Author Archives: Clifford

Not a Free Lunch

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Yesterday saw a mass desertion for a while here at the Aspen Center for Physics. Howie Haber (UCSC) organized a large group (twenty-two) of participants (and some of their guests) of the program entitled “LHC: Beyond the Standard Model Signals in a QCD Environment” (info here), to go for a group lunch at the excellent Pine Creek Cookhouse, 12 miles away up Castle Creek Road. And, I should mention, 1700 or so feet up. The latter is significant since about two thirds of us, led by Howie, cycled up there! It takes a while (times ranged from 1 hr 20 minutes to about 30 – 40 minutes more than that), and there are about two or three major long, punishing hills to deal with, but it was worth it!

Here are some (not all) of the cyclists at the destination (restaurant is a low-slung cabin-style affair out of shot to the right). Howie, our organizer, is in the middle at the front. (Click for larger view):

Lunchtime ride up to Pine Creek Cookhouse from Aspen Center for Physics

(Er, for the record, I’m slightly embarrassed by wearing socks with my sport sandals – a personal no-no – but I wanted to protect my feet from 12 miles of pedalling friction, so made an exception.)
Here are some random shots of happy arrivals (click each for larger): […] Click to continue reading this post →

Experiment IV

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Ok. Time for a bit of fun, or something. It’s rainy here, and I’m waiting for things to dry out before I go home. I’m between tasks, and I’m woozy from that extra beer at the weekly picnic (thanks, Ben!) so that’s my excuse. Not that I’ve ever needed one.

The other day while hiking I found myself singing Kate Bush songs. No, really. I get into a Kate Bush mood sometimes. Deal with it! Anyway, “Experiment IV” sort of stuck in my head and went around several times. It’s all about a science experiment, even if only a slightly naive exploration of how the military exploit scientific research. I simply love the way she made the phrases “We only know in theory what we are doing” and “We recorded it and put it into our machine” work with the rhythm and melody lines. Then I remembered, and checked on YouTube, how she’d construct these really excellent videos which were miniature movies, telling a little story, at least two of them (this song, and “Cloudbusting”) involving scientists.

Kate Bush, Experiment IV performance (still)Now of course, the scientists were the usual men-in-white-coats scientists (however, the image right is explained below). I know I go on a lot about trying to have in the media a wider variety of images of what scientists can look like, but that does not mean that I don’t like things that sometimes have the old chestnuts. Cloudbusting has Donald Sutherland as the scientist-father-figure, and Experiment IV has a similar figure (played by someone I don’t recognize) as the scientist whose work is exploited. There are a number of actors in supporting scientist roles too – look out for (I think) a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Pink Legs

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Pink variant of a columbine, I believe. I love the shape of this flower. (Click for larger view.) I don’t know what it is called, but it is morphologically very similar to a Columbine.

The colour is different and it does not seem to open up as much, but I bet they’re cousins. This is also confirmed by a similarity in leaf shape.

I’ve been spotting them occasionally up at around 10,000 ft and above in these Aspen surrounds, in very small quantities.

Somehow their relative rarity (at least here and now) makes them more alluring to me.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Draw

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game of naughts and crosses, spotted in the bar/lobby of an Aspen hotel.I’ve been quiet here recently, I know. Was mostly working, thinking and reading on the weekend. Did not even go on a huge hike (although I did do a nice walk or two). Sometimes, on an evening, I go and read a novel in a bar. (I’m weird that way, I know.) I’ve not been going to the noisy bars full of yelling and the party crowd, but instead like to find a nice sofa in one of the bar/lobby areas of the nicer hotels. Great for reading, and the drink prices are merely extortionate, as opposed to just plain offensive in the more popular places. (Photo: a naughts and crosses game I spotted on a table in one such lobby.)

Well, it’s a draw so far in the battle with my equations and ideas, but I think I’m developing a stronger position. (From this you can deduce that I decided to stick with the same project and hold my ground and struggle on some more.) Perhaps the next […] Click to continue reading this post →

Quantum Black Holes – Why Worry?

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susskind_by_matthew_black for LA TimesWell, you may not have gone to the chat between K C Cole and Leonard Susskind that I mentioned a while ago at the LA Central Library downtown. I couldn’t make it either, being away at the Aspen Center for Physics. I expect it was good. Anyway, I found a little bit of a report on the conversation, done by reporter John Johnson for the LA Times. It is here. (Clickable image of Susskind to the right is by Matthew Black, for the LA Times.)

It gives you some of the simply-stated reasons as to why there was a big argument between Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind in the first place (and between several other physicists too… there are hosts of people working on these things, and it took hosts of people to sort it out to where we are now, not just those two, giants though they are). I recommend having a look, as it is especially for the lay-person, and will give you a good idea of what the fuss is about.

You can also see a little bit about his new book on the subject and a link to a video interview with Brian Cox (the physicist, not the actor) at the LA Times blogs here. There are also links to his Stanford continuing education course on quantum mechanics, including the online lectures you can view at your convenience. What a resource!

You might wonder why we care about all this, since currently the only way we know for sure to make black holes in the universe (astrophysical processes making stellar black […] Click to continue reading this post →

For Some, The Dark Side

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solar_eclipse_010808Don’t forget that there is a total solar eclipse tomorrow. Been wondering where the moon’s been, and why you’ve been having all those lovely clear dark nights perfect for star-gazing? Well, the moon’s been busy preparing for one of its big acts. It’ll pop in front of the sun and bring a little darkness to some regions during the day tomorrow. Put differently, the dark side of the moon will be stealing some of our rays on August 1st.

Who will get to see it? Well, full totality will be available mostly for the “midnight sun” […] Click to continue reading this post →

Humps

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Now playing: I’m Confessin’ (That I love You), Thelonious Monk [Solo Monk]

Well, I’m now beyond the halfway mark of my retreat and I’ve been on the one project all this time. I’ve made progress here and there, had some setbacks, and have got very stuck at times. It’s just one of those things with this sort of work. Par for the course.

humps in road warning sign, UKThere are times when you think that if you do just a bit more on the project, it’ll get over the hump, as it were, and then coast along. So far I worry that there may be simply an infinite set of equally spaced humps of similar height all the way down the road**, in that every now and again I discover a rather pretty little gem of a result that’s quite encouraging, but these gems don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. So it’s a little scattered gravel pit of gems as opposed to a lovely… Ok, cvj, enough with the gem metaphor.

Now playing: Totem Pole (Alt. take), Lee Morgan [The Sidewinder]

The issue here is whether I should jump ship and use the last of my quality time here […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXI – Another Go At An Einstein Film

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Well, since they’ve actually done a press release about it, I suppose I don’t have to be so coy as I was in the last post. This is about the film company I was doing some consulting work for on an interesting project with and interesting screen-writer.

The company is called Hero Pictures, and they have an interesting mission statement, and a rather splendid website (which I recommend… love the little hero guy) which tells you more. One of their projects is a film about Einstein. Working title is “The Private Lives of Albert Einstein”. They’ve bought the rights to a couple of books on him, brought in a screenwriter (see my thoughts on him and working with him in the previous post), Ron Bass, well known for his work on projects like Rain Man and The Joy Luck Club, Snow Falling on Cedars, among many other films.

It was fun to work with him on this, however briefly. He’s super sharp and gets the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Two!

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Asymptotia's Second Anniversary!Well, you know I almost missed it: Asymptotia, this little blog that you come to read from time to time, is two years old today! It has been a pleasure and an honour being part of this community we’ve formed, made up of you the reader and maybe sometime commenter, and me tossing up a few things to look at, consider, laugh at, and/or discuss from time to time. I really enjoy the kind of connections that are made, and seeing people brought together (both on- and off- line) using Asymptotia as a focal point. Have a look at what I said on this date last year, and in the inaugural post.

For those of you who are not regulars, assuming you’ve already read the about page, let me mention that I think of this blog as a bit like a gathering (a party, if you will) in a comfortable home, with people in several rooms carrying out (or just listening to) conversations of various sorts. Some rooms just have things to look at. Some people […] Click to continue reading this post →

It’s Not A Superhero Movie

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Ok. I suppose I ought to say something about “The Dark Knight”, since a lot of people are expecting me to, and well, I’d like to. Of the many (too many) big films of the genre that have come out this Summer, it is the one I’ve actually been waiting for, with high expectations, based on the excellent work they (Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, etc) did on Batman Begins. So, following is my verdict, after going to see it on opening night at a regrettably substandard theatre due to not being in Los Angeles.

I thought it was wonderful to see a big Summer blockbuster that is so successful that is entirely about ideas. Whether you think you have any interest in the genre (and see below), you should consider supporting it and going to see it on that fact alone, since it might encourage the big studios to green light to more projects that engage your brain. It is about ideas – the consequences of our actions, the use of power, the fabric of a society and what motivates us to behave well or badly toward our fellow citizens. In pretty much every scene. And it is not done in an unfortunately preachy and naively over-simplistic way that I think was the case for the highly flawed film version of “V For Vendetta” of a few years back.

Finally, the (big headline) movies of the graphic novels and comics have caught up with what the actual graphic novels and comics did ever so long ago – transcend the genre. It is not a superhero movie. It’s a movie about highly conflicted moral questions […] Click to continue reading this post →

On “Do-Overs”

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I love “do-overs”. Not because I want to change anything in particular about my life, but because they are so rare, and so interesting. On my way to Vancouver on Monday, I got to do one.

We (myself and the other passengers) boarded our flight at Denver. I usually get on the plane early, and so have the change to watch people go through their routines of boarding and all that entails. After that was all, the plane full of passengers waited for the plane to get ready, doors to close, and so forth. It did not happen. After a while, the pilot came on and explained that they were trying to fix the radio, and it would be another half an hour. So we waited. After another long while, the pilot came on and said that they did not expect that the radio would get fixed in a timely manner after all, and so they were going to try something else. We would “de-plane” (a word I hate by the way – what is wrong with the perfectly good word “disembark”?) and all make our way to another gate where eventually another plane would arrive, and we’d take that one. It would be exactly the same type of plane. We would keep our ticket stubs and just re-board an hour and a half later.

I wandered for a bit, found something not too repulsive to nibble on (seems to get harder and harder in some airports), was disappointed by the meagre bookstore once again, and otherwise killed some time. Then the boarding started again. A “do-over”. Everybody would be going back to the same seats, it would be exactly the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Sharing the Storm

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Here’s something I found rather unexpected. It all begins a little more than a year ago in Los Angeles. I was chatting with a friend, Aimee Bender, about our respective modes of work, and about how Summer fits into that in general. As you may know, Aimee’s a fiction writer, (and you may have picked up somewhere that I’m a theoretical physicist), and there are a lot of parallels to be found between professions that both involve lots of sitting around, crafting with symbols, folding fragments of inspiration together into larger nuggets, and so forth. So we chat about that from time to time.

A lot of how that works can be tied to the environment in which you do it, and so we got to talking about the long dry Summer in Los Angeles, with a particularly hot spell we were going through at the time we were talking. It affects how you work, what part of the day is most productive for you, and so forth. We agreed that a rather nice thunderstorm would be a good thing to have come along, even though that was highly improbable. Just the sound of a thunderstorm is a wonderful thing, and then there’s the relief it brings from the conditions before, and the smells in the air during and after. We carried on with the hot LA work cycle, stormless.

I left a week or two later for Aspen.

Shortly thereafter, Aspen went into a typical daily cycle of sunny for most of the day with a rainy downpour in the afternoon. Very refreshing. One of those days, that downpour turned into a long super-violent thunderstorm that lasted well into the […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Hop Over To Canada

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Well, as I said in the previous post, I’m leaving my hideaway/retreat mode and popping over to Vancouver for a short spell to help out at a Summer School. It’s the PIMS (Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences) Summer School on Particles, Fields, and Strings. I’m giving four lectures on some of the techniques in string theory that it helps to know in order to do some of the fun things we do to get at interesting physics (such as the topic of the post before). My title is something like “Perturbative and non-perturbative string theory”, and I’ve no clue what the level of the students really is, so goodness knows how far I will get in four one hour lectures. But it does not hurt to try. I’ll be laying the groundwork for several of the lecturers who will be talking about the more advanced stuff closer to their research work, and so I hope to at least help the students gain confidence with ideas and language that will show up all over the place in the two weeks following my presentations.

So what will I cover? Well, I’m going to tailor things to the responses of the students as […] Click to continue reading this post →

Atoms and Strings in the Laboratory?

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depiction of lithium trap from the Kastler Brossel lab in france

A depiction of a lithium trap from the Kastler Brossel laboratory, in France. Details here.

[Despite appearances, I did not choose the music in what is to follow. I just put on iTunes set to random, and started typing, reporting on what was playing as I went along. Nevertheless, there were some nice resonances.]

Now playing: Mr Day, John Coltrane.

So. I must put the Aspen time on hold for a short while, as I promised to give four lectures in Vancouver starting tomorrow. While I sit here in a lounge in Denver at 8:00am, wondering why I booked a 7:00am flight out of Aspen, and also wondering exactly what is in this muffin that I picked up to have with the (rather good) tea they have here this morning, I thought I’d tell you about a little bit of really nice physics that’s going on in the neighbourhoood of my world. Since I’m too cheap and too disinterested to pay for a connection to the web, this’ll only get uploaded quite a bit later when I get a free hookup. (This is a bit more technical in places than usual. Please don’t give up too easily. Oh, and you might have to read some things I point to from earlier to get everything I’m saying – I’m not one for endless repeating myself I’m afraid.)

You can think of this as another story in the line of development I’ve been pushing (and telling people about here and elsewhere) for many years now. Applications of string theory to a broader range of physics areas than the popular discussions of the topic seem to touch upon. I told you last year about the exciting work going on in understanding properties of new phases of nuclear matter being unlocked at the Brookhaven experiment RHIC (colliding heavy nuclei together to create a sort of hot quark-gluon soup). That work continues. This new work pertains to experiments as well, and this time, these are closer to the human scale bench top experiments we all get misty-eyed over (ok, I do, maybe no-one else). It is super-cute stuff. I should […] Click to continue reading this post →