Category Archives: science

Spin

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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

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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

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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!

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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…

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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

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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 →

Science Film Logo

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So, here’s yet another project I’ve been working on. I forgot to tell you about it. After the success of the short films I produced and directed (etc) two Summers ago (remember? Shine a Light and Laser), the next step was to get more people involved in the film-making, to learn more about how it is done, and what is involved, both on the science side and the film-making side. Specifically, I want students from both sides of the divide (science, and film, journalism, communications, etc) to have to work with each other to learn more about communicating science.

So, Anna Krylov (Chemistry dept., and a collaborator on an NSF grant) and I wrote a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Heretic…?

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We had a really interesting discussion of the quantum physics of de Sitter spacetime yesterday here in Aspen, starting with a review of the behaviour of scalar fields in such a background, led by Don Marolf, and then, after lunch, an open-ended discussion led by Steve Shenker. This is all quite difficult, and is of course quite relevant, since a piece of de Sitter is relevant to discussions of inflation, which seems (from cosmological observations) to have been a dominant phase of the very early universe. As the most symmetric space with positive cosmological constant, de Sitter may also be relevant to the universe today, since dark energy (first recognized after 1998’s observations of the universe’s accelerating expansion) may well accounted for by a positive cosmological constant.

So we need to understand this type of spacetime really well… and it seems that we don’t. Now there’ve been a lot of people looking at all this and doing really excellent work, and they understand various issues really well – I am not one of them, as I’ve not worked on this in any detail as yet. Do look at the papers of Marolf, and of Shenker, and collaborators, and references therein, and catch up with what’s been going on in your own way. For what it is worth, the sense that I get is that we’re trying to solve very difficult issues of how to interpret various quantum features of the spacetime and getting a lot of puzzles by trying to make it look a lot like things we’ve done before.

Now, we may solve all these puzzles…. but my current take on this all is that we’re […] Click to continue reading this post →

On Physics, Spiritualism, Fiction, and Non-Fiction

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On Monday evening I chatted with Deborah Cloyed, author of the recently released novel “The Summer We Came to Life”, which I finished reading over the weekend. The conversation was recorded for Rare Bird Literature’s Rare Bird Radio site, and so you can listen. (Embed at the end of this post.) We talked about her use of various physics ideas (Copenhagen and Many Worlds quantum mechanics interpretations, parallel worlds) in her skillfully crafted novel about four friends, loss, the afterlife, and friendship.

At this point, some of you are yelling “Run, run for your life, Mr. Scientist!”. But No. No, no, no. I think that’s a mistake. Deborah is, first of all, writing a novel, not trying to push some self-help book that cherry picks a few ideas from science, conflates them with some stuff people want to hear, and trying to make a buck out of it. Second of all, she really loves the science, and seems to have read a lot about the subject, unusually widely. You don’t ignore someone who really cares about the subject and wants to know more, especially when they want to include it in the work they are producing. So when we were introduced a while back, she thought it would be fun and interesting to have a conversation about various things, and I agreed. I got the chance to comment (at her request) about what I thought she was doing with the science, and how the final result worked, I got to ask her what she thought of it, and from there we talked about lots of related topics, including the whole idea of mixing […] Click to continue reading this post →

Living in Interesting Times

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As far as particle physics and big questions about how the universe works, we are living in very interesting times, I’m happy to say. We’ve all been waiting for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over two decades, and now it turns out (I’ve been hearing from a number of people in various conversations here at the center) that the machine is running really well – impressively so. That alone is great, but an interesting thing is that we are almost certainly going to know something significant before the end of the current scientific run next year, maybe even by the end of 2011!

Recall (see posts like this one) that the primary goal is to understand the physics responsible for the Higgs mechanism – the physics that gave mass to those elementary particles that have mass. The particle that does this is called the Higgs particle, and exactly how Nature implements the Higgs mechanism is what we hope to learn. There’s sort of a vanilla version of the story, that fits into the Standard Model of particle physics without any further adornment than just doing the basic job. Then there are more complicated versions of the story, where, in some cases, the Higgs comes as part of a bigger physics story that leads the way to what’s generally called Beyond the Standard Model Physics. As the machine searches toward higher and higher energy that probes higher and higher mass, the simplest possibilities will begin to fall by the wayside pretty soon if nothing is seen. An exciting thing is that it seems that whether or not we have the Standard Model Higgs might be known soon.

Now that’s exciting enough, but there’s more. Actually, a lot of people, for various […] Click to continue reading this post →

Goodbye Ken

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I’m sad to say that Ken J. Barnes died recently. My sympathies and wishes of comfort go to Jacky and the family.

There are many theoretical high energy physicists who will tell you of their wonderful time as students in the theory group in Southampton, England. I’m one of them. I think a huge component of that is due to Ken. He founded the group, nurtured it, and led it for many years. As a nearly completing undergraduate who was somewhat certain about what I wanted, after a lot of fastidious researching of various options, I picked the Southampton group very carefully back then. I had it set in my mind that I wanted to do research in string theory, and was looking for a group that felt dynamic and energetic, and while I got offers from some good places (including the excellent group at Durham which I was later to join as a faculty member 11 years later), there was a spark that I felt when I visited Southampton’s group, the group Ken founded way back in the early ’70’s.

The group was more than just Ken, of course, but the fact that such great faculwho and staff were there, and doing great work, was part of his building process. Tim Morris, who was to be my advisor, and who was doing interesting things in string theory, was one such person who impressed me greatly. I was so glad I went there, from the moment I first arrived, and I loved those days so dearly.

It all began (as many will tell you) with Ken’s “pep talk” where he would tell the prospective students who were visiting the group about the possibly crazy decision they were making (to go into a highly technical field with few employment prospects in academia)… essentially reminding us that we’d better be doing it for the love of the subject. I think that we all were in awe of him, and perhaps a little afraid early on, but later […] Click to continue reading this post →

Workin’

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It was a quiet and good day today on the work front, here in Aspen. I started at the Center relatively early (having risen at about 7:00am today – a bit later than I have been) and the plan was definitely a vastly-mostly-physics day, digging into some of the things I’ve been puzzling over, and having some conversations with one or two people about their projects. The first order of the day, once arriving, was to turn off my phone and go dark on IM, and turn off my email… The plan for such days is to only check messages and so forth at lunchtime, and then much later in the afternoon, which is rather helpful, I find. (In fact, I ignore the phone for the entire day until the evening…)

I won’t give you a tedious blow by blow of my day, since it was mostly a mixture of sitting and reading or staring into space (along with some scribbling here and there), and so forth. I also went for some walks, down by the Aspen Institute (where there’s currently the interesting “Brainstorm Tech” conference sponsored by Fortune magazine going on) and of course over to the Music tent, where there were lots of people in the morning, since the Music Festival orchestra (and a lot of very young pianists – maybe from the piano competition? – taking turns) were rehearsing for tonight’s concert. I sent an email or two, I’ll admit, but they were specifically concerning a project I’m working on with a colleague back in LA, and so they count as ok.

I went for a walk to think and eventually returned to the tent after one or two […] Click to continue reading this post →

Mountainous

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As you might guess from the flower to the right, I’m presently not in California, but Colorado. In fact I’m in Aspen, a place to which, you might have gathered from previous years’ blogging, I come to work for a while in the Summer. The Aspen Center for Physics is here, as well as some great mountain trails, river walks, bike trails*, several other organizations of interest, festivals, and of course, some good cafes. So I’m pretty well set up in terms of things I need to think and work on various projects.

The flower is the columbine, the state flower, and I encountered them (and a host of other lovely flowers of many types) on Saturday on my first hike since properly being acclimatised to the altitude and so forth.

I’ve already had some great conversations at the Center, which included catching up […] Click to continue reading this post →

Thumbnailing

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Been back on The Project a bit more in recent days, mixing it in with various physics thoughts, projects, physics related duties, and so forth. More on some of that later. I’ve been writing some new pieces for the work, and have been flowing nicely at times. I write both in words (scribbling in my notebook in H pencil) and images, this being the point of some of what I’m up to. (See my discussion about the nature and intent of the whole business in earlier posts collected here.) So I write words, but also think about how the reader’s eye will move around the page, communicating intent, story, emotion, and concept, and so the words are supplemented by -and often guided by- little “thumbnail” images I scribble as well. (Actually, this is not so different from how I do my physics research, and I know that this is quite common. We think and reason using a mixture of words, images, equations, and so forth, and looking in my notebooks on physics will show a lot of commonality with my notebooks for The Project. Part of what I hope The Project will achieve is to help the general reader learn that this happens, while also benefiting from it by reading the form/medium they are reading…)

In the more familiar language of film, in my job as writer and “artist” at this stage, I’m directing the action as I write, and sort of doing the first pass at editing too, keeping in mind also things that will be taken over by my director of photography, costumer, editor, set designer, and so forth. Oh, those are also me in this case, since […] Click to continue reading this post →

Carmageddon Reaction

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Atlantic Station on Gold Line East LA Branch(Scroll to the end of this post for the funny thing I actually intended to post without my own musings getting in the way…) It has certainly been a huge story, with national and maybe even international attention been given to it. Carmageddon is the name given to the event of the 405 highway being closed for a 10 mile stretch for most of this weekend, for maintenance purposes. People are warning of disaster, complaining, predicting calamities for business, stocking up on food supplies, and so on and so forth. Some people are angry, some are amused, some are confused. For the most part however, people are quietly making sensible plans to adjust their routines or plans to take account of the event. (Er, I’m not sure I’d include flying from Burbank to Long Beach among the sensible plans!*)

I’m sort of struck by the huge impact this is having in people’s minds, and it has raised all sorts of discussions, reflections, and arguments about the reliance on cars that people have, public transport, and so on and so forth. All subjects you’ve maybe read being discussed here over the years. (Search the archives and/or use the search bar to the right.) The clichés about there being “no public transport” in LA is a convenient one for all to use at times (or all the time) when we want to stay in our nice cosy cars and ignore the alternatives and the possibility of making adjustments to include even occasional use of them, but I readily admit that the West side is a lot closer to the standard image of Los Angeles in this regard than points further East (still staying decidedly North-leaning in the discussion of course – the South LA conversation is an interesting one for another time). The density of shops, cafes, and long, desirably walkable stretches with other pedestrians (yes, they do exist in LA) does indeed seem lower over there, and while there is some bus coverage, the lower density makes the flaws of that part of the transport system hurt more, and of course the subway/metro […] Click to continue reading this post →