Category Archives: science

Ribbons

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A student asked a question in the string theory class today to which my answer was a suggestion of how to think about the issue raised in order to go about answering the question themselves. There’d be a few minutes of diagram drawing, and all would (hopefully) be clear. I thought that might not be an unreasonable thing to ask of a student, particularly in a graduate class, where they are ultimately trying to develop skills to do research. Well, it all went a bit pear-shaped as the student seemed to get quite strongly annoyed by this suggestion. I’ve still no idea why.

Aribbonsnyway, on the bus home I thought I’d do some idle doodling, and ended up doing the exercise I’d suggested… and sure enough what I suggested doing works nicely and does (I think) make it clear.

I’m sure it was all a misunderstanding… Probably my fault.

Over late night dinner just now, since I can’t put down this lovely brush pen I’ve been drawing with recently, I scribbled the figures out from the notebook for you to look over my shoulder, as it were, and see what we’re up to in the class. Don’t worry so much about what it all means. It is sometimes nice to just look at the shapes. (Actually, one of the students brought his mother to visit the class today. She sat through the whole hour and fifty minutes of the lecture. That was nice. I hope she enjoyed it all!)

I find these diagrams and the computations they represent rather pretty.

Wednesday will be the big climactic lecture of a sequence I’ve been leading them […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Project – 4

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So, a huge number of decisions went into getting the work to where I wanted it to be, and I’ve shown you samples in various previous posts, some collected here. But where does it all begin? It starts with the idea or concept that I am thinking about, and conversations which will form the dialogue for the piece in question. I start fleshing it out more, perhaps with a setting beginning to form in my mind. Maybe pencil drawings begin to take shape, and I start laying out pages, capturing the beats of the conversation, and the visuals that might get used. Characters (the people who will be in dialogue) begin to assert themselves by this point as well.

Incidentally, this is a place where sometimes the iPad comes into its own, and it is a great tool at several stages of all this. This project is one of the reasons I got the iPad, although I could not tell you at the time I got it back in the early Summer since I was not revealing what I was working on then. (Much of the other stuff I happily discovered about the iPad that I blogged about a while back (here, here, and here) are actually nice bonuses. I got it primarily to help me with development aspects on this project that had little to do with those other features.) I draw rough layouts on the iPad sometimes, and I can store all my rough ideas and print them out, modify them, call them up for later viewing, and so forth. I can carry work in progress with me, reference photos from location scouting, etc. It is also good for practice sketching, and sometimes, using it, I’ve grabbed some nice quick drawings of people in a meeting or in a bar or on a bus. Drawing from life is an important skill to keep up. The iPad is not used in final production on the graphic novel though. I work at a level of detail and complexity that the iPad would not be able to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Congratulations DJ!

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DJ StrouseI just saw on the USC news site that DJ Strouse, one of our excellent current physics majors, has been selected as one of 14 students in the USA to get a Churchill Scholarship this year! He is the first USC student to get one, actually. DJ is one of those students who reminds you why teaching is such a delight. He engages with the material in class and beyond, exploring it extensively on his own, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Summer Reminder

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aspen center for physicsThis always catches people off guard (myself included), so I thought I’d post a little reminder. The deadline for applications to the Summer workshops at the Aspen Center for Physics is January 31st. That’s coming up soon, so to physicists interested in doing a research stay, start thinking about the dates you want to attend, finding funds for support, planning for things like childcare or summer programs for children if you have any, and so on and so forth. There’s a wide variety of excellent […] Click to continue reading this post →

Nine Points

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Although the planning of a panel on a page is entirely freehand pencil or pen work, it is indeed the case that sooner or later I start detailed placing of subjects, and I often use perspective to do the layouts. Not just for skyscrapers and so forth, but for down to earth things too. I do it the old-fashioned way, which is repetitive and time-consuming, but I must admit – It is fun! Take some time to look at everything around you – real or represented in drawings, photos, etc – and you’ll likely see perspective cues that help give sense of depth and placing. It is all about geometry, which our universe seems to like a lot, and which we use to navigate in it. Learning a bit of this geometry, and how to build it in projection in two dimensions on the page (and it is much easier than this sentence makes it sound!) allows one to make reasonably convincing recreations of the universe (or simulacra of your choosing) and how we perceive it. Real artists (not hacks like yours truly) use geometry a lot, in one way or another, to interpret, represent, or distill aspects of the world, and so in a sense, they are companions on the same road as those of us in (especially) the physical sciences.

Babble aside, here you can see parts of the interior of a cafe taking shape. I did it using three-point perspective*:

construction_lines

This will be the skeleton upon which I build the flesh of the rest of the piece. It is based on my knowledge of a real cafe that I location-scouted (well, I happen to drink coffee there from time to time), but you’d never get this view without (a) perhaps being able to fly, and (b) removing the ceiling. Trying to be somewhat discreet in this […] Click to continue reading this post →

Back to Basics

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Well, today was the first lecture of the string theory course (part 2) that I mentioned in the previous post. And I applied the “when they think you’re going to zig, you zag” principle. They have been expecting me to dive into the whole business of open strings and D-branes and so forth (the subject of the book), and I did not. Sure, that will come, and sure, we’ll explore what they mean and what they can tell us about string theory beyond perturbation theory and so on and so forth. But I want first to spend a couple of weeks on getting to the heart of the matter. They made several standard choices along the way in doing their first semester of study of string theory. What did they mean? Why did they work? Were those the only choices? What is underlying a lot of it all, and what, when stripped down to the essence, is at the core of string perturbation theory and beyond? In other words, let’s look more closely at the path integral definition (such as it is) of a string theory (slightly schematically):

[tex] Z=\int [{\cal D}g {\cal D}X] e^{-S(X,g)}\ ,[/tex]

and make sense of all the bits. (Er, for the two of you still reading, [tex]S(X,g)[/tex] is an […] Click to continue reading this post →

New Semester Approaching

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I’m feeling strangely cold, although the heating is on and I’ve got a jumper (“sweater” to readers in the States) on. It has been this way all day, so I suspect it is something to do with my frame of mind. I’m feeling a bit reflective with it too, so I’ll think out loud (as it were) a bit before going to bed early.

Well, it is almost time to start another round of teaching. This semester, starting Monday, it is a graduate course that I’ll be teaching, the second part of a year’s sequence of string theory that we teach from time to time. My focus will be non-perturbative issues, focusing on much of what has been forming the foundation of research in various areas of string theory since the 1990s. Should be fun. Some of the material will come from my book, D-branes, that was published back in 2002. It seems so long ago now. I actually looked in it today, as I was discussing a research issue with a colleague, and could not recall some details. Happily there was a chapter with it all in there. That’s rather nice. The book serves me well as a personal reminder of things I used to have at my fingertips all the time back then, and as a bonus, lots of people around the world still use it as a handbook/guide/intro/etc, I hear.

I joke, of course. The cart and the horse are the other way around.

Speaking of books, I’ll be doing my best to continue working on the current book project, with all the excitement and adventure in developing it. (And the occasional […] Click to continue reading this post →

Paints

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building_construction_paintedOh, I finished the painting of the page that, perhaps annoyingly, I’m showing you only a corner of. Now you’ve seen three stages of development in the production process, from pencils to inks to painting. See the other two pages (here and here) for comparison.

I digitally paint for this work, using a variety of techniques. This is a big silent single-panel splash page early on in the story, and I’m using it to root the reader in reality, the location, and the principal character, and so I’ve broken out the special effects a touch. Yes, I am a traditionalist, as I’ve explained before, with most of the final look of my work not being so different from what could be done in the pre-digital era, but I am not pig-headedly so, and from time to time I use (lightly, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Knots from a Master

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witten_on_knotsAh. This is just perfect. I actually looked into my Institute For Advanced Study news magazine this time around and noticed a gem I’d like to share. Edward Witten gave a lovely talk entitled Knots and Quantum Theory for a (sort of) general audience, and there is video of it available. Ever wondered why mathematicians study knots? Why do physicists care? What do they bring to the table? Well, this could be a talk for you to take out a bit of time to watch.

Not long ago I wrote a post about Ed, his huge influence on the field of theoretical physics, and some of his role in my own development as a physicist during my time […] Click to continue reading this post →

Black Lines

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building_construction_inkedOk, I have inked the pencils I constructed earlier, showing parts of two real buildings that form the background to the opening pages of one of my stories.

In the end I did the curves freehand instead of fiddling with French curves*. Now for these objects, the inking (done freehand with ink drawing pens – I sometimes use brushes or brush pens too) is actually pretty much just networks of black lines since they are background details and, moreover, very simple skyscrapers. There are some others in this page that are more […] Click to continue reading this post →

Constructing

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building_constructionBut before we left on the trip (see previous post) I did get a little bit of work done on The Project for the first time in about three weeks, by making an early start in the morning. There’s this big single-panel splash page with lots of tall buildings on it that I’ve been meaning to finish for a while.

Tall buildings mean… windows. Lots of them. For this piece, this means lots of drawing of construction lines to place the windows. So I’ve been messing around with a T-square, rulers, vanishing points, diagonal vanishing points, a bit of free hand winging it (will enhance with French curves […] Click to continue reading this post →

Rain, Dear. Games. (1)

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double_rainbow_small So today’s rain-storm-driven activities involved staring out of the windows at various impressive downpours and marveling at the lightning and thunderclaps. This latter formed an interesting coincidence since I was reviewing grant proposals this morning, and one of them was about the science of certain types of high energy phenomena associated with lightning bolts. They were good to see, since Southern California (at least the LA part) has relatively few and relatively lame offerings in the way of thunderstorms. I miss them terribly.

In the early afternoon, we finally decided to go off to a museum. A good indoor activity. However, we got caught in a downpour between parking and museum and decided that, despite the two giant umbrellas we had deployed, our coverage was wanting and we were all too damp to continue. So we returned home. It was a good […] Click to continue reading this post →

Entropy at Play

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entropy_demoWhile out and about this rainy Saturday I thought I’d buy a set of dominoes with which to play with my young visitor. During such play, since he started to count the numbers of dots on them spontaneously, and since as we unpacked them he exclaimed “zero!” excitedly at the one with no dots on (I found this impressive), I figured I’d encourage him to place them in order. This went along fine until he discovered that he was finding numbers he’d found before. I encouraged him to lay them next to each other when they match (this shows what we’d call “degeneracy” in my area), and carry on. Eventually, he found the nice shape in the picture. I decided it was a bit early to explain to a four year old that he’d just illustrated […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Project – 3

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(Monday:) Sitting at the airport waiting for a visitor to arrive. Might as well tell you a bit more about The Project. (This is the third in a series of posts unveiling The Project. See here and here for the earlier ones.)

So the sample I ended with in the previous post was, I presume you have realized, a little attempt at irony and humour. While it does take a while to bring about the transformation of technique that I wanted, and while it has taken some time to explore and then make choices about the various techniques I want to use, it would be hilarious if that was the product so far. But this is not a joking matter. The whole process is very slow indeed, even when ticking along nicely, and additionally of course I’ve got this Professor gig I’m doing for most of my waking hours. So…

Anyway, samples of what I am doing are in order. Well, what I’ve worked up so far, in a prototype story, is only really an example of one story. So the whole thing won’t look like what you are about to see, for better or worse. This is because the outcome of trying to decide what visual style to use for the project was that I would use more than one style. Some stories will call for different styles.

Another key element I mentioned earlier is that I am having the dialogues (by the way, the working title is: The Dialogues. Yeah, I’m tricky that way…) take place in real settings, some of them may be familiar to you. So go right ahead and guess away. Here is a skyline from page one of the prototype story, helping to set the scene*…

arena_extract_1

This prototype story, called The Arena, has a pair of characters accidentally (er…or maybe not accidentally!?) meeting again and picking up on a conversation. You can see one of them below and to the right, in one of my big scene-setting splash panels […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Project – 2

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A graphic novel. Yes, of course. (Continuing a series of posts revealing The Project. This is the second. Read the first to see how I got here.)

It makes perfect sense. Rather than hide the visual aspects of it all away in background, I’ll have it right up front. Having both images and words in my arsenal at the outset frees me up to do so much of what I want to do, in bringing the reader into the conversations through the characters, the locations, and in being able to go wherever I want either realistically, metaphorically, or representationally, in illustrating ideas and story. In fact, it is so utterly natural, given how we, the scientists, actually work on a day to day basis and talk to each other!

Actually, immediately it occurred to me that it is a graphic novel I needed to do, I wondered why nobody else in my subject areas (physics and so forth) has done it before. Before you jump in and start telling me about all the “science comics” out there, please note -given all I wrote in the last post and above- that this is not just more “science comics”, with some fun pictures employed to show things in various subjects. People usually mention things like the Cartoon Guides, and so forth. Those sorts of things are great, but definitely not what I am talking about. I’m getting at, or trying to get at, something quite different, at least in part. We shall see. It seems it me that there is way more to do with this incredibly powerful genre in science than has been done, and certainly in the corners of physics in which I lurk. I want to try.

It is still surprising to me, but when I say graphic novel, it is not uncommon for it to emerge that people have an odd idea of what I am talking about. Some think that it is cartoons for children. No, it need not be for children, and it need not be cartoons. […] Click to continue reading this post →