Category Archives: science

Double Equivalence

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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 →

Gold and Neutrinos!

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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 →

Reports on the Night

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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 →

CelebritySC is on the Story!

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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 →

Crunch Time

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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 →

Tense Moments

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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 →

Science Comics and Branded Content

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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 →

Scribbling about Quantum Gravity

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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 →

Tune In!

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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 →

Lunar Eclipse!

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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 →

Goldilocks Final

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So it is the final exam for my quantum field theory class tomorrow, and today I need to write it and typeset it. I’d given them a choice of exam. They seemed to want a take-home exam, but I warned them that a take-home is probably going to be way more challenging. I’d be thinking up newer, harder material that you can’t just google the results for. An in-class exam has a time limit, which seems to freak people out, but on the other hand (assuming the examiner (me) is a reasonable person – and I think I’ve given them every reason to believe that) it is likely to be written to be solvable in the assigned couple of hours. So there is a much stricter limit to the length or depth of what they’re going to be asked to do. If they’ve really been following along in the class and doing the homework, they should be able to get most of the exam done without breaking a sweat in 3/4 of the time allowed… maybe the last 1/4 of it might need a bit of furrowing of the brow, squinting the right way, scribbling hurriedly here and there, but in the spirit of a challenge, not torture. Even if they don’t get every last part solved, a well-designed exam will give them several opportunities to show off what they’ve learned.

I like setting take-home exams too, but I’ve a soft spot for in-class exams, I’ll admit. As you may have guessed, I loved in-class exams when I was a student. Yeah, I’m weird. This does not mean that I always scored super-well on them, but I enjoyed the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Whale Song – Your Help Needed

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I heard on NPR this morning that there’s a shout out to everyone to help with an interesting scientific project. It is crowd-sourcing in order to achieve certain objectives in science, which is an excellent idea. I wish I could do certain research projects I’m working on in this way – would be fun and quite novel indeed… Crowd-sourcing crowds of processors is maybe the closest I’d get to that. Anyway, it is all about identifying different types of whale song, and as a citizen scientist you’ll […] Click to continue reading this post →

Almost at an End

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I’ve had a fun time over the last few lectures with some more mature topics, pointing the students to things that they will see more (I hope) in the advanced class next semester. We covered the large N Gross-Neveu model in some detail, giving me the opportunity to give a glimpse of several important topics and techniques… at large N the 2 dimensional model’s solution is exact, and it shows important phenomena such as spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, dynamical mass generation for the fermions and dimensional transmutation. These are all important phenomena shared by (the more difficult to study) quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. (See an earlier post about some of these properties and what they are… there’s also a mention of a new general level book that goes into some detail on the physics and the history.)

The other thing I took some time to explore was the diagrammatics of the model, and the interesting patterns that emerge […] Click to continue reading this post →