Author Archives: Clifford

D-Brane Fun!

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image Turns out that it still a lot of fun to lecture about string theory and D-branes! (The latter are an important type of extended object, generalizing membranes, that have been very useful in theoretical physics for the last 20 years. — My goodness, it has been 20 years since Joe Polchinski first demonstrated their importance for string duality!) The students at the Latin American String School here in Mexico City seem to be very engaged and enjoying themselves. Although I was having fun I was also not without a presentation error or two brought on by […] Click to continue reading this post →

It’s Time

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delorean_sketchOk, So I’ve finished prepping my presentation of detailed recipes for how to make time machines. (Sorry, but it does not involve any of the elements depicted in the sketch above.) It is for a special event tonight celebrating the fact that this is the day Marty McFly came forward in time to in Back to the Future II. The question is: Should I really be telling people how to do this? Yikes. 😉

Ok, time to get into my flying car and head off to teach…

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Gravity on the Horizon!

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joshua_tree_shoot_horizon_2Had to nip over to Joshua Tree National Park yesterday, for my sins.

Why? Well, gravity, of course. I can’t tell you the full details, but I was helping out the folks from the BBC on a documentary program (for the series Horizon, which I loved watching back in the 80s when I was in school!) being made about topics connected to gravity, space travel, mass, energy, and all that good stuff.

You can see me mid-demo in the photo (click for larger view), standing upon a rock somewhere in the park, talking about Newton and Einstein. I also got to be a bit of a stunt driver for a while, being filmed bouncing an SUV along a dirt road several times, which was (I grudgingly admit) a lot of fun!

After the shoot […] Click to continue reading this post →

That Serial Film Crime…

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After all these years, I still have that little pain inside about what I think is one of the greatest missed opportunities (nay, crimes) in the history of film: that Guillermo del Toro did not get to direct the Hobbit due to all the delays in New Zealand over strikes (if I recall correctly), and so after two years of development he (and all his staff) packed up and moved on with their lives…. leaving Peter Jackson to take over the reins. That pain is right there next to those three jabbing pains inside that still feel a bit raw every time I get a reminder about how the films actually turned out overall. Just seeing a poster can set me off. (There are of course some nice set pieces in them here and there, but memory of them is rapidly erased by the overall wrong tone, silliness, and pandering to the need for pointless action sequences at the expense of common sense.) It’s old news now, but it still really hurts.

And it is nothing to do with the fact that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Back to Basics

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back_to_basicsHappy to say that I’m back to regular bread-making! The oven had some problems for a while and since I Was distracted by far too many things, I did not have time to get it fixed until recently. It is working again, and now I can make bread once more, and all is well with the world. Here is some of last week Sunday nights’s batch. (Seven other rolls were made, but those are bagged and frozen already…)

Hurrah!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Screen Junkies – The Martian, Science, and Problem-Solving!

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screen_junkies_martianAs promised, the Screen Junkies episode we made is out. It is about The Martian! JPL’s Christina Heinlein (a planetary science expert) also took part, and I hope you find it interesting and thought-provoking. Maybe even funny too! As usual, there’s a lot that was said that was inevitably left on the (virtual) cutting-room floor, but a lot of good stuff made the cut. All in all, I’d say that this film (which I enjoyed a lot!) had a refreshing take on science and engineering for a big studio film, on several scores. (Remaining sentences are spoiler-free.) First, rather than hiding the slow machinations involved in problem-solving, it has a lot of it up front! It’s an actual celebration of problem-solving, part of the heart and soul of science and engineering. Second, rather than have the standard nerd stereotype […] Click to continue reading this post →

Get ready for some “movie science” chatter…

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hal_cvj_christina_bigYes, I’ve been hanging out with my Screen Junkies friends again, and this time I also got to meet JPL’s Christina Heinlein, who you may recall was in the first of the Screen Junkies “Movie Science” episodes last year. While we were both in it, I’d not got to meet her that time since our chats with host Hal Rudnick were recorded at quite different times. This time, however, schedules meant […] Click to continue reading this post →

Metals are Shiny

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metals_are_shiny

“Metals are shiny.” That’s one of my favourite punchlines to end a class on electromagnetism with, and that’s what I did today. I just love bringing up a bit of everyday physics as a striking consequence of two hours worth of development on the board, and this is a good one for that. I hope the class enjoyed it as much as I did! (Basically, as you can’t see in the snapshot of my notes in the photo, those expressions are results of a computation of the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Thomas and Fermi

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thomas-fermiThe other day the Thomas-Fermi model (and its enhancements by Dirac and others) wandered across my desk (and one of my virtual blackboards as you can see in the picture) for a while. Putting aside why it showed up (perhaps I will say later on, but I cannot now), it was fun to delve for a while into some of these early attempts in quantum mechanics to try to understand approximation methods for treating fairly complicated quantum systems (like atoms of various sizes). The basic model showed up in 1927, just a year after Schrodinger’s […] Click to continue reading this post →

Moon Line

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lunar_eclipse_line
(Click for larger view.) This was a heartening reminder that people still care about what’s going on in the sky far above. This is a snap I took of a very long line of people (along the block and then around the corner and then some more) waiting for the shuttle bus to the Griffith Observatory to take part in the moon viewing activities up there tonight. (I took it at about 6:00pm, so I hope they all made it up in time!) The full moon is at close approach, and there was a total lunar eclipse as well. Knowing the people at the Observatory, I imagine they had arranged for lots of telescopes to be out on the lawn in front of the Observatory itself, as well as plenty of people on hand to explain things to curious visitors.

I hope you got to see some of the eclipse! (It is just coming off peak now as I type…)

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →