Author Archives: Clifford

Snooky

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tribute-to-snooky

Still from the closing piece of the short concert in tribute to trumpeter Snooky Young on the occasion of being awarded the first LA Jazz Treasure award. This was on Friday 11th September, at LACMA. (Don’t you long for a time when everybody had nicknames like this as a matter of course? Well, it is more of a matter of place and culture than a time, in some ways, but anyhow… What would you choose yours to be, if you had the choice?) There are some trumpet players of note on the stage at this point (Arturo Sandoval is one, I cannot identify the others by eye), and Snooky himself is there too. He’s the one looking endearingly like a Mathematics professor (which, now I think about it, sort of fits for a trumpet player).

While it was a pleasant enough event, and I am glad it took place, I can’t help but think that it would have been greatly improved by not having quite so many official […] Click to continue reading this post →

Happy Birthday Murray Gell-Mann!

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Murray Gell-Mann at TEDIt is Murray Gell-Mann’s 80th birthday today! Congratulations! Gell-Mann is best known as the person who came up with the idea of quarks, the particles that make up (for example) protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei. (He’s known for a lot more than that, of course, and you can read about it online.)

There’s an interview with Tom Siegfried in Science Now in honour of his 80th birthday*. Have a look. (See also an excellent article by Siegfried on Gell-Mann from August, focusing on the quark discovery, and the progress of new scientific ideas.)

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Laser

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Well, here it is! The second of the fun (I hope) short films I made illustrating some science ideas. Recall that last month I released “Shine a Light” for your viewing and sharing pleasure, and I promised a second and this is it. (The trailer was out some days ago.) Please read my post of last month for more on what this is all about. Here is some of what I said:

For this [National Science Foundation-supported film] to be a success, your help is needed. It needs to be seen. Tell your family and friends, colleagues and students, local teachers, etc., about it. Forward it on to people you know. Blog it, tweet it, facebook share it, etc. Crucially, remember that it is designed to be not just for people who already know they have an interest in science, but others too, so make no assumptions about who might like it… just please send it. Thanks.

Ok, let’s dim the lights! Run the Projector! Be sure to look out for the Monty Python moment…! (Tip: It is a high video quality, so pause it and let it buffer for a while before watching if you’ve only a moderately fast connection. Also, try the high definition (HD) option if you like, and/or view it in full screen and with the volume turned up. The embed here is small, so you can see it at a more glorious size at the YouTube site by clicking here.

laser_still

-cvj

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Categorically Not! – The Worlds We Make Up

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kc_frankThe next Categorically Not! is this coming Sunday September 13th. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events. (Image above right is from the inside of the jacket of KC Cole’s book on Frank Oppenheimer, who will be celebrated in this month’s Cat Not! as you’ll read below. I talked a bit about the book here.)

The theme this month is The Worlds We Make Up. Here’s the description from K. C. Cole:

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Laser is Coming Soon!

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Well, here it is. After lots of interruptions over the last 24 hours, I give you the trailer for Laser, the next of my films. I think it is a bit more playfully enigmatic than the trailer for the first film. (I’ve only just (half an hour ago) finished recording the music for it, and so it really is being rushed to you straight from the cutting room, as it were.)

See earlier posts for my thoughts about the project, and see the trailer for the first film here, and the actual first film, Shine a Light, here. Sorry it is so late… the semester started and I got swamped. See my chatter about that here.

Anyway, here it is! Enjoy!

-cvj

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A Little Behind…

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Well, here are a few thoughts:

(1) I’m behind on pretty much every deadline. In addition to the externally set ones (article to finish, class material to prepare, etc), I’m behind on those I’ve set myself.

(2) An example of the latter is the fact that I am two weeks late bringing out the film “Laser”, the followup to “Shine a Light”. The semester started, and all the time I thought I’d have to sit and cut a trailer for it and record some music to go on it never materialised….

(3) …Until the last 24 hours. I cut together some images into an interesting (I hope) sequence, and just now finished recording some music onto it. It is more enigmatic than the last trailer, or at least that is the intention. It is being crunched on by YouTube right now and when it is ready I will release it to tease you to return for the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Ten Things That Go Boom!

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the_universeWell, ok… Boom is not quite accurate, but the idea is that there will be ten kinds of blasts/explosions/major_energetic_events discussed tonight on the History Channel’s The Universe:

The Universe is full of explosions that both create and destroy. The Chicxulub impact on the Yucatan peninsula, which may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, was two million times more powerful than the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated on Earth. But guess what? That’s only good enough for the very bottom of the Biggest Blasts top ten list. This episode works its way up through supernova explosions and gamma ray bursts all the way to the blast that started it all–the Big Bang.

Sounds good doesn’t it? There’s a lot of good people contributing again, so I know it’ll have some good material and explanations.

In addition, I’m reasonably confident I play a role in this one…This one was a blast (sorry) to film. You saw some posts earlier reporting on some of the filming. Assuming they used the material I did with them, you’ll get to see why I was at the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Thursday was Monopole Day

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Here’s an odd coincidence. Thursday, just for fun, I declared it Monopole Day in my facebook status. It was largely because I was prepping a class on Dirac’s ideas about magnetic monopoles (roughly: point sources of magnetic fields analogous to point sources of electric fields), why it seems (from looking at Maxwell’s equations – the defining equations of electricity and magnetism) that Nature might very much like the idea of them (using a symmetry argument – roughly: electric and magnetic fields can turn into each other so if there’s one kind of point source, isn’t it strange that there’s not the other?) but chose to hide them away…

monopole_workIt’s a favourite topic of mine (and many physicists – it is one of the first grown-up tastes of modern ways of thinking about physics that you get as an advanced undergraduate, actually), and so I was excited to lecture about it (as I am every year… I find en excuse to bring monopoles into every course I teach… almost). I even handed out one of my class worksheets, which was all about how to build a monopole (on paper – you take a semi-infinite solenoid (a “Dirac String”) and let the magnetic flux lines spill out […] Click to continue reading this post →

Oops!

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Forgot to report on this email exchange from last semester:

From one of the staff in the physics office:

Subject: 499 Syllabus
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:01:38 -0700
From: Beverly
To: Clifford V. Johnson

I was reading the syllabus you sent over for the 499 class. I am not sure if this is a type-o but in the Extra Books section it reads “/Black *_hoes_* and Time Warps: Einstein’s outrageous Legacy/” should it read
“/Black *_holes_* and Time Warps: Einstein’s outrageous Legacy/”.

Thanks,

My response: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Kiss and Tell

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I make it a rule to never do that. It’s bad form. Best to be avoided.

Seriously, though, over on the Intersection, Sheril wants your kiss and tell photos. What she’s really looking for is…. well, here are her words:

Have you ever taken a picture of bears nuzzling in the field or kissing fish? How about a provocative pair of human subjects? (With their permission!) Are you interested in having an image credited to you in a science book debuting next Fall? If you’re a photographer with intriguing pictures of kissing and cuddling [no higher than PG-13 content please], email me before September 14 at srkirshenbaum@yahoo.com.

So go and send her some of your material if you have what she’s looking for! If not, consider making some new material. It’s for science.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

It Fell From Space…

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the_universeTonight’s 9:00pm episode of the History Channel’s The Universe ought to be interesting. It is all about objects that fall to earth from space. It’s a good opportunity to learn things about the universe (both near and far) from the perspective of things we glimpse arriving here on earth. You’ll get to learn about the earth as well, and how it (and life on it) has been affected by these things. There’ll be asteroids and planetary science of course, and maybe other things. I know from hearing some chatter of the program makers that there’ll be lots of demos using impacts and collisions and so forth. I know some good people were involved in making it, such as the writer/director Laura Verklan, and my friend and fellow regular on the show, JPL’s Amy Mainzer (who has an excellent blog here). […] Click to continue reading this post →

Head in the Clouds…

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clouds_and_smoke_2Stepping back from the unpleasantness going on at ground level for a moment (see the four previous posts, 1, 2, 3, 4), it seems that there is something else going on that’s actually quite fascinating. I went over to the top of one of the USC campus parking structures to take a look and gather some data and I’ve been chatting to people at random about it*. (This might also be a sign that I’m procrastinating on some other task… 🙂 ) That white part of the cloud is not smoke, is it? It is actually a cloud of vapour. Like a cumulus cloud you’d normally see in various weather conditions. I’ve heard some chatter about these systems “making their own weather”, and I can see that you could get a lot of localized heat dragging air in from other areas and so creating winds and so forth, but is that also generating this cloud? If so, how? Where is it getting all this moisture from? Is it from the water that is being […] Click to continue reading this post →