Well, I’m not getting any sleep at all tonight, so might as well blog a bit. I’ve got to wake up in two and a half hours to catch a flight, so might as well give up gracefully, and usefully, by sharing with you:
Two spheres caught my eye around Dublin today, one familiar, one not. Both great. […] Click to continue reading this post
Hang in there, Rob! Keep up the good fight for a better climate for, (and representation of) women in your department, and in departments everywhere. -cvj
At the (K)ITP the other day there was a journalist-led discussion/presentation on the largely-media-driven “controversy†about string theory. You know my opinion on this -it’s a largely made up story based on two inaccurate chariacatures (in book form) of research in the field- told by the same journalists and editors who some time earlier brought you the glossy stories about string theory that played up the excitement and promise, and played down the often-said but often-ignored cautionary remarks. The irony of all of this seems to have been lost on most. (I’m not saying that string theorists are entirely blameless in this, but I’ve seen how hard it is to get a balanced remark -about the basic process of seeing a complex scientific program through to its end- survive next to a glossy one-liner).
The point is that the story being told now in the press is simply the one that journalists and editors want to tell now – a David vs Goliath story. It has little or nothing to do with what is actually going on in the science research. The journalist -George Johnson- does a good job of pointing out supporting evidence for this by going through a number of stories from a decade ago and looking at their structure. […] Click to continue reading this post
Here are the three young scientists selected in the Discovery Channel’s “Young Scientist Challengeâ€:
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From their website, about Nolan Kamitaki, aged 14, from Waiakea Intermediate School in Hawaii: […] Click to continue reading this post
Coffee break. Day two of the panel work. Locked in a room again, looking at proposals. Yesterday we deliberated over who passed to the next stage, and who did not – a painful process at times. Today there’s a final part of the process to be performed. We are writing … Click to continue reading this post
It was a long day on the Job. From 8:15am to 6:15pm, we were stuck in one room for more or less the entire time. Now…. a quick guinness on the way back from dinner. Conversation about the private vs public forms of university, funding in science in general, dark … Click to continue reading this post
I’m still excited about the news that Branson has joined the fight to put money aside to lead the way in fighting global warming issues. I blogged about it here a month ago, you’ll recall. Well, of course the Onion has a take on this. It’s mean, but it is funny:
Analysts are predicting that the $3 billion Sir Richard Branson has pledged for developing energy sources to combat global warming could come close to matching the amount the entrepreneur, adventurer, and Virgin CEO has already spent on elaborate balloon-based excursions.
That’s the main joke, but to me, even funnier is the ending line of the artice: […] Click to continue reading this post
I’m always pleased to see this sign. It is at Heathrow, on the walk down the perpetually dingily lit underground corridors connecting the terminals, the tube, the extortion Heathrow express, and the parking lots.
For a start, I generally like the idea that the ground floor of a building (the one you walk onto off the street) is the “zeroth†floor. (I mean no disrespect to this splendid country I live in, that has largely chosen otherwise, although every now and again in older buildings you see it.) So it is just great to see […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, it was only yesterday that I was telling the physics 100 class all about Special Relativity (lots of incredulous looks…. lots of reassurances, including: “You’re confused? That’s ok! It is one of the greatest pieces of science of the 20th Century… It’s not supposed to be trivial….â€), but it seems like an age ago, and very distant. That’s because I’m in Dublin today. (Pesky wormholes.)
Just for a few days.
Guinness will be involved, I imagine (yeah!), although it will not be the primary focus. (The pint in the photo to the right is from a previous trip.) [ … ] Click to continue reading this post
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Lovely and playful.
From one of Peter Goin’s “Narrative Photograms†on the Red Line subway stop Metro/7th in Los Angeles (click for larger image). […] Click to continue reading this post
So imagine the following:
You’re walking along the street, minding your own business, and somebody walks up to you and tries to sell you a string theory. So you stop and examine the goods, since you’re in the market for string theories, on the lookout for any that might be novel, useful, bright, or shiny, etc. You never know when one or other property might come in useful.
Question: How do you know that it is a string theory? Let me be sure to point out that it comes with a lot of the defining path integral done for you. In other words, you don’t have to do the integral over string world sheet metrics and world sheet fields. This was done in the factory for you. What you have access to are parameters such as the coefficients of the operators in the theory, and you can also adjust the value of the string coupling.
So a lot of the stuff you would recognize as a string theory in your typical string theorist’s notebook have been cleaned up. They’ve been integrated over. The observable physics actually never cared about them (the technical details of summing over metrics – slicing up the moduli space of inequivalent metrics properly at each genus, etc etc…. all done), assuming you’ve done the integrals properly. The factory did it all for you.
So what criteria do you use to decide that it is a string theory at all? Actually, this is not an idle question. Think about the issue in the context of trying to understand some […] Click to continue reading this post
When I was a child, I was fascinated with a straight line of three stars that were evenly spaced. Whenever I looked up in the sky, I would be comforted by being able to find those stars, especially when I was about to embark on a long walk home at night. I later learned that they were actually known as Orion’s Belt, part of the constellation of Orion. So Orion remains my favourite constellation.
These nights, Orion takes centre stage in stargazing circles since the Orionid meteor shower will be originating from a point near the constellation. Of course, Orion has nothing to do with the shower. It merely marks the apparent direction that it comes from (see red dot in image below).
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(Above is the view of the sky looking Southsoutheast from mid northern latitudes at 3:00am today.) We will be traversing a debris field made of stuff left over from Halley’s comet’s tail. That stuff will rain down into our atmosphere, glowing brightly […] Click to continue reading this post
As part of the Freshman Seminar I told you about earlier (e.g., here, here and here), we went on a field trip to MOCA in nearby downtown LA.
We went to see the exhibition of drawings by Eva Hesse. Hesse is very well known for her sculpture, and among the things she did, I think that a rather splendid one in this context is the one below. It is an example of those that resemble three dimensional renderings of her interesting use of line on the paper.
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This one (not in the exhibition) is called “Metronomic Irregularity†(I think it has a number as well… there are several pieces of this title done by her).
The group is standing in front of the sculpture I posted about earlier. There’s Ashley and Adam, left and middle. Jeff (on the right in the picture) -who is not a freshman, but a senior who does physics research projects with me- came along as well. We had a rather good time, taking […] Click to continue reading this post
Down at MOCA for a field trip today. More later. Took a shot of this old favourite: Nancy Rubins’ “Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s Airplane Parts, About 1000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, Gagosian’s Beverly Hills Space, at MOCA” (Can never really make out if that is the acttual title, … Click to continue reading this post
The hole in the ozone layer over Antartica was recently the biggest it has ever been, I learned from this Reuters article:
“From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles ,†said Paul Newman of
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington.
If the stratospheric weather conditions had been normal, the ozone hole would be expected to reach a size of about 8.9 million to 9.3 million square miles, about the surface area of North America, NASA said in a statement.
(NASA image top right. More about it here.)
This immediately reminds one of the other story on the hole I mentioned not so long ago. There was good news there, since it was supposed to be stabilizing, as a result […] Click to continue reading this post
