Category Archives: work

Tales from the Industry XXXXI – Puppet Black Hole

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Yeah. Not sure how to best title this post or fully explain the picture [edit: Picture taken down temporarily until the show is ready to be promoted]. Let’s just say that I spent a bit of this afternoon explaining some of the science of the Large Hadron Collider to a bright orange puppet that was determined to not believe whatever I told him/it. It was fun, and was done to camera at Los Angeles Center Studios downtown. (I was actually speaking about things that intersect with the subject of yesterday’s post, if you’re interested.) It is for a new show on a channel that I can’t mention yet*, and I’ll let you know as soon as I know what the air date is, etc.

Well, one more thing, in support of the old “It’s a small world after all” saying. I noticed from the call sheet that this morning they were shooting a fun segment that was hosted by my friend Hal Rudnick the host of Screen Junkies! (Have a look at some of the science-meets-movies things we’ve done together here, here and here.) Also, a friend I’d not seen in […] Click to continue reading this post →

Earth Not Swallowed!

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So, here we are. Still in existence. Hurrah!

cern_LHC_tunnelThe Large Hadron Collider (image right is courtesy of CERN) started a new phase of experimental work today, colliding particles at double the energy it was working at a few years back when the Higgs was discovered. By time I was making breakfast and checking email, their live blog, etc., this morning, it was clear that (contrary to fears expressed by some) the LHC had not created a black hole that swallowed the earth, nor had it created some sort of strange chunk of new vacuum that condensed that of the entire universe into a new phase. (Or if it did either of those things, the effects are hardly noticeable!!)

As I keep emphasising (actually I’ll be talking about this to a puppet character on a TV show tomorrow too – details later) the LHC (or any of the particle collision experiments we’ve ever done) is not doing anything that Nature does not do routinely right here at earth (and most times way more violently and […] Click to continue reading this post →

‘t Hooft on Scale Invariance…

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Worth a read: This is ‘t Hooft’s summary (link is a pdf) of a very interesting idea/suggestion about scale invariance and its possible role in finding an answer to a number of puzzles in physics. (It is quite short, but think I’ll need to read it several times and mull over it a lot.) It won the top Gravity Research foundation essay prize this year, and there were several other interesting essays in the final list too. See here.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

LAIH Field Trip – Parks and Recreation

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Last Friday’s luncheon for the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities had a double treat. First, it was a field trip to another interesting and exciting Los Angeles space – Clockshop/Elysian, down near the river in Frogtown. Clockshop is a wonderful arts organisation whose concerns fit very neatly with many of ours: From their website:

Clockshop is a multifaceted arts organization that works at the intersection of politics, urban space, and cultural production to explore the forces that shape our lived environment. We program events and screenings, and produce artist projects and conversations. […]

Elysian is an excellent restaurant, the main space where Clockshop events are held, and we were served splendid lunch there while Clockshop director Julia Meltzer told us a little about Clockshop.
LAIH_clockshop_1 [click for larger view]

The second treat was a talk (over coffee and cookies) by Jon Christensen (editor of Boom) entitled “A Century Beyond John Muir: A 21st Century Vision for California Parks”, detailing a project to rejuvenate, expand (and enhance the awareness […] Click to continue reading this post →

In Case You Wondered…

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Dear visitor who came here (perhaps) after visiting the panel I participated in on Saturday at the LA Times Festival of Books. (“Grasping the Ineffable: On Science and Health”) What a fun discussion! Pity we ran out of time before we really began to explore connections, perhaps inspired by more audience questions.

In any event, in case you wondered why I was not signing books at the end at the designated signing area, I thought I’d write this note. I was given the option to do so, but the book that I currently have out is a specialist monograph, and I did not think there’s be much demand for it at a general festival such as the one on the weekend. (Feel free to pick up a copy if you wish, though. It is called “D-Branes”, and it is here.)

The book I actually mentioned during the panel, since it is indeed among my current attempts to grasp the “ineffable” of the panel title, is a work in progress. (Hence my variant of the “under construction” sign on the right.) It is a graphic book (working title “The Dialogues”) pitched at a general audience that explores a lot of contemporary physics topics in an unusual way. It is scheduled for publication in 2017 by Imperial College Press. You can find out much more about it here.

Feel free to visit this blog for updates on how the book progresses, and of course lots of other topics and conversations too (which you are welcome to join).

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Festival Panel

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father and son at LA Times Festival of BooksDon’t forget that this weekend is the fantastic LA Times Festival of Books! See my earlier post. Actually, I’ll be on a panel at 3:00pm in Wallis Annenberg Hall entitled “Grasping the Ineffable: On Science and Health”, with Pat Levitt and Elyn Saks, chaired by the Science writer KC Cole. I’ve no idea where the conversation is going to go, but I hope it’ll be fun and interesting! (See the whole schedule here.)

Maybe see you there!

-cvj
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Beyond the Battling Babes

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Screen Shot 2015-04-16 at 14.03.58The recent Babe War (Food Babe vs Science Babe) that probably touched your inbox or news feed is a great opportunity to think about a broader issue: the changing faces of science communication. I spoke about this with LA Times science writer Eryn Brown who wrote an excellent article about it that appears today. (Picture (Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times) and headline are from the article’s online version.)

(By the way, due to space issues, a lot of what we spoke about did not make it to the article (at least not in the form of quotes), including: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Excellent Witten Interview!

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ooguri_witten_kavli_ipmuI just learned of an excellent interview with Edward Witten, one or our field’s grandmasters, or rather: the grandmasters’ grandmaster. I strongly recommend reading it. (This is for technically equipped people working in the field, most likely – I believe that it is not intended for the general public, although you are welcome to read it too!)

There’s a lot of discussion (of among other things like his current work) of that golden period during the 1990s that I had the privilege to work in during my postdoc years (some of them under the guidance of Witten) that remain one of […] Click to continue reading this post →

LAIH Luncheon with Amy Parish

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LAIH_Amy_Parish_10_April_2015_2 For Friday’s Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities luncheon we had a presentation from anthropologist/primatologist Amy Parish (an LAIH Fellow) on the work she’s been doing with bonobos at a zoo in Stuttgart. She updated us on how bonobo societies work (of all the apes, bonobos are our closest cousins, genetically), and then told us about recent experiments she’s been doing with getting them to watch films, giving them control over what they watch, and observing the effects of this on social patterns. (There’s a brief article here about Amy’s recent work.) It was an excellent talk, well attended, with lots of laughter – the result of a pretty potent mixture of food, sex, and humour!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Tales from the Industry XXXX – Relative

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relativity_shoot_1(Click images for larger view.)
Last Tuesday was a bit unusual. I’ve been chatting for a while with the people making a new BBC/PBS(NOVA) special in celebration of it being 100 years since Einstein’s presentation of the field equations of General Relativity, and that was the day we’d arranged to have an interview of me saying a few ideas to camera, and also doing a demo or two for fun. It was a very tight schedule, and a lot had to be arranged since one of the demos involved me sitting on the back of a flat bed truck at a desk (apparently in an office), looking up and explaining something, only to have the camera reveal the larger context in which the conversation was taking place. Well, the office set and desk were abandoned for various reasons, and then we got held up for almost two hours because the campus safety people turned out to have been confused (?) by the director’s careful notes in advance of the shoot and did not realise that the flatbed truck with me and the furniture and the cameraman would actually be moving. Even though it was intended to move at only a snail’s pace, it violates their safety rules to not have everything strapped down with safety harnesses. It qualifies as a “stunt”, and they were not expecting one. So there was a lot of back and forth over walkie talkies and in person and so forth, and persons with little golf carts coming and going, until some of the crew dashed off to Autozone to buy several cargo straps that, after application, seemed to make everyone happy.

I climbed up and allowed myself to be strapped in too. Before it all got started I asked about how exactly I was to unstrap myself if for some reason the flatbed […] Click to continue reading this post →

Getty Visit

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LAIH_luncheon_getty_2Every year the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities has a luncheon at the Getty jointly with the Getty Research Institute and the LAIH fellows get to hang out with the Getty Scholars and people on the Getty Visiting Scholars program (Alexa Sekyra, the head of the program, was at the luncheon today, so I got to meet her). The talk is usually given by a curator of an exhibition or program that’s either current, or coming up. The first time I went, a few years ago, it was the Spring before the launch of the Pacific Standard Time region-wide celebration of 35 years of Southern California art and art movements (’45-’80) that broke away from letting New York and Western Europe call the tunes and began to define some of the distinctive voices of their own that are now so well known world wide… then we had a talk from a group of curators about the multi-museum collaboration to make that happen. One of the things I learned today from Andrew Perchuck, the Deputy Director of the Getty Research Institute who welcomed us all in a short address, was that there will be a new Pacific Standard Time event coming up in 2018, so stay tuned. This time it will have more of a focus on Latino and Latin American art. See here.

LAIH_luncheon_getty_1

Today we had Nancy Perloff tell us about the current exhibit (for which she is […] Click to continue reading this post →

Simulated meets Real!

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Here’s a freshly minted Oscar winner who played a scientist surrounded by… scientists! I’m with fellow physicists Erik Verlinde, Maria Spiropulu, and David Saltzberg at an event last month. Front centre are of course actors Eddie Redmayne (Best Actor winner 2015 for Theory of Everything) and Felicity Jones (Best Actress – nominee) along with the screenwriter of the film, Anthony McCarten. The British Consul-General Chris O’Connor is on the right. (Photo was courtesy of Getty Images.)

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