The 2006 Nobel Prizes: Who, What and Why!

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Not long after the colloquium on the Fields Medal work, we had a joint presentation by three colloquium speakers on the topics of the three science prizes awarded from the good folks in Stockholm this year. This was another very popular Monday talk, with people from various other departments joining us, given the topics being discussed. The speakers talked about the science of the prizes, and also reflected upon how it drives or interfaces with future research, perhaps their own research program.

First up was Lin Chen, of Chemistry and Molecular and Computational Biology. He told us about the Chemistry prize, awarded to Roger Kornberg, “for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription”.

lin chen

Starting out by reminding us about the basic chain of relationships within organisms concerning the movement of genetic information, (the “Central Dogma”) he explained Click to continue reading this post →

More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, VI

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A quick update:

  • There was a second installment of the discussion led by George Johnson about press coverage of string theory. He went back to look to see what exactly some of those early articles said… How much coverage was there to start with? When did it start? When did it begin get out of hand? Did it get out of hand? Is this all just part of a standard bubble that happens for any field that the press decides to cover, a sort of manufactured (my word not his) boom and bust cycle? All issues that were touched upon in the discussion. Note also that the discussion broadens out considerably -as it should, (finally!)- to talk about the broader issue of coverage of topics in physics and science in general. The positive and negative effects of press coverage on attracting the next generation of students was also discussed. The discussion (this aspect in particular) was especially interesting because of the remarks by a number of senior people in the audience who were able to talk about their experiences over the years having seen the cycles recruitment of students in their own departments. Worth a listen/look at the archive here.
  • Lee Smolin has written a “Dear Friends” letter in response to some of the things that have been pointed out about his book, and about other points he’s made publicly in various discussions*. He’s given over some time to write quite a bit, which in general is a good thing to have done. You can find it here.

I’ll leave it to you to form your own opinion about Smolin’s remarks (I’ve not had time to read it in detail yet), and start a discussion here. Maybe ask him some followup questions here, for example. To help with context and build a more complete picture, do read some of the earlier comments and discussions involving him -and questions put directly to him- on the threads that share the name of this post. (e.g., Here and here.) Put those alongside the discussion with Peter Woit and of the central thesis of Woit’s book too. They are inseparable.

My set of opinions on the issue is the same as it was before. Even though I’ve said it all so many times here, since blogs seem to have no memory, I will summarize a bit:

Click to continue reading this post →

Mercury Passing

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transit of mercury

So did you see yesterday’s event? (Above is a snapshot of a movie of the event from a SOHO image capture sequence. Mercury is a tiny dot just below the structure on the right that is not far from one of the remarkably few sunspots on the sun at present (it is low season for them). Go there for more images to see Mercury in action.)

Joe Vandiver (centre, below) here at USC had a telescope set up for all on campus to view:

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Elemental

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Yesterday in Physics 100 we started a discussion of the structure of matter. This inevitably brings up the early ideas from 400 BC about atoms, from Democritus (and others) at least in the Greek line of thought. These ideas were later brushed aside by Aristotle who declared that the elements from which everything can be constructed were Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.

Of course, one is obliged to show a slide at this point. I could not resist this one: Click to continue reading this post →

A Man Out Standing In His Field

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Two of our colloquia this semester were concerned with work very much in the public eye this year. The first was from Francis Bonahan of the Mathematics Department here at USC.

F bonahan colloquium

He talked about the work that won the Fields medal Рthe proof, by Grigori Perelman, of the Poincar̩ conjecture. Or better, I should say the work toward the proof, since the citation does not explicitly mention the conjecture, but his larger body of work. (MathWorld link, Wikipedia link.) In fact, Francis spoke about a lot more than just the Poincar̩ conjecture.

F bonahan colloquium

He talked about the larger setting in which that work fits, something mathematicians call the “geometrization conjecture”, which Mathematicians care a lot more about. Perelman’s work does more than just prove the Poincaré, it addresses the whole (3-)ball of wax, so to speak. He told us quite a bit about that in the talk, spending most Click to continue reading this post →

Inside the Academics Studio

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Well, do you know the show on Bravo, “Inside the Actors Studio”? The host interviews an actor of some sort -pick your favourite- and you get an in-depth conversation about their life, work, motivations, loves, hates, passions, etc. Not in the service of frivolity, but in pursuit of an understanding and further appreciation of the craft of acting itself. A lot of people like the show for those reasons.

Imagine the same thing, but with an academic in the hot seat. This is what happens tomorrow, hence the title of this post. I will be the interviewer, and my new colleague cosmologist/astrophysicist Elena Pierpaoli will be the interviewee. It will be in front of a live audience.

No, it won’t be on Bravo, or any other tv channel, as far as I know. It is a local USC event, part of a series, and a jolly good idea I must say. It got me thinking:- What academic in history would I like to have sit in my interview chair, and if I only had one question, what would it be? Off the top of my head (and stretching the definition of the word “academic” a bit, I’d like very much to have Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, Dirac… oh and several more… But what would I ask them? Don’t know yet…. need to think about it.

Here is blurb about it. And yes, I’ve already been teased by my students and a colleague about being described as a “super string theorist” in the advertising.

I may well wear a cape to the event.

-cvj

Twelve Days of Physics

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This morning I received an email from someone called “Grrrl Einstein” today which read:

I am creating a Physics Calendar for the Holiday season, and I am including twelve entities. So far I have:

  1. Newton’s Laws
  2. The Dirac equation/Schrodinger equation
  3. The Clifford Algebra defining the Dirac gamma matrices
  4. E=mc2/Einstein’s equations/postulates and/or some solution of them, such as the Schwarzschild solution
  5. The principle of least action
  6. Maxwell’s equations
  7. E=hv
  8. The Yang-Mills Lagrangian
  9. The Schwinger-Dyson equations or something else related to functional methods
  10. Stokes’ Theorem
  11. Entropy

What would be a good String Theory equation to round it out? Any things I should include/exclude?

She also says:

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Copernican Reality

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Well, you’re sitting there at the desk, so might as well put on the radio to keep yourself company. Do in on the web, and I suggest that you listen to:

Radio Lab episode #205

This one was about Space. It has a lot of good stuff in it: excellent speakers, very good clips, and playful (rather successfully, surprisingly often) presenters. My favourite bit? Neil DeGrasse Tyson being interviewed about our place in the universe. If you’re not an expert on the anatomy of the idea, please have a listen, since this is one of the best (and quite funny) layperson’s quick descriptions I’ve heard on the subject.

Tim Ferris (on the unlikelihood or likelihood of travelling vast distances for expeditions in space) and Brian Greene (on the geometry of our universe – another good layperson’s level chat) are also in this segment, just before. Direct mp3 file link to that particular piece here. Main link here for all the other really good segments.

-cvj

Some Observations at Griffith Observatory

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So I must apologize. I went to the preview of the Griffith Observatory so long ago now and did promise to blog about it with more than just one nice picture, but it did not happen. Partly because I had to go back across the Atlantic to do some work, and then got ill over the weekend I was planning to do it, and then..

Griffith Observatory

Anyway, here are some of my thoughts. First note that my two week delay means that this is no longer a scoop, since even the LA Times had a spread on the whole thing on Thursday. A rather nice one as well. I urge you to consult it for a lovely pull-out graphic of the whole site. There is also a special website with picture tours, nifty 360 degree interactive shots of the spaces, and other information. The Griffith opened yesterday.

What they’ve done over the last four or five years is simply shut down the entire building and rethink and redo a great deal of it. How to preserve the lovely 70 year old landmark, while making it even better? Simple question – simple answer: Get $93 million for your project (I find this number, the earth-sun distance in miles, suspicious), and then go underneath the existing building and hollow out about the same amount of space that is has, but underground. Fill it with lots of goodies. And I mean lots and lots. What goodies? We’ll see.

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Memories, Physics, and Celebration

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It’s a pleasantly foggy morning here on the USC campus. It is 7:00am now (at least at start of writing), and it will all burn off in a few hours, I imagine, to reveal the sunny sky waiting for us. But right now it reminds me of the Cambridge morning of a couple of weeks ago. A foggy Saturday morning in fact. I took that photo of the spider web I used on Halloween with that mist in the background.

That Saturday of celebration of Andrew’s work (The Andrew Chamblin Memorial Conference) at Cambridge was a remarkable experience. (See here for my first post on Andrew, with tributes.) I was exhausted through a good deal of it, since I had eight hour jetlag, but I’m so glad I went, and that I could contribute a talk. I met many old friends and colleagues, drawn mostly from the UK and European side of Andrew’s collection of friends, collaborators, and admirers in the field.

andrew chamblin memorial conferenceThere were talks by former collaborators of Andrew’s: Gary Gibbons, myself, Roberto Emparan, Robert Caldwell, Raphael Bousso, and Stephen Hawking (who also guided some of Andrew’s thesis work). Gary, in “Discrete Symmetries and Gravity”, talked about Andrew’s early Oxford and Cambridge work on various discrete symmetries in physics, particularly those of a geometrical origin. He’d played with various ideas in this context, including some applications to problems in cosmology and other areas of physics. Gary described some of this Click to continue reading this post →

Promises, Promises

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Due to travel, work, and illness, I’m very behind in a number of posts I was hoping to have brought to you by now. I’m planning a big session of playing catch-up tomorrow, and so please accept my apologies for the lateness of some things I promised.

Until then, I’ll leave you with another lovely Peter Goin “Narrative Photogram”, part of the series that I showed you before at the Metro/7th Subway stop on the Red Line.

Peter Goin

They’ve put a lot of effort into those subway stations. Not nearly enough people use them or even know about them, even though they live and work in the city. Consider Click to continue reading this post →

God’s Final Message?

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“According to So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, God‘s Final Message To His Creation is written in fire in letters thirty feet high on the far side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet of Preliumtarn, which orbits the star Zarss, which is located in the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine. The long path to the message is lined with souvenir stands at spaced-out intervals.

When Marvin reads the message, it says, “We apologise for the inconvenience.” However, Fenchurch‘s reaction suggests that the message she saw was the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (and that presumably, therefore, the Message is personalized to each viewer).”

–Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Or perhaps this* is God’s Final Message:

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Tales From The Industry, VIII

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“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“So are you the Talent?”
“Uh… Yes… Maybe.”
“You’re the Physicist?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a real Physicist? Not just playing one?”
“I’m… real.”

Snippet of conversation between myself and a woman from the art department at the studio, while we stood waiting for our green tea to brew. The floor is full of tables all around, mostly occupied with various people sitting at them fiddling with Macs. (Macs everywhere, as I’ve come to expect from the people in the Industry.) There’s a serious-looking table with more senior looking people discussing something in earnest, and another serious-looking table with people editing video on more Macs. All the tables are serious, of course, but overall there is a fun atmosphere. There’s also a big situation board that is consulted regularly by groups of people. It is covered in bright yellow stick-notes covered in writing that are being moved around. There are people coming in and out with a sense of purpose, and some of the crew I am with tv shootare milling around with bits of equipment. All very exciting-looking. It is all made a bit comical by this totally out of place and thoroughly splendid trio of bright red chandeliers that are hanging down from the ceiling over what looks like the head table for the senior folk. Strange but well-appreciated quirk of decoration, for what is otherwise a high-ceilinged warehouse-type space.

***

The situation? Shooting some fun things about physics for a TV show. It will air on a station near you (in the USA) next year some time. Details then. We converted a corner of one of our teaching labs at USC into a mini-studio:

tv shoot

Joe Vandiver, the director of our teaching labs, got to bring out some nice little demos Click to continue reading this post →