Super long day of meeting after meeting. Call after call. Email after email. With that and all the rest… I’m super-stressed.
When I can, I try to make some meetings happen outside. Walk while conversing. That way I get to see things like this:
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 page with the three heads (whose names and occupations change every week) making comments on the story. (Be sure to watch the video links of the demo too!)
This is the sort of science/mathematics reporting that I usually expect to read in 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 Teacup”, 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 all”, 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!
-cvj
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:
An extract:
You don’t have to feel quite so guilty when you next thumb through the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. (Yes you – you know who you are.) Environmental groups have been protesting their (specifically, the parent company Limited Brands) practices for a long while – they produce about one million catalogues per day, printed on virgin paper, including paper from forests that came habitats of endangered species such as the caribou in parts of Northern and Western Canada. The good news is that they have now committed to stop using virgin paper, and use a significant component of recycled paper for the catalogues, in addition to stopping the use of the paper from endangered habitats. From an article in Reuters:
The company’s catalogs will use either 10 percent recycled paper or 10 percent new paper from sources certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as having been produced in an environmentally sustainable manner.
You can read much more about the result at ForestEthics’ site.
Ok, back to your lingere shopping now*.
-cvj
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:
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:
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 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 an award to Stephen Hawking on Thursday, and the BBC took the opportunity to make a special effort to cover some very good science discussion, as a sort of away mission for the Radio 4 Today program. You can go to the Royal Society’s site with all of the interviews (with Martin Rees, Stephen Hawking, Lewis Wolpert, and John Krebs among others) on various subjects. The last two interviews have comments about ethical implications of scientific research, and about whether the public can trust the information they are given by scientists, respectively. I’ve not listened to those yet, but I bet they’ll be interesting.
You can listen to the whole thing in one continuous block by going to Radio 4’s listen again archive for Radio 4’s Today programme, clicking on the Thursday link (before it gets over-written by the next Thursday programme).
Radio 4’s In Our Time last week also had some interesting material. It was all about the speed of light. This is particularly timely in view of the [sometimes morbidly fascinating] discussion going on about varying the speed of light on another thread. The programme features John Barrow (Cambridge), Iwan Morus (Universirt of Wales, Aberystwyth), and Jocelyn Bell Burns (Oxford). Programme here. (Although you might have to go to the archive page here after Thursday to find this episode.)
Enjoy.
-cvj
(*Thanks Ed Copeland!)
[Update: Andrew Jaffe also talks about these programmes.]
Well, in the fine and tedious tradition of various huge Hollywood movies (perhaps most recently Batman Begins), in showing the following picture I probably should have used the blog post title “I gotta get me one of those”, or some slight variant:
… but I’ll spare you the cliché. This car is part of a fantasy that I (and some others) Click to continue reading this post
Well, it is midnight and I am only on page 12 of the notes I am writing to present as a talk in the Southern California String Seminar tomorrow at 9:15am. Don’t try this at home – prepare talks early, ok?
Where is the seminar being held? UCLA! What University am I from? USC! What event happens tomorrow besides my (hopefully not too terrible) talk? The big USC vs UCLA head to head in College Football. If USC wins, they go to the championship game, apparently. Yay.
So the usual articles about the cross town rivalry between the two institutions have shown up this week in print and on National radio and TV. There are two amusing (and interesting) ones that I looked at – one in LA Weekly (about academic performance, faculty recruitment, student acheivement, and much more – illustration above from it, by Deanna Staffo), and one in the LA Times (mostly about nightlife). Have a look. There are dozens of others -just type USC into the LA Times search engine for example. You learn things about both universities as well from those two, so it is not without some point. For example, our young ones clearly go to cooler bars, for a start, as you can see from the pictures in the LA Times article.
(Strange that the articles do not mention the cooperation and general fun had when their high energy physics groups get together to discuss topics in string theory and other physics. Very odd omission indeed.)
I would say a lot more about the articles, but time is not on my side, so I will instead leave you with a blog post I wrote (“Drag the Bear”) on December 2nd last year, upon encountering something strange on campus:
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
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
