Author Archives: Clifford

Riverside Fun

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(Note: Written yesterday afternoon at 6:00pm.) Well, that was fun! I am on my way back from UC Riverside where I visited to give a colloquium. I met a number of faculty that I had not seen since I was last there (talking at a DPF APS meeting in 2004) and people seemed to like the talk (similar to the ones I gave last Fall in LA and in Vancouver), even though I was a bit rusty in my talk-delivery, being deep in sabbatical mode, you understand. I wallowed too much in the experimental physics part of the talk and so had to rush the ending bits where I bring in aspects of string theory to the game. I hope people were not too confused. I invited people to send me email for more information/explanation if they wanted to, since I had to leave immediately after my talk.

You might be wondering why I am typing while I’m driving on the highway. Isn’t that bad? I could respond that texting while driving is illegal but blogging while driving is perfectly fine (along with things like eating, shaving, applying makeup, and a host of other things you see people doing in cars, some of which I won’t mention as this is a family blog). However I won’t make such a silly response since of course I am not driving. I took the train. Yes, I’m weird. It’s a very fine double-decker (actually there […] Click to continue reading this post →

Other Accelerator Physics is Available

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The alternative title for this post was going to be “Closing in on Unobtanium”, but I realized that it might be better to explicitly remind you that the Large Hadron Collider, understandably featuring in the news a lot these days, is not the only particle accelerator in operation. Such machines are routinely at work all over the world (for example, supplying hospitals with radioactive materials used in medical diagnosis), and doing various kinds of key research (recall as another example the RHIC physics I’ve told you a bit about in relation to certain applications of string theory). One such set of investigations involves finding new heavy elements, extending the periodic table of elements. Yes, just like happened with Pluto’s demotion and its resulting effect on your internalized list of planets in the solar […] Click to continue reading this post →

She Blinded Me With Science…

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The funny video below* is good for a bit of nostalgia for the time of the Thomas Dolby song, the song itself, and perhaps for the X-Files TV show (but not for me, I saw only a few episodes). Scully fans will love this, and although I never regularly watched the show, I did appreciate her character. Strong skepticism, insistence on using the scientific method, etc. Excellent. Good character overall, and broke a lot of ground as a female lead with these characteristics too.

chloe_obrian_24Now here’s an idea. Would someone please do such a video for 24’s Chloe O’Brian? (Pictured left.) She’s definitely one of my favourite technical expert engineer/scientist types on a major show, and Mary Lynn Rajskub does an excellent job giving her life, depth and likeability even though she’s fighting against all the geek/nerd stereotype characteristics they’ve endowed her with. In essence, she does it by embracing them. Her attention to detail regularly saves the day (world, city, state, whatever), and the lives of her colleagues, and in the last episode they even had her supposedly determining that light in a video was daylight by […] Click to continue reading this post →

Occult Activity Tonight!

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rws_zetaophocc1Oh yes. Occult. Exciting right? Those of us in LA and some other areas (apparently points in Nevada, Idaho, and Western Montana, and the cities of Calgary and Edmonton) will see have the chance to see something quite remarkable if we stay up until 03:34 Pacific time. I learned this from Phil’s blog. You can find out more from Sky and Telescope (that’s their figure on the right). The event is this. If you stare at the star ζ (Zeta) Ophiuchi, which is visible to the naked eye, it will go dim for about eight seconds. Why, because an asteroid (824 Anastasia) will pass directly in front of it. You can’t see the asteroid directly, since it is too small and too dim, but nevertheless its presence between you and the distant star will be enough to make it go dim for a bit. Isn’t that wonderful? Have a go!

This remarkable effect (called occultation – hence the sneaky blog post title: the key root meaning here is “hidden”), while it might seem rather mundane in some ways (although you’re seeing the effect of an asteroid with your own eyes!) is extremely powerful in astronomy. It is a great way, for example, of detecting planets orbiting other stars! You’re familiar with occultations already actually. When the moon moves […] Click to continue reading this post →

Awesome

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obama_light_sabre I’ve never been one for the naive Obama-gushing, you may have noticed, but I can’t resist this lovely tribute. It is the site called “President Obama Looking at Awesome Things”, a collection of “photos”, and the example to the left is one of my favourites. (Click for larger view.)

It is excellent use of certain looks he gets on his face when doing things like “looking interested” at things. Isn’t photoshop great?

The site is here, and be sure to look at (currently) all three pages worth, or jump to the Flickr photo set here, where I learned that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Inspiration and Dedication

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jaime_escalante_by_robert_gauthierYou might not have heard of him, so I thought I’d mark the passing, on Tuesday, of the mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante. (Photo on right by Robert Gauthier.) He was an extraordinary teacher who passionately believed in the abilities of the many East Los Angeles students from disadvantaged and traditionally ignored backgrounds he taught, enduring the ridicule of his colleagues to press on with the job of teaching them as well as he could, challenging them to reach impressive heights of mathematical ability, especially considering given the circumstances. Some people might know some […] Click to continue reading this post →

Great News for Healthy Skepticism

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I don’t know if you’ve been following the story at all, but there’s been a major breakthrough in the UK for the ability of people to speak out against, for example, claims being made about the efficacy of medical treatments. It is very important, since the UK courts with their strong libel laws, are commonly used by big companies (with deep pockets) as a stick to beat anyone (such as a reasonably skeptical ordinary citizen who is not willing to believe extraordinary claims with little or no evidence for them) who raises questions. Simon Singh, a well-known science writer (whose work I’ve discussed here before) has, after a long battle, won a crucial appeal that may be […] Click to continue reading this post →

Stairway to Heaven?

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“There’s a lady who’s sure
All that glitters is gold
And she’s buying a stairway to heaven […] “

the_orbitNot that I’m calling Boris Johnson, the [occasional village idiot] Mayor of London, a lady or anything. It just was the best bit of the song I could use for the story. This structure does not exist yet, but it seems that will. What is it? Another Big Thing for people to go up to look over London. Yay. Silly, in many ways, but I will admit that I like it as a piece of mathematical poetry squiggled in the sky. It is by Anish Kapoor. Story here from the BBC, and here from AOL news. Video of announcement from Guardian here.

Now, while looking at the picture above, I noticed something interesting. Is it just me, or is the sky wrong? I don’t mean that it is blue and over London and therefore a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Wonder

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Over at Wongablog, Andrew points to a post he did over at Humanist Life in which he reviews “Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science”, by Richard Holmes. This is one of my favourite topics, and it is certainly a book I’m planning to read, although I have not done so yet.

Andrew writes thoughtfully on the book and the matter in general, and so I’ll leave you to wander over there and have a read of it. To tempt you, an extended (I hope Andrew does not mind) extract: […] Click to continue reading this post →

New LHC Physics Phase Begins!

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cern-first-physicsWell, here we go. It has been a little over 20 years since I’ve been actively working in this field and have been hearing about the promise of this machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and now it is really here, working, and colliding protons at an energy much higher than any previous experiment, promising us to a glimpse of new aspects of how the universe works. It is not guaranteed, of course, but there’s a great deal of hope, and so much of what we know strongly suggests that there’s going to be some exciting things to learn. See the list of related posts below for several bits of background on the LHC, or go to CERN’s website. [Image above right -click for larger view- is a CERN-supplied montage of data/images from the various experiments at the LHC. Caption: 7 TeV collision events seen today by the LHC’s four major experiments (clockwise from top-left: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb).]

Two of the things foremost in people’s minds are on one hand the Higgs (the particle or particles that ultimately give masses to the elementary particles that make up the […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Short Cut to Mushrooms

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My title for the last post reminded me of a discovery I made the other day (and gave me an excuse to steal a favourite title for this post – know its origin?). I was watering a plant that I’d not tended to properly for a while since I was away on Walkabout, and I noticed, upon looking closely, that it has been under attack by mushrooms!! Wow!

Click on each of the thumbnails below for a larger view: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Picking Mushrooms

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From Frances Bonahan s colloquiumAha. It’s one of those moments in mathematics press coverage that the journalists love, since all the stereotypes about how weird people working on abstract things can be are able to be brought out and highlighted, and words like genius, prodigy, recluse, eccentric, etc, get thrown about in equal measure.

Yes, Grigory Perelman has being turning down stuff again. You may recall him refusing the Fields Medal four years ago. Now he is refusing the Clay Mathematics Institute’s million dollar payout. Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture a while back (see this older BBC article about that, along with a non-technical mention of the content of the conjecture – see also here, a related post the picture above right is from), which is on the Clay’s list of Big Problems whose collective heads have a bounty on them. He’s apparently a bit eccentric and the press love it, so most articles I’ve seen are mostly taken up with stuff like the following I saw in the Guardian:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

A Spring Flower

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wise2010-008-med It is Springtime, and it is not unheard of for me to have pictures of flowers, often from my garden, up on the blog (see here). This time, I have a picture of a flower from a different garden. It is the one you can see by looking up. If you look up with the right equipment, you can even see new growth (just like you can in Springtime gardens). In this case, the equipment is WISE (the spacecraft launched in December, recall) with its ability to survey the sky in the infrared part of the spectrum, and the new growth is a cluster of new stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster. Looks a bit like a rosebud, […] Click to continue reading this post →