Category Archives: science and society

Fair Play

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Yesterday saw my annual stint of judging at the California State Science Fair. Somehow it managed to sneak up on me this year, and so I did not get to do what I planned to do, which is encourage one or two scientist/engineer friends of mine in the area to sign up to get involved, since it is such fun and quite rewarding (ahem: Michelle P., Amy M., mark your calendars for next year! I’m going to come a-calling…) See earlier posts (e.g., here, here) for science fair descriptions, and the fair’s own site with lots of photos each year is here.

(Ok, there’s the whole getting up in time to arrive there by 7:00am or so. That bit is less than good, perhaps.) I arrived a bit later than 7:00, due to some breakfast procrastination that science_center_parkingI somehow sometimes manage to do even when I wake up with plenty of time (a whole hour this time) to get ready. My plan to simply set out by 6:10am and pleasantly walk/bike and bus down (my usual mode) was thwarted by this and so I had to take a somewhat quicker mode of transport, launching out of the batcave in a hurry at 6:50am! By 7:15am the parents and students in their SUVs and minivans were arriving at the California Science Center in droves, and so this meant that parking was a bit more of a challenge that it would have been 15 minutes earlier. But as you can perhaps see on the right (click for larger view), it all worked out in the end… ( 🙂 )

Here’s a shot of the annual morning briefing of the volunteer judges (all well fed, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXVIII – Angels, Demons, and Antimatter

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So, apparently there is physics in the upcoming huge film Angels and Demons (and presumably the book). Lots of it. I did not know that until recently. So imagine my surprise a few months ago when I got a message from a producer (Natalie Artin of Prometheus Pictures) of a documentary about it, asking if I’d like to contribute, talking about aspects of the physics.

They wanted me to talk about anti-matter. This is as a result of finding a blog post of mine over on Correlations, entitled “Not Science Fiction”, which starts:

Anti-matter. Seeing the previous word, you immediately glance back at the title, right? Strangely, it has been 80 years since the discovery of anti-matter, and we use it routinely in our technology. Nevertheless, anti-matter is still thought of as something from science fiction (and mostly bad science fiction at that).

dirac_equation It all goes back to one of my favourite theoretical physicists, Paul Dirac, and you might like how he found it (roughly). He essentially did it by […]

I agreed to talk, if I could focus on one of the main issues of my post: That anti-matter is not weird stuff of science fiction, but actual routine science…. so routine that it is used commonly in medical diagnosis, for example. The “P” in PET scans stands for “positron”. The positron is the anti-electron. (The “E” does not […] Click to continue reading this post →

Yesterday at JPL

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jpl_open_house_2009_1I had a lot of fun at this year’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) open house. I’m happy to report that there were, once again, lots of people wandering around looking at the displays and demonstrations, asking questions, hanging out, and so forth, and an impressive turnout of JPL staff answering questions and being very enthusiastic about the science (something which is easy to do because it’s such an excellent topic!). I’ve made a video for you that is coming up at the end of this post. (Click on stills for larger views.)

jpl_open_house_2009_5 jpl_open_house_2009_6

There was the usual huge emphasis on planetary exploration with rovers and robots and so forth – this seems to capture the imagination of everyone, so why not? – but I was more than a little surprised to find virtually no showing for the Planck mission. There was one poster somewhere, but no booth, no model, no description of the truly amazing science that it will do in unlocking more about the origins of the entire […] Click to continue reading this post →

Fun at the Museum Tonight!

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dj_natural_history
Last month’s First Friday was just great! I think I finally understand where LA goes on a Friday night. The Natural History Museum was full of people wandering around looking at the exhibits, going on the tours and listening to the talks (all were at capacity!) and just hanging out listening to the musicians or the DJs. Reminds me a lot of that Josh Ritter event I went to a while back, but so much more extensive, since […] Click to continue reading this post →

Making Movies, 2

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still_from_shoot_5_smallReally, I suppose this should be entitled “Making Movies, 1”, but I think that the earlier post “Call Me Cecil…” is morally the post of that title. Several days of insanity later (from worrying more about insurance, to locking in locations, worrying we would not get the HD cameras in time, trying to find a PA for the shoot, negotiating with various parties here and there about various things – in between the usual activities of physics professoring), the first big shoot day came. That was yesterday.

It was a day with record (for the date) heat (90+, in F), which was not helpful, but overall it was fun. On Thursday, in my location scout mode, I was to be found popping over once every hour or so to a particular location on campus and taking a snapshot. Why? I wanted to see where the sun would be at what time, so that we could figure out exactly when we could use the location, and for what shots. The sun […] Click to continue reading this post →

The University of Celebrity

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Marina Hyde at the Guardian wrote a hilarious article on the rise of celebrity spokespeople on matters of science and health, focusing on the claims of Madonna, Stella McCartney and Gwyneth Paltrow, concerning subjects such the healing powers of “energy injected” Kabbalah water, nuclear waste, “chemical-free” food and “biological foods (whatever those terms mean), among other things.

I recommend having a read of it, (here) as it is an amusing distraction. I’m a bit puzzled, however as to why she does not mention the efforts of their esteemed […] Click to continue reading this post →

Pit Visit

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I promised a report on last week’s College Commons trip to the Page Museum at the Tar Pits, here in Los Angeles. It was an excellent trip. The usual thing I do for blogging these things is, some time later, as time allows, I sit down and do a sort of brain-dump. I tried to do something different this time, and walk on the tour with my Palm Tungsten (yes, really really old technology, I know) and simply write a sort of narrative into it as I went along. Then I combined the uploaded file with the images I took as I went along, and supplemented with some extra sentences here and there. The overall effect should be a sketchier description of the event than I usually do, which may or may not be an improvement given that everybody seems to skim everything these days anyway. (Click on the photos for larger views.) So, here goes:

tar_pits_trip And so it begins. And it begins well – after a name tag is given out, upon check in for the bus, we are given a little brown paper bag of snacks. Hurrah!

3:39 and we’re off! (We run by the excavations for the Expo line and since it is an elevated bus, I get a nice view of what’s going on for quite a way. Wish I’d had the camera out to make a video for you.)

My colleague David Bottjer, a paleontologist, gives a little run down of the history of the region (both social and paleontological) as we go north on La Brea (appropriately – they are the La Brea Tar Pits… Or given that La Brea means The Tar, they are The Tar Tar Pits…)

4:05 We’re here! Somehow, the little bag of goodies is all empty already. Except for […] Click to continue reading this post →

100 Hours!

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telescopeThis weekend, you might like to participate in the 100 Hours of Astronomy events going on all over the world. Recall that it is the International Year of Astronomy, and that there are lots of things going to celebrate the 400 years of the Astronomy era launched by Galileo’s use of the telescope for his landmark Astronomical observations. There are all kinds of exciting events, from local astronomers setting up telescopes in your neighbourhood for all to use, to things involving some of the great professional telescopes around the world live webcasting and even… twittering. From the main page of the organizers:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Periodically Fun!

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This is just great. I don’t know what it is good for, except amusement and nostalgia, but that’s a good portion of the balance sheet of the good things in life, so that’s good enough for me. It is a periodic table of elements that you can click on to find a selection of early comic book references to it. It is by some of my old neighbours – members of the Chemistry department at the University of Kentucky (F. James Holler and John P.Selegue) – and I’ve no idea how old this project is (1996, perhaps?), but it’s new to me. Click on the table to go to their site:

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[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Pi Day!

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piIt is Pi Day today! (It is also Einstein’s birthday, and Talk Like A Physicist Day. See below.) To remind you about Pi Day, from Wikipedia we have:

Pi Minute is also sometimes celebrated on March 14 at 1:59 p.m. If ? is truncated to seven decimal places, it becomes 3.1415926, making March 14 at 1:59:26 p.m., Pi Second (or sometimes March 14, 1592 at 6:53:58 a.m.).

The first Pi Day celebration was held at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988, with staff and public marching around one of its circular spaces, and then consuming fruit pies; the museum has since added pizza pies to its Pi Day menu.[1] The founder of Pi Day was Larry Shaw,[2] a now retired physicist at the Exploratorium who still helps out with the celebrations.

This year it is officially National Pi day too, according to the U.S. Congress!

Be sure to do some pi-ous things, ok? (Making pies, walking in circles at 1:59 pm (at […] Click to continue reading this post →

It’s Not A Superhero Movie, II

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watchmen smiley

Well, strangely, I was able to walk right into the Vista (one of my favourite movie palaces) and go to my favourite seat on Friday evening to see Watchmen, without even waiting in line. So I’m able to report on this rather sooner than I thought. (Or at least I was, but Friday night saw me busy, and Saturday night I was all prepared to do so after my long hike in the rorschach costumeSan Gabriels, but I feel asleep on the sofa still in my hiking gear and did not wake up until 6:00am.) So here we are. I’m happy to report that the owner or manager guy at the Vista, who wears a costume whenever a film of this genre shows, did not disappoint. There he is on the right in his Rorschach outfit. (Click for larger view.) Quite splendid.

This film is, on the surface, partly about my people (My people? Take your pick about what you think I mean here: (a) Physicists? (b) Superheroes? (c) Physicists who like to wear capes? (d) Physicists who like to go around in the nude and are sometimes blue?) and so of course I had to go along and see and report, but more urgently I have to report because I am quite sure that most film reviewers will not be able to see past the capes and tights. Having seen a few reviews since I’ve gone, I’m not wrong so far. I get to use the above title for the post, as I did last year for The Dark Knight, because the capes and tights are a red herring.

I’ll fold the rest of this away for those who don’t want to read about the film before seeing it first, so click to read on if on the front page or on a feed.

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Happy 200th Birthday, Darwin!

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Well, as you’ve read here and elsewhere, this is a big year for (among other things) Darwin celebration. There are all sorts of wonderful essays, documentaries, discussions, lectures and so forth all around. Be sure to look at some of this work, and get involved. In addition to it being the 150th anniversary of the release of the Origin of Species, it is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday year, and the actual birthday date is today, the 12th February. […] Click to continue reading this post →