Monthly Archives: May 2007

JPL the new Disneyland?

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If you’re looking for a day (or half day) out today in the greater Los Angeles area, let me suggest a trip up to the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL). (Details here.) Their open house (held today and yesterday) is rather fun…. you get to learn about some of the grand space missions of yesteryear (like the 1977 Voyager missions… both craft are still actively sending data from beyond the solar system now), or of the moment (like Cassini-Huygens, for example sending wonderful pictures of Saturn and Titan back for us to learn from and marvel at – see e.g. here), or to come soon (like WISE (an infra-red telescope which will help broaden and deepen our understanding of planetary systems, galaxies, and the universe at large), or Dawn (a mission to go and orbit and study two large asteroids).

JPL Open House

You can learn lots of things about the science these missions are teaching us about not only far away worlds, but about our own world. There are also missions which are studying earth directly (making observations about our atmosphere, oceans, and so forth), so even if you don’t care about space, there’s something for you.

JPL Open House

JPL Open HouseYou can visit special exhibits for each of the missions, talk to scientists and engineers, and even visit the large warehouses where the spacecraft are made, and where they are assembled. There are the control rooms to visit, JPL Open House a dome with giant robots (I’ve no idea about that one), an extra special exhibit about Mars exploration, and lots of stations with all sorts of entertainment for kids! They’ve done a great job providing a lot of material for everyone to take away, including packets of information for teachers to use in their classes too! […] Click to continue reading this post →

Read a Gravity Essay Today

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The Gravity Research Foundation announced its awards for the 2007 essay competition. (Hmm: I think we should have more technical science essays, in more categories, to inform each other about what the big questions and answers are…. and maybe even just for fun (because I’m in a silly mood) -and to make an important point about how vital it is to communicate what we’re up to to each other- have a swanky awards ceremony, with speeches, and music, and an MC, and everything. And of course it should be held somewhere in LA… Like the LA Times Book Awards. It could be held at the same time as (another fantasy): awards we give to our peers for the important task of writing essays, books and other efforts in the service of communicating science to the general public.)

But anyway, you can read all about the winners of this year’s awards here. Nicking a bit of text from the site, here are the top prizes: […] Click to continue reading this post →

LHC Coverage

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CMS at LHC NYTimes

One of the Large Hadron Collider’s detectors, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS).

As you gather a lot when there are discussions on the topic here and elsewhere, there’s a lot of excitement and anticipation among high energy physicists about a number of things. I would go as far as to say that we are already in a very rich experimental time for results pertaining to high energy physics (or, if you insist, “fundamental physics” issues (I have in mind, for example, all the wonderful cosmological and astrophysical data that continues to come in, with more to come), and it is set to possibly get much richer – maybe even a new Golden Age with a little bit of luck – when the Large Hadron Collider starts producing results. We are really going into the (relative) unknown with this experiment, and this will be a great time to be working in the field – with a little luck, as I keep repeating.

A number of substantial articles have recently appeared in the general media that give you a good sense of what is going on, more reasons (and more detail) for why there is […] Click to continue reading this post →

Taking the Time to Work it out

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Itzhak BarsOne of my colleagues here at USC, Itzhak Bars (picture right, by Don Milici), spends a lot of effort trying to understand aspects of time. In fact, in his way of approaching things, the fact that we see a single time dimension (all the others being space dimensions) would be a consequence of certain choices (“gauge choices”, in the more technical language) made, whereas in the underlying formulation, there’s be two times. Yes, two.

You hear about extra dimensions, and you think “string theory”, no doubt. No, this is nothing to do with string theory. He’s developed this idea independently of string theory for years, working first with quantum mechanics, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XI – The Universe

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The History Channel is diversifying a bit, and doing their first science show. It will be called “The Universe” and will premiere on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 9pm ET. It will be a series of 13 episodes. Here’s a blurb I found on the web:

It’s been fifty years since man first ventured into outer space. Now we have robots on Mars, telescopes capturing the birth of the stars and their collapse into black holes, and probes slamming into comets at hyperspeed. What we’ve learned has completely changed our understanding of the universe and our relationship with it – we once thought ourselves to be at the center, now we know we are a small, small spec. This epic series throws light on all the known universe and out to the edge of the unknown – what’s going on out there, what is our place, and is there life outside of Earth?

history channel shootI like the idea of more TV channels (besides the usual suspects like PBS or Discovery) getting involved in making shows that have more science, so given the end that it serves (see the about page) -and because it is interesting and fun work- I was happy to help out when I got a call to do some interviews to camera for use in the show. (The other show I did some segments for last year -see here and here– turns out to be part of a (reportedly somewhat saucy) variety and comedy show, I’ve since heard! It will air on another channel in the Fall, and I’ll tell you more about it then. )

We recorded on Thursday. The original plan was to record in a house in the Hollywood Hills, with access to some Griffith Park backdrop to shoot some b-roll of me doing a bit of hiking, but the fire put a stop to that. Instead, we found another location – a house with a lovely garden overlooking the Topanga wilderness. (Actually, they wondered whether we could use my house and garden, but I decided that the garden was not ready for prime time yet, having just begun to come out of its Winter slump where there was hardly any rainfall… So it remains still just between me and you my dear blog readers, ok? In the end, it would not have worked anyway since on Thursday there was still a lot of activity from helicopters en route to patrolling the Griffith park embers… not good for filming!)

How did it go? Ok, it started well. There were two separate settings, for two separate […] Click to continue reading this post →

Assassination Complex

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By the way, in case you’re in town here and looking for a good show, I ought to mention Assassins, put on by the Sight Unseen Theatre Group at the Meta Theatre. I saw it with a group of friends on Saturday night and it was excellent. (Friends mostly from a rowing club, go figure. Not a grouping I expected to meet in LA…No, I don’t row, I met them at a party the previous week.) A Stephen Sondheim musical (very clever songs and lyrics therefore), with excellent direction and performances, based on the book by John Weidman. They’re going to be done by the end of the week, so move fast.

assassins
The various assassins and would-be assassins of various US presidents, assembled together, with guns, song and (a bit of) dance. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Penguin Opportunity?

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So I don’t know whether you’ve noticed or not, but there’s been an awful lot of penguin movies (or movies with a big penguin component) recently. There’s yet another one to come out soon about surfing penguins. I’m slightly annoyed by it already, and I can’t really tell you why. It could turn out to be good, I suppose…

So I got to thinking that this could be theoretical physics’ big break! We can pitch our own penguin movie, since we have up our collective sleeve…

The penguin diagram!

penguin diagram

This is a type of “Feynman diagram” describing how various particles interact with each other in a specific process. (More on Feynman diagrams here, for example.) What does it have to do with Penguins? Well, this picture I got from Wikipedia might help:

penguin diagram

melissa franklinjohn ellisApparently, John Ellis is responsible for their appearance in the literature, pushed along by Melissa Franklin. The usual suspects were involved too (drinks, a pub, darts, etc…) From the Wikipedia article here is the story, in (we’re told) John’s words:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

First Day of the Rest of Their Lives

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Cliché, I know, but I presume that is what calling it “Commencement Day” is all about. Is that not right?

commencement day
(Commencement Day: Part of the crowd of graduates, family, and friends assembled in front of the grand stage set up in front of the Doheny library.)

commencement daycommencement dayYesterday was both a happy and slightly sad day for me, because I’m a bit of a softy when it comes down to it. Quite a number of the students I taught over the last few years graduated yesterday. While I was so pleased to see them all happy and looking forward to moving on, and meet their parents and siblings, I was also a bit sad, since I won’t be seeing them around the campus any more. I feel like I’m losing a number of good friends, which seems like an odd thing to say given that I don’t really know them all as friends in the usual sense…. But I got accustomed to seeing them around, spending time with them talking, laughing, worrying, puzzling… getting coffee, milkshakes… They became a real part of my life for a while… Now they are off to take on the world. I feel a bit like a parent… perhaps I’m getting broody?

The campus was lovely yesterday, even more than it usually is. The ground staff […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Recycling

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The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 13th May – Mother’s Day! (USA). The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See the links below for some recent descriptions (and even video) of previous events.

The theme this month is recycling. Here’s the description from the site:

Everything gets recycled: newspapers and banana peels, the air you breathe and the earth you walk on; some would even say our souls. Our bodies, we know, are made from materials recycled in generations of stars. The mix of genes that makes us who we are is a stew recycled by long lines ancestors—something nice to remember on Mother’s Day. Artists recycle everything from concrete objects to abstract ideas. New musical forms—like new scientific theories—are inevitably reconstructed from pieces of the past.

We’ll start with the ancestors of us all: the stars. An astrophysicist with the Carnegie Observatories, Alan Dressler uses both the Hubble Space Telescope […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Burning, I

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Well, my previous post went rapidly out of date in just an hour or so… The wind is up and blowing the flames in a way that makes them spread rapidly to new areas… and they’re now evacuating people from some of those houses… Electricity is gone from some homes… Gosh.

fire in Griffith Park
(Click for larger view.) Shot showing the rapidly moving edge of flames….Griffith Observatory off to the left there… the flames have since crawled West over toward the last major ridge before the canyon that leads to the Observatory.

Really sorry about the photo quality. It’s just my tiny little canon from about a mile away. I don’t have a digital SLR with a longer lens…

A number of my favourite trails have definitely gone. Dante’s view (a lovely garden/oasis in the park) sounds like it is either under threat or already gone… Apparently there are deer and coyotes running around confused, poor things. […]
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Another Seasonal Indicator

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Ah, yes. In addition to the Jacaranda trees, the temperatures getting up to the 90s, the final exam of my undergraduate courses, and the days of confusion as I try to make the transition from mostly-teaching to mostly-research (I just blogged about it) I’ve had another reminder of the beginning of a long hot summer. Fire.

fire in Griffith Park
Click for larger. Flames and smoke of the Griffith Park fire today. You can see them clearly while carrying on with your business in the neighbourhoods near the park.

This time, it hit close to home. No, really. This afternoon a huge fire started raging in the hills of Griffith park (the one I live near, which I often tell you about). I could see flames licking skyward as I made my way home from the bus stop. Occasionally, a helicopter would fly over and dump a load of water on to the flames. (I just missed taking a photograph of a helicopter water drop for you, but a car came up behind me… I was standing in the middle of the road…)

fire in Griffith Park
Click for larger. Another picture showing proximity to some homes. You can just see the end of a plume of water from one of the helicopters.

It’s all very odd to see the lands where I regularly hike going up in smoke like that. I […] Click to continue reading this post →