Author Archives: Clifford

Another Hole in Pandora’s Box?

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05classic05lNo doubt you’ve heard it all over the news. Craig Venter and his teams have created another press storm, this time about “synthetic life”, although I wonder a bit about the meaning of the term. I’ve no particularly insightful things to say about it all, other than to do like everyone else and watch and wonder where it’s all going to lead (probably not exactly where people currently think… is one thing we can say for sure). There’s coverage everywhere so I don’t need to point, but for future reference, here’s a Guardian link to a video of the man himself talking about it in some detail, and a link to a story by Ian Sample in the same paper. There you can find links to the research paper too. (Image at right is of a pithos, the kind of vessel Pandora opened in the Greek myth. The image is from the online component of the Michael C. Carlos museum at Emory university. Click image to jump there.)

Truly fascinating stuff to say the least.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

An Exciting Asymmetry?

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A big mystery in physics is why there is more matter than anti-matter. (Of course, which we call the matter and which we call the “anti-matter” is a… matter of convention. Take your pick.) It is hoped that there is some mechanism in the laws of physics (at a very basic level concerning particle interactions) that will become apparent that explains it. It’s also hoped that the mechanism itself might have some understandable origin too. The mechanism would operate in the first tiny fractions of a second of the universe’s life when the primordial soup of particles and antiparticles (created from, roughly speaking, the energy of the big bang) began to cool down as the universe expanded. Rather than them annihilating all back into energy again, the mechanism would create an imbalance between the two, giving rise to a matter-filled universe, from which we emerged. So what could be the mechanism, can we isolate it in our theories and in our experiments? Build a good model of it? Explain it?

This is all very first and foremost in people’s minds when there’s a new experiment switched on that is probing the unknown – the Large Hadron Collider. Well, actually, it has been recently announced that a suitable mechanism (or, more precisely, its […] Click to continue reading this post →

Greetings!

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passion_flower_pairGreetings of the birthday sort to my younger nephew.

I made a card for him out of these lovely passion flowers (click for larger view) from my garden, and I posted it, but apparently there are postal delays due to volcano ash and so forth, so it might not get there in time.

So this blog post is to serve as a card and wish him Happy Birthday.

Happy Birthday!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Venus at Midday!

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[Update: That really hurt. Hard on the neck. And could not even find the moon… I think there’s left over moisture haze high up. šŸ™ ]

I just learned from Phil’s Bad Astronomy blog that apparently there’s a great opportunity to see Venus right in the middle of the day, and today is rather optimum for it. I’m going to try and see if it works. At about 1:00pm (sorry those of you for whom the sun has already gone way past that), look for the sun and then the thin crescent moon will be about three fist-widths to the left of that (if in the Northern hemisphere – right otherwise). Venus will be visible just to the right of that crescent. Phil has a diagram up on his site, here. This is all supposed to be possible with the naked eye, and I imagine you can help things a lot by holding your palm up against the sun to stop the brightness from that direction, and then waiting a bit for your eyes to relax into the viewing of the area of the sky I mentioned. Phil also mentioned binoculars. I’d seriously suggest trying without them, if you can, since accidentally looking at the sun with them is something I want to strongly urge you to avoid. (If you must use them, put something like a building or a large tree trunk in front of the sun and don’t change your footing…)

Good luck! I’m going to try in a couple of hours. Let me know how it works out for you, if you like!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

New Beginnings

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It has been a wonderful Spring for me so far, I must say. On many fronts. For example, work is trundling along steadily, with small but regular landmarks in my project being set and met, and the garden is planted with lots of new vegetable plants that carry promise for tasty treats in the months to come. In the mornings the garden has a cacophony of sounds from all sorts of birds, all determinedly busy with whatever it is they think needs to get done that morning. It is good to start that day hearing all that activity. mourning_doves_2(Fully half of that sound comes from a remarkably energetic Northern Mockingbird that manages to run through several distinct birdsong choruses at high volume while flying from tree to tree in the neighbourhood. It is almost as though it is trying to create the illusion that there are several mockingbirds in residence…) In the photo you can see a pair of mourning doves (the same pair I think I spoke about earlier), surveying the activity in the air and on the ground below.

There’s a feeling of promise, hope, and growth all around at this time of year. It’s everywhere. A nice surprise waited for me early last week. I was filling the kettle at the sink for my first cup of tea of the day one morning and noticed something green […] Click to continue reading this post →

But is it Real? (Part One)

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After my colloquium at UC Riverside some weeks back, I was asked an important question I’ve been asked before, and no doubt will be asked again. The same question may have occurred to you given things I’ve written here about the subject of my research concerning applications of string theory (particularly, ideas from quantum gravity) to understanding (relatively) recent experimentally measured phenomena. (The technique of “gauge/gravity dualities”: See also the special Physics Today May issue with articles on all of this. I wrote about that here. It tells you some of what we can and can’t do with the computational technology, and prospects for improvement, etc.)

So the question is “Is it real?”. This is particularly referring to the black hole in the discussion. Recall, one computes properties of new novel liquid phases of matter (that seem to be closely related to what shows up in the lab) by using a toolbox that involves the equations of gravity, in a higher dimensional spacetime, and much of the thermal nature of the system is controlled by a black hole solution of those equations. So people want to know if that black hole is real. A version of the conversation is like this: (Imagine I’ve already introduced the technique, the higher dimensional spacetime, and the black hole…)

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Happy Mother’s Day!

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It is Mother’s Day in the USA. The UK version was earlier, in March, but since my mother is there, she usually gets two greetings from me, one for each version of the holiday.

oleander_flowersMother’s Day for me means flowers, at least in part. I often (although not this year) make and send her a card featuring a flower from my garden. Roses are usually the ones that make it to the card (my mum loves them) but as I stood in the garden this morning and looked around, the Oleander caught my eye. The bushes are covered in pink flowers (click the image on the right for a larger view), with many more to come, and I was suddenly put in mind of the years I lived in the Caribbean. Oleander plants were very common, and I recall many of them (in a selection of colours, I think) in the grounds of St. Augustine’s where my family went to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Summer Fun…

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Ah, now that Springtime is firmly settled in (been several weeks now), it is time for the next major season. What is that? Summer Blockbuster season! It’s already been underway, the highlight so far (in my opinion) being the clever and tongue-in-cheek “Kick-Ass”, which I suspect will be the best of the bunch of the (dismayingly rapidly growing) superhero movie genre for this year.

kick_ass_vistaOne of my favourite movie theatres, the Vista (a classic old movie palace that has not been chopped up into bits, like so many criminally have, but instead kept in excellent condition with great seats, huge screen, and wonderful sound) always has a treat when showing the superhero-type movies: The manager dresses up in a (sometimes charmingly saggy) costume to match the title character. Here he is (on the right – click for larger view) as the character Kick-Ass, where the (forgive me) lameness of the costume is this time actually appropriate (you have to watch the movie to understand fully why). See an earlier one here.

Enjoy!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Art and Science

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e.coli image by shardcoreSome time back I wrote a post concerning E.Coli, and illustrated it with an image that I found on the web. The other day I learned more about the actual source of the image. The painting (click on image to enlarge) was from someone working under the name shardcore, and you can visit their site here. Notably, there are several pieces of work there, and a number of them are of science subjects, and scientists. Shardcore writes interesting notes for some of the work too.

The work is overall quite fascinating, striking, and often very aesthetically engaging. I recommend having a good long look around. To tease you to go there, let me point out a (topical) one for some of us with eyes on the LHC. A painting of Peter Higgs:

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

The Search For Perfection…

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…is all very well, but to look for Heaven…is to live here in Hell*.

may 2010 physics today coverOne of the things I worked a lot on in earlier months this year (and late ones of last year) was the lead article in a cluster of articles that has appeared in the last few days in Mayā€™s special edition of Physics Today. They are sort of departmental-colloquium-level articles, so for a general physics audience, more or less. Itā€™s about some of the things Iā€™ve told you about here in the past, concerning exciting and interesting applications of string theory to various experiments in nuclear physics, as well as atomic and condensed matter physics (although we do not have an article on the latter in this cluster). I had a fun time working with Peter Steinberg on the article and remain grateful to him for getting us all together in the first place to talk about this topic way back in that AAAS symposium of 2009. It was there that Steven Blau of Physics Today got the idea to approach us all to do an article, which resulted in this special issue.

My article with Peter Steinberg, ā€œWhat black holes teach about strongly coupled particles ā€œ, is here, and the pdf is freely downloadable (update: alternative link here). It is mostly about the theoretical aspects of the whole business and the relevance of the string theory […] Click to continue reading this post →

Odds and Ends

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angels_flightThe little railway on the left is apparently the shortest rail journey in the world. So the sign proudly claims, anyway. I imagine they mean shortest for one carrying passengers, and that considerations of scale have been made (so that model railway that loops around your dining room table does not count). Whether it is the shortest or not, Angel’s Flight is very charming and quite a lovely, brief ride (shot of interior below). I recommend visiting it if you get a chance. It’s in downtown Los Angeles. A reward at the end is Grand Central Market, so you can’t lose.

I’ve been quiet here on the blog for a few days. It has been an oddly busy time where on the one hand I’ve been trying to work on my project, and on the other I’ve been […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXXI – An Extra Dimension

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I went off into an extra dimension yesterday. Well, in a manner of speaking. No, this was not anything to do with my string theory work!

I was being filmed in 3D.

3d_cameraThere’s a bit of a 3D revolution going on. There have been a lot of 3D movies out lately. Some are better than others, and a great deal more are to come very soon, as you probably know. Many major filmmakers that you probably regard as “serious” filmmakers have 3D films in the works. There’ll be 3D TV channels appearing soon in the UK and probably elsewhere, and they’ve been selling the TVs already, both there and in the USA (and I imagine, in other places).

There are lots of questions you’ve no doubt asked yourself: Is the technology here to stay? Is it just a gimmick? Is it just a ploy to combat piracy? Is it a new aspect of the visual form that creative filmmakers can genuinely use to enhance the story-telling? Has that happened yet? And so on and so forth…

I’ve been asking myself those questions too. I did not expect, however, to be part of the revolution (if that is what it is) and be filmed in 3D, so soon, for a TV show. My […] Click to continue reading this post →