Category Archives: science

Becoming Engaged…

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It turns out that a really great way of passing the time when listening to someone give a talk is to do some sketch practice. [… wait, what? The post title? Oh! No, no, don’t be silly. Ok., let me continue …] If the subject matter is right, it’s a good thing to do while you focus on what’s being said. This last couple of days I’ve been in Aspen, Colorado, and I’m starting out my visit here with a three day conference entitled “Becoming Engaged: Initiatives That Can Change Science Education”. You can see more about it on a dedicated website hosted by ICAM. One of the people behind it is David Pines, and we’ve had many conversations about science outreach and science education over the years, and so he invited me to participate. I’m supposed to be here at Aspen for my visit to the Aspen Center for Physics, and so I’m only partially attending, opting to to listen to some talks, and take part in some discussions… then going back over to the center to hear some LHC and Higgs chatter on the LHC workshop that is starting up this week.

There are a lot of interesting people talking about science education, and science outreach, many describing their various approaches and projects in short talks and presentations. (I will tell you about some of them in future posts.) It is great to meet several people who are passionate about outreach too, and see what others are up to and share ideas… so this is a valuable time. Hopefully, some action ideas will come of this meeting that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Working Group

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It wasn’t all lecture halls, discussion rooms, and cafeterias for the workshop. The organizers arranged for a boat tour last week, and we all sat on one of those splendid long, wide and low tour boats that you often see on the canals in Amsterdam. It was nicely equipped with a bottle of wine at each table, and the crew members handed us each a glass of sparkling wine as we embarked. Very nice. There was a lot of fun chatter from each table for the whole trip around the canals (so much so that they stopped the attempts to inform us over the PA system about some of the sights we were seeing, since the sound was drowned out by the conversations), covering (from what I could hear) a wide range of topics from well beyond physics to matters concerning topics presented in the workshop.

Sometimes pads of paper and pens appeared. Above is a group (David Tong, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Valerie Weiss on Women, Science, and Film

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You’ll recall me mentioning filmmaker Valerie Weiss from earlier posts this year about her debut feature film “Losing Control”. Well, she wrote a guest post* for the website Women and Hollywood this week. It was about a recent film made for the European Commission to encourage girls to go into science. Apparently it was awful. (I’d heard about it from someone else too, but did not get to see it.) Valerie shares some thoughts […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Bridge

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The workshop has been fantastic, overall. In between discussions, the talks, and some thinking about my own projects, I’ve had some time to wander a bit, and look around. Yesterday after lunch I wandered a bit and then found myself settling down and doing a sketch of a bridge at a junction with lots to see. The Amstel is joined by Prinsengracht canal here, and it was fun to sit a while and put down some pencil lines, followed by firmer ink lines. I pulled the result into the iPad and splashed on some colour for good measure.

Having finished the paper last week, it has been fun to field questions about it from various people, as well as think at a more leisurely pace about the next […] Click to continue reading this post →

Slow Writing

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Well, the workshop is going well. I had to miss a talk this morning in order to carry on with this writing of a paper I was doing. Basically, we’re over due in producing our submission to a special volume of some publication or other that is going to be all about magnetic fields and models of strongly coupled matter… As you may have gathered by now, I’ve dabbled in magnetic fields for some several years by now, so it was natural to be asked. My collaborator in a lot of these dabblings, Tameem Albash, and a student, Scott MacDonald, and I have been working on a suitable project for a while, and due to my travels and entanglements with a previous project, I’ve made us all a bit late.

The last few days have been difficult for writing. I’d forgotten […] Click to continue reading this post →

Happy Higgs Day?

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Dont forget that today there will be big announcements of the latest results from the LHC about the search for the Higgs…(and some of us are hoping for news about what might be the beginning of the search for what lies beyond…)

There are so many live blogs, so follow a few… Like Resonances… for an expert view, Matt Strassler, for another expert view, or Quantum Diaries, for a non-expert view.

Exciting!!

(update… Looks like it is a strong enough set of results, statistically, to call the Higgs discovered… Hurrah! And with possible hints of new physics too? Excellent….)

Further update… A CERN press release is to be found here. Also, looks like any deviation from the standard model Higgs, at least for the decay channels examined so far, is very small… So there’s a lot left to do and understand…

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Amsterdam!

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20120703-164422.jpgAmsterdam! I’m here for a workshop for a while. It is on string theory – many aspects – and so the mix of people is a good one overall, with conversations ranging from high energy physics, the LHC (including the Higgs announcement at CERN expected tomorrow) and black holes all the way over to condensed matter and various kinds of exotic physics one can do in the laboratory in that context. It should be an excellent time here… It is good to be back in the city after over a decade, and to catch up with a number of friends and colleagues in the field. I also want to properly explore the city this time, not having done that much exploration last time. (Photo above is a snap taken of the lovely moon that came out last night, with the Amstel and accompanying reflections and so forth… Was pretty to see.)

I’ve been trying to read some notes in preparation for working on a draft of a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Voice of God

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With the Aspen Center for Physics film almost completed (see several earlier posts, e.g. here, here, and here), various things get set in stone once and for all, so that other things can be built on top of them. At some point, I had to be certain of the final form of the voice over, so that Dave (the editor) can lay it in and time various transitions around it. This was done on Friday along with a huge rewrite of the whole film script, and lots of work on picking b-roll footage and other material to illustrate the film and create atmosphere. Once my co-producer/director Bob had glanced at it and made some helpful remarks (always good to have more eyeballs to spot any mistakes that could get frozen in) I was ready for Monday’s exercise – recording the final voice work. No turning back, no second chances, since we need to deliver the film this week.

While I’ve directed a bit before, I’ve not ever had the chance to direct a hugely experienced star actor, so this was going to be a blast! A while back, over food and drink at a party, my friend Harry Lennix (who loves contemporary physics – that’s in fact why we met, years ago) had generously agreed to do the voice narration for this project, and I was very pleased since it was his voice I had in mind since late August […] Click to continue reading this post →

Peek Over My Shoulder

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Been splitting my time between being a physicist and being a filmmaker making a film about physicists. It has been an interesting time. Recall from earlier posts (see e.g. here and here) that I am working on getting a film made for the Aspen Center for physics in celebration of its 50th Anniversary. I’ve got rather sucked into the process – a lot more than I intended – and so find myself putting together the script that will guide the editor in cutting the film. This means that I’m reviewing acres of footage of interviews and picking out some great quotes from my awesome cast of interviewees. You might recognize some of them (feel free to try to name them, and their field…).

What you’re seeing in the picture is a screenshot of some of the windows I have open […] Click to continue reading this post →

Don’t Forget the Transit of Venus!

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Hot on the heels of the annular eclipse of a few weeks ago, we’ve another giant body passing in front of the sun tomorrow. Venus! This time the giant body (roughly the same size as the earth…just a bit smaller) is much further away from us, and so is dwarfed by the sun. It’ll be a tiny dot on the disc of the sun that takes several hours to pass across. This’ll give you plenty of time to look. (In the US, for example, it’ll start at about 6:06pm EST and about 3:06pm PST…) You won’t get another chance (at least, not from earth…) until 2117, so have a go!

In fact, you’ll be doing something that is vital for modern astronomy right now – observing the effects of a planet on the light of its parent star as seen from afar. This is the principal method for detecting planets moving around distant stars, the “extra-solar” planets you hear so much about in the news from time to time. Here, we’re seeing it happening for a familiar planet around a familiar star. Although both objects are quite familiar, this transit is still worthwhile to study, since it helps planet hunters learn more about how such processes can help deduce things about the planet doing the transit. So study it many will, I’m sure.

You can just look at it for fun, but remember to be careful. Do not look directly at […] Click to continue reading this post →

Containment Cube

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No, not some geometrical artifact of immense power… It is the containment for my next batch of compost. Click for a larger view. I made it last year out of PVC pipes and chicken wire, and it was a huge success (see recent posts with pictures of the produce that has been appearing from that compost batch….) with one design flaw: It was a bit high so that digging in it to turn the forming compost over and so forth was tough on the back – I put my back out for days one time. So I’ve cut it down to a smaller height and now it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Film in Progress…

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This was an incredibly busy visit, but worthwhile. We pulled 12+ hour days in getting everything needed for the film (about the Aspen Center for Physics), with lots of backup, and oodles of great footage. So much that I fear we have so much great material we can make five completely different short films instead of the one that is supposed to be delivered. It is going to be tough. I’m so excited about some of the things that we’ve shot. A number of ideas I had for the arc of the film, the feel and tone, and the opening moments, look to be falling together almost _exactly_ as I envisioned them months ago.

Ouf excellent DP, Dave Gaw, (an accomplished filmmaker in his own right) seems to almost immediately get what I’m trying to do when I explain something I’ve visualized, or when I draw it, and so the shots work out quite nicely, and sometimes he’s gone and filmed some sequences that look very much like ones I’d been imagining, sometimes without us even having had a discussion about it! It has been a great collaboration among the three of us – Dave, Bob Melisso (my co-Producer/Director), and myself – as we exchange ideas about how to best implement something or other to make it tell part of the story…

Anyway, while preparing for getting some nice outdoor shots of physicists doing […] Click to continue reading this post →