Category Archives: science

Carbon Focus

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Seems that carbon might be a theme in this week’s Nobel slate, on the science side, so far. It was graphene in the Physics spotlight yesterday, a two dimensional carbon material, and today’s Chemistry announcement features carbon molecules too:

nobel_picture_chemistry_2010The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2010 to Richard F. Heck (University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA), Ei-ichi Negishi (Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA) and Akira Suzuki (Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan), “for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis”

It is all about organic chemistry, and in the press release, you can learn more.

On the other hand, the prize for Physiology or Medicine (to Robert G. Edwards […] Click to continue reading this post →

Nobel Prize in Physics 2010

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Wow! For Graphene! Excellent:

The announcement:

nobel_picture_physics_2010The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 to Andre Geim (University of Manchester, UK) and Konstantin Novoselov (University of Manchester, UK) “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Southern California Strings Seminar

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scss_studentsOh! I almost forgot to remind local readers that the next Southern California Strings Seminar is happening this week. Friday and Saturday. It will be at UCLA, and there’s a great line up of speakers. As I’ve said here before, graduate students are especially encouraged to come…

…since special effort is made to make sure that each talk begins with a pedagogical portion to help non-experts in that subfield navigate and see the motivation.

The speakers and talks are:[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Magnitude and Direction

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arrow_album_cover I learned from members of my family the other day that Arrow died last week. I’ve no idea if by name you know who that is, and I am sure if I mentioned his given name, Alphonsus Cassell, that won’t make your eyes light up in recognition. But as soon as I say “Hot Hot Hot”, I bet that there’s a good chance a song starts playing in your mind. It is a Soca song (Soca being a more dance-oriented cousin of Calypso, and the name Arrow was, I think meant to pay homage to the Calypso star the Mighty Sparrow), and may well be the most famous Soca song worldwide. So many times when someone wants to inspire heat – usually involving sunshine – or excitement they play a bit of that song and so it ends up in lots of TV and radio commercials and other such places, and of course is played a lot at parties and other places where people are simply having fun. Arrow wrote and sung a lot of songs, and was devoted to his community, and so many are very sad at his passing, feeling that a friend has gone, even though they might not have known him. Seems to me he had a good life. At the very least, to be known for bringing joy and communion through good music well after you’re gone? That’s a great thing right there.

I did know him since I grew up in the community that he was part of. It was on the island of Montserrat where, you might recall from previous posts, I spent ten years of […] Click to continue reading this post →

Gell-Mann Joins Us!

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Some exciting news today! We’ve had Murray Gell-Mann join the USC faculty! See an article about it here. As you may know, he is the inventor/discoverer of quarks, the particles that make up, among other things, the protons and neutrons that make up the nuclei of every atom in your body.

Speaking of bodies, he’ll actually be focusing on medical issues, as far as I understand it:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Too Little, Too Much, or Just Right?

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Charles Day on the Physics Today blog asks an interesting question: Why has physics today’s news coverage of string theory been so sparse? I must admit that I had not noticed what the level of coverage is, and so the matter had not sprung to mind, but it is an interesting one. He looks back at the number of major articles written about the subject in recent years (he was a feature editor, and so shepherded some of them through), and concludes that the numbers are low, and he may well be right, but I am not sure I know what the best measure is.

How do we measure the appropriate coverage level? Is it by the number of people working in a sub-field as a percentage of the overall field of physics? If it were possible to break things down that way (I’m happy to see that we have come to a point in the field where I’ve no idea how to define what a “string theorist” is, per se, any more than I know what a “field theorist” is. There are simply people working in various fields who use both as tools to make progress) I wonder what fields would end up appearing under or over covered?

Perhaps a large part of it it is the issue of how many articles on the topic can be written that are of general enough interest, and finding the people who are both able and willing to write. This is a tricky issue, and depends on a combination of the topic in hand and the knowledge and writing skill of the author. There are two extremes that would be a factor here. On the one hand, you have the obvious difficulty of a non-expert journalist either not being able to see the general relevance or value of new results in such a specialist field, or if having seen it, not being able to explain it […] Click to continue reading this post →

I Know What You Did Last Summer

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That was the unmentioned title of yesterday’s group meeting. We try to do this every year, and so one of the first meetings of the year is us sitting together, eating our lunches, chatting about ideas. We basically catch up, and chat about things we learned about from Summer travels, perhaps from conferences, schools or workshops. We also mention what we’ve been up to in terms of projects worked on, work in progress, etc. I find the latter especially useful from the standpoint of student development, since it is often the first time that a student gets to tell a wider audience (but in a safe environment) a little about what they are doing, often their first projects. Even a few minutes summarizing what you have been doing can be daunting at the early stages of your research career, so this is a good place to start.

Talking about things that we’ve learned are going on in the larger community (or […] Click to continue reading this post →

Scribblings

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Ack! It is September already. Somehow the last few days got away from me and I prepped a number of posts, but then they did not make it to the blog. One of them was another followup to the Friday iPad post (see also here). I wanted to show you one of the things I did in class on Wednesday. Recall that I am experimenting with using the iPad with Note Taker HD in class to simply sit with the students and work through solving problems with them on “paper”… a sort of fireside chat, if you will. The first experiment was on Wednesday, and I did it a little slowly at first, but I think it’ll be just great. Bear in mind I’m just scribbling with my finger here… I think I’ll try using the stylus I got the other day for variety. Click for larger versions.

classroom_chat_1 classroom_chat_2
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Time Travel a Click Away

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cvj_with_wormholeI just noticed that last week’s episode of The Universe on Time Travel, which I told you about here and here, is available online on their website. Click here to learn more about the ins and outs of it, and I show you how to make one too! Kind of.

It is a difficult subject to explain, and one that must be tempting to […] Click to continue reading this post →

I Gotta Get Me One O’ These!

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p-2048-1536-a738e2a5-eaa1-450b-9a0a-ed526300dc23.jpegSome of you will recognize the blue box in the picture on the left that I took recently while travelling. I have two things to mention in connection with it, but first let me mention that it is indeed what you think it is, but not really. In other words, it is in London (Earl’s Court), and it is a classic Police box (well, a modern relaunch), but it is not (as far as I am aware) also a disguised remarkable time machine owned by a somewhat eccentric renegade Time Lord. Ok?

Ok, thing number one. I don’t get the BBC America channel, but they kindly were dumping on to On Demand the episodes of the new season of Dr. Who, with the new writer and the new actor, so one day I thought I’d have a look. Just to get myself annoyed, because (sorry fans of its recent years) over the years I usually get ridiculously annoyed at how utterly stupid the show is, with lots of pointless running, and overacting, and cheap, crappy, silly plots and sets and so forth, and get even more annoyed when I remember it is mostly deliberate – we are supposed to enjoy the hokeyness in the spirit of nostalgia for the time many decades ago when it was on a super low budget but was ahead of its time. And I get more annoyed when I think that people abroad are watching this and thinking it is a prime example of great British television. Then I turn it off and ignore it for a year or two, and then do it all again. So anyway, I did that this time, back in the Spring. And guess what? […] Click to continue reading this post →

Entangled

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l-2048-1536-bceff628-4f08-4836-9001-d1f10349d0e7.jpegThis rather hot day sees me in more of a reflective mood, which is a rather good thing. I’ve been chipping away at the Project a bit, solving some issues concerning its final form, and looking around me and soaking up the Summer. I did some of that at Intelligentsia cafe before lunch, listening as I worked for a while to four filmmakers at the next table loudly plan a shoot, until I decided to switch to listening to music when it turned out that it was a porn film and they were exchanging ideas about what underwear the teenage star of the scene would be wearing and in what sequence it would come off. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a prude, and certainly am not averse to underwear being removed in the right sequence and in the right circumstances, but it was distracting. And obnoxious. It is the price one pays for having coffee there instead of at Casbah, where the non-shiny people like me sit, mostly, but it is just too hot in the latter for me these days.

This is a very different day from yesterday, which saw me up at 5:30am, and then e-mail bouncing drafts of a paper back and forth with my collaborator Tameem all day until about 10:30pm, when we decided we’d done enough and submitted it to the arXiv. I focused on little else that day and did not leave my lair at all, so today is sort of an antidote to that.

Going on in background is a bit of preparation for the start of classes on Monday, the beginning of the new academic year at USC. I’ve been looking at a draft of a syllabus for the big class I’ll be teaching on introductory physics (for Engineering and Science majors). My class will have 100 students and the parallel one, taught by a colleague following the same syllabus, will be of similar size. So decisions about homework, grading policies, midterm dates, and so forth all need to be finalized by tomorrow […] Click to continue reading this post →

Perseids Galore!

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perseidmap_stripThe Perseid meteors are reported to be really good viewing this year.

As I said a few years ago in anticipation of a similar nice Perseid meteor shower:

Concerned that you don’t know enough astronomy? No idea in any amount of detail where these constellations are? Don’t worry! Basically, all you really have to do is find a place where the sky is reasonably dark, look [North] East, and wait. As your eyes acclimatise to the dark, and with a bit of luck, you’ll see some, and zero in on where to look.

There’s more at the NASA news site, from which I borrowed the image above. The peak is around these few nights (12th August or so) and there’s no moon, so if you’ve got some dark (ish) skies and a bit of patience, you should see some. Yes, this includes viewers in cities. Don’t be pessimistic. You might be able to find patches of dark enough sky, especially if you can go near to an edge of the city, or a park, and look away from the bulk of the lights. It does not have to be perfect viewing […] Click to continue reading this post →

Revisiting Shine a Light

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One of last year’s crazy Big Projects was filmmaking, you may remember. I just noticed that a little over a year has gone by since I premiered the first of the short science films I wrote, directed, co-produced… etc. Doesn’t hurt to look at it again. If you have a good connection, go to YouTube and select the option to watch it in HD and blow it up to full screen, and crank up the volume for the fun music!

Here’s Shine a Light:

It was brought to you by the NSF and USC’s iOpenShell Center. Visit the latter to learn more!

Don’t forget to share it! (Lots of people have viewed it (over 16,800 to date) shared it, and used it in their teaching, etc. It has been translated into a number of other languages, etc.)

Now, back to working on this year’s Project….

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Outshine

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l-640-480-d044a0bd-8d6a-4a37-af29-7487b2205058.jpegI gave my seminar at the workshop yesterday and said goodbye to friends old and new, colleagues, staff, and so on. Today is a hello to tourist mode, with me exploring aspects of Vienna. It is raining today, so it is a good thing that I’d planned to spend a lot of time looking at art indoors.

I’m resting in the cafe at MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst), between bouts of exploration of the exhibits. There’s a modern art and modern science (together, and of course modern means early 20th Century) exhibit on the upper floors. They have the usual chatter […] Click to continue reading this post →