Category Archives: science

Looking Back and Forth

By | | , , , , , , , ,
Comments Off on Looking Back and Forth

Somehow after Wednesday I lost track of time, in a sense, in the natural course of having another very busy week. There were several things competing for time, and some of them may be of interest to you. (Left: Some lovely pink gladiolus flowers that have sprung up in my garden.) The Nobel Prizes kept coming, of course, with some very interesting winners announced. In addition to the ones I mentioned already in two earlier posts, I’ve got to find some people among our faculty who’ll be willing to spend 10 to 15 minutes making some informal remarks about the Who/What/Why aspects of the prize at one of two lunches I’ll be hosting in the coming weeks about the Nobel Prize. I’ve mentioned this before. It is an annual event I’ve tried to get going as part of the Dornsife Commons (formerly known as College Commons) series. I’ve locked in Physics and Peace, and want to get people for all the others. This year I know that if I have problems with Chemistry, I can step in if need be, although I’d rather not have to do that – I want to broaden participation, not do everything myself. Look out for those lunches (see here) and come along!

Speaking of doing everything myself, I’ve been continuing the weeks long struggle to get support, interest, and participation for the Science Film Competition I told you about earlier. Having spent a lot of time meeting with many faculty and other parties to build support and understanding, getting lots of faculty to make announcements (one time even coming down from Santa Barbara to campus to give a ten minute announcement in a class at the film school and going up again after!) and so forth – and thanks everyone who has helped! – I decided to amplify my focus on tackling […] Click to continue reading this post →

Quasicrystals!

By | | , , ,
4 Comments

Wow! WOW!

As you can tell, I am very pleased about the 2011 Chemistry Nobel Prize announcement. I’d love to tell you a bit more about why, but I’m supposed to be working on something urgently right mow, and so will try to do so later. The key thing is that I think the discovery of quasicrystals is fantastic and very visual example of how we can dream up a mathematical structure just because it is interesting and beautiful (Penrose tilings, independently discovered by Roger Penrose as the answer to a mathematical puzzle, (see two dimensional version on left) but also showing up in Islamic tiling patterns from much earlier) and then find later that Nature has exploited that same pattern to make something- a new form of matter (the quasicrystals themselves… The subject of today’s prize to Dan Shechtman – image below on right is of a silver and aluminium quasicrystal compound. Both images here are from wikimedia commons.).

I was in love with these things when I was an undergraduate, not long after their discovery, […] Click to continue reading this post →

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics

By | | , , ,
3 Comments

Ok. So who was surprised by this one? My hand is not up… is yours? (That’s a screen shot from the Nobel Prize site to the left. More here. Cheeky of me, but it’s early in the morning and I’ve got to pack, shower, and cycle like mad to the subway to get to my train to Santa Barbara, so time is of the essence.)

I was pretty sure that this would be the prize sometime very soon, although I’ll not say that I knew it would be this year’s for sure. It is well deserved, since this was a genuinely major change in how everyone in the field thinks about the universe, and we’re still trying to get to grips with it today. The acceleration of the universe that they […] Click to continue reading this post →

Breakfast Guy

By | | , , , , , , ,
2 Comments

I’ve no idea who he was, but he made for an interesting subject for several minutes*, sitting eating his breakfast with his (I think) wife. I was staying at a hotel and having breakfast, just North of Santa Barbara. The person I set out wanting to draw (very interesting face) was sitting right opposite me, at the same table as me, looking over regularly, and so it seemed a bad idea to try to sketch him. Also, he turned out to be a physicist also visiting at the KITP for a workshop, and so it could have ended up quite awkward.

It was a pretty good week at the workshop. I had a number of interesting conversations with young people trying out ideas and calculations, who’ve actually read (!) various papers of mine, and so had questions and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Science Film Connections

By | | , , , , ,
1 Comment

So journalist Pamela Johnson (no relation!) did a nice article last week about the science+film competition I mentioned to you (see also here). It is entitled “It Could Happen One Night”, and you can take a look at it here.

If you’re a student at USC and thinking that you can’t do this because you don’t know about science, or you don’t know about film… don’t give up! You might just need help to figure out how to get in contact with students who also want to get involved in making a film and want to learn more about one side or another (so you’re in the […] Click to continue reading this post →

No. Uh-uh. Nope. Nuh-Uh.

By | | , ,
23 Comments

I’ve received any number of emails from excited friends pointing me to articles in the news saying that particles have been discovered moving faster than the speed of light. Thanks everyone! My initial gut-response to the whole thing has been as given in the title of this post. My measured, scientist-response has been “this is extremely unlikely”. You see, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to me at all, and I expect that the scientists involved will at some point find an error, or other scientists will fail to reproduce the experiment. But, let’s see what happens. The great thing about science is that it is not about what people believe. It is about demonstrating phenomena with reliable, repeatable experiments. (The experiments were done by the OPERA collaboration, and their preliminary paper is here. I don’t need to point to the news articles since every news outlet has a bit on it.)

It’s funny, I’ve recently been writing about this in a part of the graphic novel. Somehow I think that the speed of light is presented too much as a speed limit in popular discourse, and so people naturally keep thinking that there’s some way of violating the law, like you can on the highway, or that some things are not subject to that law, like motorcycle cops, or people in a hurry to get home to watch Madmen, etc… I don’t expect this to be terribly clear in the short time I have to type this between this and that, but I think things are better thought of not in terms of a speed limit, but rather in terms of the fact that it all has to do with the meaning of what space and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Food

By | | , , , ,
Comments Off on Categorically Not! – Food

The new season of Categorically Not! gatherings started last Sunday night. It went very well. You may recall that it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. 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. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones.

This one was about food, and had musings on food and bringing people together at New York’s Cornelia Street Cafe, by the founder Robin Hirsch. He talked about the history of the place, read some extract from his writings about it, and also described the beginnings of the “Entertaining Science” series that got going when K C Cole, Roald Hoffman, and Oliver Sacks did a performance there many years ago. The Categorically Not! series, now five years or so in age, was a spiritual outgrowth of that series, and so it was great to see Robin speak at it. He was very pleasant and interesting to talk to before and after the event too. (I did a quick, rough, sketch during his 20 minute segment – with some tidying up later – and have included it for you to see. Click for slightly larger view.)

Robin was followed by Amy Rowat, of UCLA. Amy gave us a nice overview of what’s going on in her lab. She’s a physicist, and spends a lot of her time looking at food through that lens. The concerns she described were largely ones of structural, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Journeying

By | | , , , ,
5 Comments

It is 8:20am, and only now is the sun appearing from behind the mist that seemed to cover the world since I got up this morning at 6:00am and since I boarded the Amtrak train at 7:30am, bound for Santa Barbara. We’ve arrived at beautiful downtown Northridge, and have another two hours and a half to go. I’ve got my bike folded neatly in the luggage rack above me (I tried not to look too smug when passing two cyclists struggling a bit to find room for their giant bikes in the space remaining to them), have had my second slice of multigrain bread smeared with whipped cream cheese and homemade fig jam (I made a batch a few weeks ago) and an sipping coffee while catching up on various things, such as telling you what I am doing. I think I’ll stop writing for the blog now, getting back to thinking about some physics I want to put into a new paper, looking out the window at the landscape as it opens up more (we’ll be running through farmland, and then along the seaside soon!), and letting my mind drift and be open to those expansive kinds of thoughts that typically come in when I am sitting on a train watching the world go by. I don’t get that with driving up here, since so much it put into driving safely and so forth, one’s mind is never fully free. I love train travel, and I love this journey, even though I know there’s no good reason why in the 21st Century in the USA it should take three hours. (Three and a half on the return – I mean, really).

Ok… back to stuff.

Oh, wait – Why am I going to Santa Barbara, you ask? Is it another “jump on the train and see where I end up” sort of day? (See an earlier post.) No, I’m going up there (actually my stop is Goleta) to spend a bit of the week at[…] Click to continue reading this post →

That Was the Week that Was

By | | , , , , , ,
1 Comment

I might be losing my stamina, or have simply taken on more than I usually do, but it sure seems more tiring and hectic than it usually does this early in the semester.

It was a busy week, but I managed to get a few things done here and there that seem worthwhile, so I count my blessings, as they say. (Or used to say – maybe that’s somehow too loaded a phrase to use now? Not sure.)

To attempt to wind down yesterday after a tightly wound day and found myself walking with large sketchbook in hand in the warm evening sunlight to a studio to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Spin

By | | , ,
12 Comments

This week marks a landmark in the class (Introduction to Quantum Field Theory) since it focuses on the seminal work of one my heroes, Paul Dirac, who quietly went about his business of puzzling over the issue of how to find an equation that describes the properties of electrons (particles of spin one-half), and in finding what is now called the Dirac equation (see snapshot from my notes on right), uncovered a hugely rich and bright cornerstone of fundamental physics. It is famously described as a sort of square root of the relativistic wave equation known at the time – the Klein-Gordon equation – and in that way of thinking you quickly arrive at the idea of anti-particles (as did Dirac), since taking a square root leads to two solutions (both +2 and -2 square to give you 4). One solution turned out to be the electron, and the other leads (by an appropriate path of reasoning) to its anti-particle, the positron*.

Besides leading inevitably to anti-particles, the equation (which Dirac pursued in […] Click to continue reading this post →

Reaching Out

By | | , , , , ,
1 Comment

So I’ve been spending a huge amount of time trying to generate awareness among the students and faculty about the newly launched film competition. I don’t know how much traction I’m getting, but we shall see. Lots of poster posting, and giving packets of postcards to colleagues in College departments such as Physics, Chemistry, and the Writing Program, and over in Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, and of course the Cinematic Arts School. I need to figure out a way of getting a foothold over in the various areas of the Keck School of Medicine, on the other campus… It’s open to all students at USC, but I need to make sure I target certain concentrations to maximize chances of getting interested students’ attention.

On Monday I did an interview with a student reporter for the Daily Trojan and that appeared this morning. (Have a read.) I’m a bit embarrassed that they missed out mentioning my colleague and collaborator Anna Krylov, but the main thing is that more people will learn about the initiative though the article. It was fun talking to Jasmine, the reporter. The key thing, for me, is that the collaborative aspect of all of this is forefront, since that’s the most important aspect. As I said in an email to another reporter this morning (which may or may not result in an article, we shall see): […] Click to continue reading this post →

From C to Zee

By | | , ,
8 Comments

End of the first week of semester. I’m already tired, I must confess. I think it is mostly a combination of running around doing various things for various projects including another big shoot this week for the science documentary series, and prepping all the publicity for the science film competition, which is now rolling along and gathering momentum, and through it all… the heat. It is just so very hot, and not using air conditioning much and walking and cycling in it to boot does mean that I’m tiring out a bit more. I’ve been waking up with those low level headaches from time to time that signal that I’ve not been cool enough during my sleep, despite having several windows open for throughput. Might have to give up and cool things down a bit with the air conditioning on a thermostat setting of some sort.

So through all that, (and not counting other things like steady progress with a research project, and the drawing here and there that I’ve told you about… oh! and the garden) I’ve also been teaching a course. It is on introductory quantum field […] Click to continue reading this post →

Announcing: Science Films USC!

By | | , , , , , ,
5 Comments

Ok, so here is the announcement I promised last week. Science Films USC! It is a film-making competition! The first of its kind at USC, I think. Right now, all there is to say is that we welcome teams of USC students from Cinematic Arts, Communications, Science, Engineering, and beyond, to enter the competition. They will present a short film that explains and/or illustrates a scientific concept, principle, or issue, for a wide non-expert audience. The first prize will be $2500. Yes, we are giving a serious prize for what we hope will be a serious competition with some wonderful entries. We’ll have a film festival in January, some prize-giving, and maybe some interesting people connected with the film world at the award ceremony. Of course, we’ll have it early in the award season, in January.

You can learn more at sciencefilms.usc.edu and for those of you who can’t bear to be away from facebook for long, also at facebook.com/sciencefilmsusc.

By August 31st, we will announce the details of the eligibility requirements, rules, and opportunities for those who are not well-resourced to get a small grant to help out with developing their film.

Teams, said I? Yes. As you know from many of my posts here and the work I’ve done in the past, I think that the future of better presentations of science in the media and entertainment, etc, is to get communicators and scientists working together and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Crazy Week…

By | | , , , ,
1 Comment

Feels like a crazy week so far. Not sure why. I’m sort of recovering from a bamboozling amount of sunlight yesterday, so maybe I’m a bit addled in the head, compromising perspective. I was up in the brown hills somewhat North of LA on an old disused airstrip, shooting a very interesting segment for a TV show. I’ll tell you more later, but it involved being in the unforgivingly intense sunlight from 10:00am to 6:00pm… with only my hat to protect me between takes… long, sunbaked, takes. I’ll tell you more a bit later. It was very worthwhile. The whole thing is what can definitely be thought of as a great “teaching moment” which will be lovingly done in HD, and well-edited and so forth. More later.

Had to find some time today to email and chat with a couple of other writer directors for two other TV episodes that will appear. I was trying to get an idea of what science story they are trying to tell and help shape the kinds of questions and answers we might be able to explore in the (minor) contribution I’ll make to their shows. Tomorrow morning I will have to make myself presentable again in order to discuss the material on camera… one a 3D HD show, the other just garden variety HD. We’ll shoot until well after lunch, and then hopefully I can get back to other projects for the rest of the day once that has done. I’m behind on a number of things.

I’m supposed to be able to point you to the websites where we announce the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Multiverse Musings

By | | , , , , ,
12 Comments

As you may know already there’ll be a new NOVA series on PBS in the Fall, based on one of Brian Greene’s books, The Fabric of the Cosmos. Last Fall I did some a shoot with them for my role in it (I’ve no idea how much they will use), and I learned a short while ago that they’ll be using some of it on the NOVA website too. They extracted some parts of the on-camera interview segments I did concerning the idea of multiple universes and transcribed them into something you can read online. Have a look here. I touch on the idea in a fragmented way, mostly being led by the questions I was asked, but it’s a fun topic to chat about, and may lead you in interesting directions should you wish to learn more, so have a look.

A word on the picture they are using (er…see above left). It seems to be one that the […] Click to continue reading this post →