Photo (by Soren Koch of Hilmer and Koch Photography) is from the report. One of a series.
Yes. I know. I have been totally taken in by the cuteness. See the full article* by Jerry Kofman on ANC News blogs here. But there’s a promise to manage […] Click to continue reading this post
The OPERA experiment has reported that they may have found the source of the timing discrepancy that produced the result that neutrinos moved apparently faster than light. It seems that there was a faulty connection that affected the timing measurements. Here’s a physics world article on the matter, along with a link to a CERN press release. (Note that there are some doubts related more directly to the GPS timing signals they used, which on their own would make for even faster neutrinos, but clearly there’s cause to really doubt their strong claim from back in the Fall and take a step back.)
You’ll recall the huge press storm about it last Fall, accompanied by all the usual hysteria about the establishment (this time, Einstein) being overturned. I blogged about it here, with the noncommittal title “No, Uh-uh, Nope, Nuh-uh”. They’ll be doing more experiments later in the year, as will a number of other groups, in order to solidify the results one way or another. It’s clear that most people have decided the whole business is over, and will turn away from it to other things. Some will be pleased, some annoyed, some confused, and so forth.
My hope is (as I discussed in the article I wrote back then) that this gets as much […] Click to continue reading this post
Gosh, I got a bit swamped there over the last week. Several things took me away from sitting down and doing a blog post, including teaching my class (more on that shortly), working on a film project (more on that longly) and doing my taxes (late this year – bah!) and the usual raft of committee meetings and so forth. But one of them was locking myself away for two days with my computer and a web connection and writing a paper from start to finish with Tameem Albash. We’d more or less completed the bulk of the project over two months ago, with some very interesting results that we’d talk about from time to time to try to understand what was going on, but I held things up, being distracted by several other things (some of which you know about from this blog). We decided two weeks ago that we’d just finish the thing once and for all, and then somehow ten days went by with me not getting to it. Then I decided to close the door and just do it. So from lunchtime on Friday through lunchtime on Sunday I became a recluse (kind of) and I wrote, in turn with Tameem, as we emailed and IMed back and forth, until we had a nice paper entitled “Holographic Studies of Entanglement Entropy in Superconductors”.
It is a project I’ve been hoping to do for a long time, but not all the pieces were on the market until late last year. The entanglement entropy has been a quantity of interest among physicists in various fields for years, especially in the condensed matter and quantum information community, and is regarded […] Click to continue reading this post
Wow. So I’ve been wondering how far behind I might be in my lectures for the General Relativity class. I seemed to spend a bit more time than I remember teaching a recap of how to think about rotations, using it as an operational and mathematical brace upon which to build my review/revisit of Special Relativity. I was definitely convinced that I was a bit behind after two lectures on introducing how to study a little geometry using intrinsic quantities rather than by reference to embedding it inside another geometry (e.g., learning to think about a two-sphere in its own right instead of as the surface of a ball – this prepares you for thinking about a three-sphere, for which the ball would be hard to visualize, or draw), and so forth. All solidly useful material for the students (in this and so many other physics pursuits to come), so I do not regret spending time on it, but I did wonder about where I was in the journey…
Anyway, I got to the statement of the Equivalence Principle yesterday, the foundation of the whole of General Relativity. I was feeling quite pleased that we’re starting on this now, putting to use all the hard work we’ve been doing conceptually so far… and thought I’d do a quick post here on the blog to celebrate that we’ve got there. I thought I’d entitle the post “Equivalence”.
I started typing and then thought I’d see if I’d written anything about it here before. […] Click to continue reading this post
Here are two of the top prize winners in the competition (see earlier posts for the others, and for the full list). The 2nd Prize and 3rd Prize winners are below! Consider watching them in full HD. (Sadly, the 1st Prize winner, Time, (by Kevin Le and Edward Saavedra) uses … Click to continue reading this post
Here are the two films that won honorable mentions in the Science Film Competition. Consider watching them in full HD. I’ll release the others tomorrow… Enjoy! -cvj
Well, it seemed to go well. I rambled too long and unstructuredly in my off-the-cuff speech (and long thank-you list) at the beginning, but nobody seemed to mind so much since the films were the main focus, and people loved the program. I only got two shots of the activities worth sharing since I was occupied with being host and so forth… but there were so many reporters there, and so I expect there’ll be more showing up all over the place. There were about 140 people in attendance, I was told, which is nice to hear.
People seemed to really love the whole idea of the competition and showcase, and really to understand what I am trying to do with this whole program, so that’s heartening. I hope this also translates into lots of interest next year, with even more filmmakers joining in and making films (and faculty being supportive and helping out as matchmakers and so forth).(This is all assuming I find a sponsor to fund the thing.)
Oh! I opened envelopes Oscar-style and gave out the awards. Here are the results:
1st place (and $2500): Time (Kevin Le, Edward Saavedra)
2nd place (and $1500): It’s All in You (Maria Raykova, Andy Su, Jabril Mack, Mara Guevarra, Kayla Carlisle – a freshman team!)
3rd place (and $500): Superluminal Neutrinos in 5 Minutes (Josh Heineman, Nate Fulmer, Michael Powell)
Honourable Mention (and $500): Dance with Newton’s Laws (Linda Jules, Anna Zaferiou)
Honourable Mention (and $500): Yaddda, Yadda, Yada (Kimberly Laux, Simon Wilches Castro, Scott MacDonald, Anna Drubich, Laura Cechanowicz)
(Filmmaker’s roles and the synopses can be found here.)
Then there was a surprise extra prize from Richard Weinberg (Professor in the Division of Animation and Digital Arts). He came up and gave a limited edition print […] Click to continue reading this post
So I learned about a blog called CelebritySC recently, when they got in touch to ask me about the science film competition, and whether they could attend the showcase and cover it as press. (They also asked me some background about it, and posted an interview here.)
They’ve been doing update posts on the whole thing in the days leading up to the event, and I just saw that they’re even making guesses about which films will win prizes! From Anya Lehr’s piece, I’d guess she’s been chatting with the filmmakers to […] Click to continue reading this post
I’m on the bus on the way to campus, it is pouring with rain, the heat is too high on aboard the bus, and I am late. And a bit tired. I was up until 1:00am crunching numbers. The main stage of the judging for the science film competition ended last night and I went into the system to do the data analysis. I’d designed a spreadsheet on which each of the ten judges give a score for each film in eight different categories which I tried to make roughly orthogonal. I set it up so that they could go to an online form (having viewed the films on a private channel on YouTube) and enter the scores, an action which in turn populates the spreadsheet for me. (Google docs rocks!) They could also enter optional comments about each film that could be useful for any discussion that needs to be had. So what I was doing was slicing the database of scores to see if I could get a ranking of the films to take into a face to face meeting with some of my fellow local judges today. Then I wanted to find ways of laying it all out in a way that was easy to read for everyone and in the end this morning I printed out a giant version of the entire spreadsheet on several sheets of 11×17 and glued them together to make a big colour coded foldout for us all to sit around.
The films? I’m delighted with the turnout as it shows the kind of variety of film I’d hoped would be produced. There are eight films, with films that are illustrated explainers on the one hand (with with animation or live action or sometimes both), through drama and narrative, to reflective overviews of a topic on the other, sometimes venturing into art inspired by science ideas.
(Above is a graphic made by Laurie Moore In Dornsife communications from stills of the films.)
This variety makes for a hard task in coming up with the prize winners, since […] Click to continue reading this post
I’ve tried not to be worrying about it, but nevertheless there was a bit of concern today as I logged into the account and looked to see if any films had arrived. I did this a few times between other things like teaching and working on issues to do with another film project, and each time there was nothing. I was confident that there were some films on their way, since various students from the teams who entered the film competition had emailed me about various clarification issues (duration, what does midnight mean exactly, etc.) and so I know that not all of the 19 teams who submitted their application to enter the competition in October were going to be no-shows… but how many would “not all” end up being? This is the issue you get when you set something up, advertise as much as you can, and then sit back and hope that people come. You never know until they do. The same thing happened with the pre-registration phase. I’d been running around doing as much as I could to build awareness since the end of August, but until the very end I did not know if I would get a single entrant. In the end 19 teams (around 90 students) got involved!
So here I am again. There’s no turning back… the splendid theatre is booked for the showcase, the judges have been selected, the upload space is sitting waiting, the […] Click to continue reading this post
Part of the set of photos I took at the Page Museum yesterday. These are upper parts […] Click to continue reading this post
People often point to certain “science comics” as examples when I explain to them what The Project is about. In turn, I explain that while both things have science in them, and both things use sequential art, they’re not really the same. Not everyone gets it, but that’s ok. (If it helps, ask yourself if you would assume that I was writing a bodice-ripper for Mills and Boon or Harlequin if I said I were writing a novel in which there are elements of love, relationships, romance, etc., in it*.) There’s room for more than the “hey kids! science is awesome!” model, as fine a model as it is.
Since the confusion with that genre is so easily made I confess that I find myself reluctant to discuss it much here, lest I compound the confusion. That might be silly. Anyway, as an exception, I thought I’d point to a little collection of comic covers (and an extract from an interior) that the Washington Post has on its Innovations site as a piece about the movement in the fifties to get kids interested in science, through the big popular culture medium of the time – comics!
I wonder how much it worked, as compared to other efforts at the time. Is it even measurable? (For example, I think that the stuff I do in science outreach helps the cause of strengthening science (and its understanding) in […] Click to continue reading this post
So I mentioned that I was doing some more material for the Nova people, via their website. (See here for some earlier material about Multiverses.) They’ve a blog called The Nature of Reality with contributions from many interesting people. Well, now they’re featuring those pencasts I think I told you about in an earlier post.
The pencasts are all about Quantum Gravity, a major research topic in physics. I talk about what it is and why we care about it. I speak and write, scribble and draw and […] Click to continue reading this post
Later today, there’ll be a joint seminar by physicists from ATLAS and CMS, the two experimental halls at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) looking for evidence of the Higgs boson. This will be the first official announcement of the physics seen (or not seen) by the combined results from both independent searches. Neither search has enough data to announce a discovery of anything (as far as I’ve heard) and the combined results would not constitute one either, but people are hoping for at least some nice hints of something suggestive that support each other. We shall see! this is an exciting time, as you’ve read me say before, and so I recommend looking out for what will be announced. Even a negative result (e.g., “we’ve found nothing yet”) […] Click to continue reading this post
For those out here in the West of the continent, there’ll be a lovely lunar eclipse tomorrow morning (I should have mentioned it before but it somehow missed my attention). It will be at its peak about dawn (about 6:00am), and so if you are an early riser, it should be a nice sight to greet you – especially since it is expected to be somewhat red in hue. Of course, look for the moon in the West, near to setting. Since it will be close to the horizon, it will look quite large as well.
The eclipse will actually be visible right across the Pacific too, and into Asia and Eastern Europe, but check local details for the specifics.
There are more details here*. I plan to get up and have a look… maybe we’ll all be watching it together!
Enjoy!
-cvj
*Thanks Shelley! Click to continue reading this post
