Category Archives: science

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 →

The Project – 1

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It is midnight and I really should get to sleep in order to wake up and work some more on editing the final exam for my class so that it can go to the printer by noon. But I’ve got several pokes from people clamouring to find out what The Project actually is, and I promised yesterday I’d start to spill the beans. Thanks for the interest! I think I’d better get at least some of it out there or I’ll have an angry mob by morning! So here goes. I will drag out the draft I sketched yesterday and beat it into shape:

So, as you may have guessed, The Project, which I’ve been mentioning here since a post way back in February, is a writing project, but it is somewhat different from what you might expect. The bottom line is that I hope that at some point into future you will be able to purchase a copy of your own, and that you will find it instructive, exciting, and enjoyable. At least.

Yes, it is a book about science. However… Well, here’s the thing. Over many years, people (friends, colleagues, potential agents and publishers, blog readers, etc) have been asking me when I am going to write my book. You know, the popular-level book that every academic who is interested in the public understanding of their field (as you know I am from reading this blog) is expected will write at some point. To be honest, I have given it some thought over the years, and it has been something I figured I might do at some point. In fact, several different ideas have occurred to me over the years, and I may well implement some of them at some point.

But a major thought began to enter my mind well over ten years ago. In my field, there is a rather narrow range of models for the shape of such books, usually involving about 80% of it being a series of chapters covering all the standard introductory material (some relativity, some quantum mechanics, and so forth) for the lay reader, before culminating in a chapter or two of what the researcher really wants to tell them about: some aspect of their research. This is a fine model, and it is great that people continue to write such books, and I will no doubt use that model one day, but to be honest, I don’t think there is any urgency for me to add to the canon yet another one of those books. Moreover, if you line examples of that type of book up against each other, you see that the […] Click to continue reading this post →

I, For One, Welcome Our New Arsenic-Replacing-Phosphorus-In-DNA Overlords

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mono_lakeYeah! This is just the sort of thing I’d hoped that we (human beings) would find soon, in order to strengthen the idea that in looking for forms of life elsewhere, we be not just open to the idea that the basic chemistry for that life may be very different from what we are used to on earth (easier said than done), but that it is maybe even probable that this is what we could find first. Now, given the news today (announced by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her team in a NASA press conference today and reported on in a paper to appear in Science) we know that it is not just a theoretical construction, but already a reality right here on earth. The researchers have identified a life form with a striking difference. The bacterium (which lives in Mono Lake – see NASA image above right) has DNA (and some other important complex molecules) with a major difference from all other forms we know. phosphorus has been replaced by arsenic!

periodic_tableThis works, by the way, because arsenic is in the same chemical family as phosphorus, being directly below it in the periodic table. Note that this is exactly the sort of thing that has been speculated about a lot in the classic days of science/speculative fiction concerned with alien life, remember? :- Silicon based life forms instead of the Carbon based ones that we know and love on earth. Silicon is again in the same column as […] Click to continue reading this post →

Nobel Scrutiny

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Many people have found the Physics Nobel Prize (see here and here) this year quite remarkable, and mostly for positive reasons. It was given to innovative, young researchers Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for work on a material that is remarkable for scientific and engineering reasons alike, and both theoretical and experimental. All good. Others have been a bit concerned about how very soon the prize was given for this work, and in other cases there has been some annoyance about how work on graphene has been attributed (a lot of people seem to be under the impression they discovered graphene, for example, which is not the case).

Well, it seems that there are quite a few strong words being written about the issue at very high levels. I was sent* a Nature News article (by Eugenie Samuel Reich) a day or two ago on the matter […] Click to continue reading this post →

ALICE Publishes!

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Jacques Distler pointed out that ALICE has just published their first paper, only a little over a week after the beginning of the heavy ion phase of the LHC at CERN! Moreover, they are way ahead in energy of the previous heavy ion collision experiment (RHIC) and have verified “elliptic flow” (the main sign that the quark-gluon plasma behaves like a strongly coupled fluid, the big experimental surprise of some years back, with properties of a type that can be nicely captured using string theory models). Have a look at Jacques’ post here, and go directly to the paper of ALICE here.

Hurrah!

Please see my post from last week (“Experimental Excitement” was the apt title) about why I’m excited about all this!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Experimental Excitement!

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alice_frist_run_dataWell, this week is a big week, in some ways. The Large Hadron Collider has gone into a new phase! For a while, the experiment has turned aside from the task of searching for the origin of mass (the Higgs Particle, or whatever it is that mediates the generation of the masses of elementary particles – see earlier posts, and features like this, etc) and is turning to heavy ion collisions. Rather than studying processes in which only a few particles at a time are interacting at super-duper-uber-high energies, the experiment will instead collide together the nuclei of lead atoms, so that you get lots of particles colliding together and creating a messy “soup” of high energy stuff all together. The goal is to understand the constituent nuclear particles (quarks and gluons) working collectively at high temperature (and low to moderate density), instead of focusing on issues concerning individual fundamental particles. Today (starting late yesterday, actually) is an exciting day because it marks the first step on the journey to probe deeper into this physics. The ALICE experiment has started looking at these collisions. See top right for some screen-shots of the mess of particle tracks that are left after the soup flies apart. The trick is to analyze all these tracks from millions of such collisions to work out the properties of the soup.

As you perhaps know from reading this blog, while of course I’m interested in the behaviour of fundamental particles and the origin of mass, and so on and so forth, I’m very interested in this nuclear issue too. Some of the most interesting work that […] Click to continue reading this post →