Author Archives: Clifford

Point of View, II

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The second of the Point of View campus events in the Visions and Voices series is on Thursday. It is at 7:00pm at the Gin Wong conference center (which is near Fine Arts and Architecture, by the way.) See the bottom of this post for some earlier events of this type, and this post for the background on Visions and Voices.

This time we’ll have a Poet, a Dancer, and a Physicist! Here’s some blurb that KC Cole (my co-conspirator in this business) wrote about who is appearing and what they’ll be saying:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

MiniBooNE for Neutrinos

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MiniBoone
(Image from the MiniBooNE archive. This depicts a neutrino signal in the detector. )

There was a new result announced today. The MiniBoone collaboration has confirmed the more “standard” scenario for neutrino oscillations, and ruled out suggestions by an earlier experiment (LSND3) from a while back that might have implied the existence of sterile neutrinos. Two commenters, Scott H. and Bee, alerted me to this in another thread. Rather than me trying to paraphrase things, I’m going to first reproduce Scott H.’s comment here (he came back from a colloquium by Jocelyn Monroe on the topic earlier today): […] Click to continue reading this post →

Quark Soup Al Dente

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Here’s Rob Myers in action, giving Monday’s excellent departmental colloquium, entitled “Quark Soup Al Dente: Applied String Theory”:

robert c myers quark soup al dente

Here was his abstract:

In recent years, experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have discovered an exotic new state of matter known as the quark-gluon plasma. Simple theoretical considerations suggested that this plasma would behave like an ideal gas, however, the experiments show that it actually behaves very much like an ideal liquid. Thus the standard theoretical tools, such as perturbation theory and lattice gauge theory, are poorly suited to understand this new phase. However, recent progress in superstring theory has provided us with a theoretical laboratory for studying very similar systems of strongly interacting hot non-abelian plasmas. This surprising new perspective extracts the fluid properties of the plasma from physical processes in a black hole spacetime. At present, this approach seems to provide some of the best tools which theoretical physicists have to understand the heavy ion collisions at RHIC.

For a very good blog post on this issue, see Bee and Stefan’s post at Backreaction.

It was really excellent to see Rob and spend some time with him at dinner afterwards and at lunch the next day with my students. We got to chat over a nice Tapas-style meal and catch up a bit on what each other has been up to (both in and out of physics – Rob is one of my most long standing friends and collaborators in the field), and he even gave us a seminar on Tuesday before leaving.

Now, here’s a physics question for you: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Small Things Considered

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What small things? Elementary particles! The second of David Kestenbaum’s excellent report on CERN’s LHC aired yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered. You can see what I said about the first part here, and the second part can be listened to on the NPR website here. There’s also more video, extra audio, and a transcript.

atlas detector
(Image: The seven story tall Atlas detector at the LHC. (photo: Serge Bellegarde))

The focus on this one broadens out to marvel at the sheer scale of the experiment as a civil engineering feat, and also as a feat of human cooperation (consider the many countries, languages, different people, etc, who are collaborating to make this happen). It’s great to hear the many voices of the various scientists he talks to.

(It’s also great, on a personal note, to hear Jim Virdee (the CMS spokesperson) […] Click to continue reading this post →

NPR goes to LHC

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National Public Radio’s David Kestenbaum, who’s quite reliably an excellent reporter whose field reports I always enjoy, did a report on CERN’s (soon to be switched on) Large Hadron Collider (see also a Wiki here) today! Or rather, it was played on this morning’s Morning Edition. Here’s the site where you can listen to an archived version of the report, and read a transcript of some of it. It’s rather well done.

CMS Higgs simulation event

(Image: A simulation from the CMS experiment – part of the LHC – showing the decay of the Higgs particle after being created in one of the high energy collisions.)

It starts with a few theoretical physicist clichés in the introductory remarks leaving up to talking to Alvaro De Rujula, but it’s fine – not really too over the top, and done with good humour. Really good is that fact that once the physics issues start being discussed and described, he focuses on doing that well. The bottom line is that if your subject -the science- is good, that should take center stage in forming the core of the report for attracting and holding the audience’s attention.

And report does it well. Through interview and Kestenbaum filling in with further […] Click to continue reading this post →

Happy Easter

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babianaBabiana. (Click for larger view.)

This will serve nicely as my Easter greeting to all who readers care to be greeted in that way (Happy Easter!), but especially to my mum and sister who actually sent me Easter greetings cards in the post. Thank you!

I picked the lovely Babiana because (besides loving the name …this led to an ichat conversation with my sister about whether or not I’d name somebody this, to which I replied (not fully seriously) that I happily name a daughter Babiana… only to withdraw that when my sister suggested that the name would be shortened to Babs… and I was immediately put in mind of Carry On movies – I mean no offense whatsoever to any Babs in the readership, of course)…. because these were planted, partly with mum’s help when she was last visiting here, and so she gets to see how they are doing. They are in the same batch as the gladiolus plants I mentioned about two or three weeks ago, and I still have yet to get to tell you the story about my getting these bulbs, which is sort of interesting, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Mexican Superlattices

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I grew some decent crystals once when I was younger. Perhaps you did too? It’s an excellent (and cheap) science project for a young person to do, so do encourage them to have a go, whenever you get the chance.

Whatever you do, perhaps it is not a good idea to show them these giant selenite (gypsum) crystals first:

mexico crystals

Fantastic aren’t they?! (Click for larger view.) They are in some truly extraordinary […] Click to continue reading this post →

Finding Your Way

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Here’s a map of science*!

map of science

map of science keyThe work, by Richard Klavans and Kevin Boyack, shows aspects of the connectivity of relations between scientific disciplines (colour key to the left), based on analysis of about 1.6 million scientific articles. Rather pretty isn’t it? And, yes, of course, very interesting to see the connectivity visualized like that.

Please visit their website to see how to visually slice all of this to highlight areas of the map by (a limited selection of) countries, regions, institutions, blue vs red state (!), etc.

There’s more information about the relationships in this Seed article, where there’s a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Barbed

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agent takes questionWhile listening this morning to President Bush splutter and stumble his way through a bunch of mostly softball questions from the press at the Whitehouse (as usual), I was put in mind of this recent excellent Onion article, entitled “Heroic Secret Service Agent Takes Question Intended For Bush”.

It’s brilliantly funny. There’s analysis of the event, interviews, etc.

Have a read.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

The First Green Shoots of Recovery?

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From the BBC, I learned that there’s been an unexpected turn around in science education in the UK:

The latest statistics from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service on applications to join full-time degree courses, show double-figure percentage rises compared with the same time last year for physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and technology.

The speculations have begun:

While admission officers admit that they are baffled by this sudden and unexpected surge in interest, many secondary school and university tutors are convinced this is a result of long hard work by many working our education system.

“We really make a point of doing fun, practical things with all pupils when it comes to the sciences,” said Richard West, the head of science and physics at St Peter’s Collegiate School in Wolverhampton.

“We are encouraging after school science activities like astronomy and animal clubs and taking part in national competitions.”

Various other possible reasons are discussed as well, such as: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Cyrus Chestnut Rocks and Rolls

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Sunday night, after a long afternoon of intense work in the garden (digging holes and improving soil for planting new budlea plants, standing on the tall ladder for trimming one of the tall palm trees, and more) I went to the Jazz Bakery to see the second set of pianist Cyrus Chestnut with his trio (Dezron Douglas on bass and Neal Smith on drums):

cyrus chestnut

They were excellent. As usual, there was hardly any audience for this extremely talented pianist (20 of us max?) – the triple whammy of (1) Los Angeles – people just seldom seem to make the effort, in great numbers (2) after 10:00pm in LA – see (1), and (3) Sunday night – see (1) again. The club would have been packed, were this taking place in New York, or London. Anyway, not my loss, I suppose, although it does take away a bit from such an event if the crowd is depleted like that. Musicians often feed off the crowd’s responses. In any case, it was an excellent show, as I said. Unexpectedly, they interspersed various standards with some recently reharmonized […] Click to continue reading this post →

Namesake

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the namesakeSaturday night, after a quick trip to catch the end of a pleasant reception down at the Santa Monica Art Studios (they’re featuring a new set of artists), I went to the Arclight (hurrah! – it’s been a while) and saw a quite wonderful film: Mira Nair’s “The Namesake”.

I laughed and cried in turn at the joy and the sadness of it. It’s a very simple film about so many key things, explored marvelously: Family, home, leaving home, leaving your country, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Best Of The Day

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So far today, the three best April Fool’s Day jokes I’ve heard or read have been as follows:

On NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, they had a good piece about new regulation to limit mobile phone ring tones in New York:

mobile phoneThe city’s Center for Reduction of Noise Pollution issued a public call to action last month, citing an increased number of confrontations spawned by a new phenomenon: It’s called “ring rage,” and it involves strangers getting into fights over obnoxious cell phone ringtones.

David Yassky, a member of the New York City Council for the 33rd District in Brooklyn, has proposed a bill to regulate cell phone rings.

Distracting ringtones in the workplace cost the economy more than $1.2 billion each year, says Yassky. His bill mandates that New York residents choose between four more palatable rings, custom-made by the city.

The audio of the interview is here (along with the funny ringtones). NPR almost completely ruined the idea by being too obvious (you could almost hear them going “eh!?”, “eh!?”, after every sentence), not choosing a credible-sounding interviewee as the main subject, and then immediately reminding you of the date at the end of the interview. Are they afraid people will sue? It’s such a shame they had to be so obvious.

Much better was the following: […] Click to continue reading this post →