Category Archives: science

Double Treat

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I’d been inside all day, working while listening to the rain and the occasional clap of thunder. They are rare here and so I’ve been making sure to thoroughly enjoy the parade of storms we’ve been having over the last several weeks.

Today (Tuesday 9th!) was definitely a day I’d planned to stay in, rain or not, since I wanted to dig further into a project I’m working on, and focus on it all day. And so focus I did, until late in the afternoon I noticed a lovely light on the buildings and trees, telling me that the sun had emerged from the clouds just before it dropped below the horizon – peeking through that gap between the clouds and the sea that, now I think of it, must always exist quite clearly if there is a localized set of clouds over the region, due to the storm. I thought I’d go outside for the first time of the day and look at this evening light, and I noticed it was still raining and there was a rainbow! Actually, it turned out to be two. A double treat stretching majestically across the sky. I grabbed a piece for you. [Update: Several pieces. Glued two together for you to get the full effect. See above. It was raining, so was not so careful with my alignments when snapping in my haste to escape….]

rainbow_full_small

Notice that the colour sequence (ROYGBIV) runs backwards on one as compared to the other. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Grand Challenges!

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So yes, the Categorically Not! series was a bit thin on the ground in the last several months. I think KC was a bit busy travelling to tell people about her Frank Oppenheimer book.

Well, it is back on the calendar, and I probably should have mentioned it earlier, but the next one is tomorrow, so I thought I’d remind you. Remember that the series of events is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). 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. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events.

The theme this month is Grand Challenges!. Here’s the description from K. C. Cole: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Essence

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Today I’ve got to give a guest lecture in a class of KC Cole’s at USC’s Annenberg School. I’m supposed to talk on the theme of Art and Science. I’ll cover a number of aspects, I expect (have not written it yet), but it put me in mind of two posts I did a while back on the subject. One was over at Correlations (remember that?) and the other, called Transcendence, was here. I thought I’d reproduce some of the Correlations post, called Essence, here. The back story was that I was working up a contribution to SEED magazine (the December 2007 issue I think) which was doing a cover story on Science and Art, and… well, I’ll let the 2007 me tell you the rest:

While working on the contribution, I was hugely conflicted, for many reasons (variety of themes, variety of pieces, art forms, only 100 words, etc…) and another major theme struggled for dominance – “essence”. How both science and art strive to identify the essential truth about a subject. My original contribution that I submitted to the editors to get their feedback on whether I was on the right track for what they were looking for therefore had a bit more of this in it, and referred to two pieces of art (I eventually chose one and focussed on developing and rewriting around that, using the “transcendence” theme). The piece I used that did I did not use for the final article is perfect for illustrating the “essence” theme, and so to provoke some thoughts in you […] I include it here, along with some fragments of the paragraphs I was playing with at the time:

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Gunslinging Bohr

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bohr_einsteinThis story has come along at just the right time, given that my last post was about Einstein. Seems that Niels Bohr (another giant from the same period, and another one of the founders of the quantum theory) was a big fan of cowboy movies, and thought a lot about gunfights. Yes, really! (There he is in the photo on the left hanging out with his friend Einstein in later years, perhaps 1925. Perhaps they’re at a drive-in movie? I got this photo here.)

It turns out to be all relevant to new studies about reaction time. The fastest person to draw does not necessarily win the gunfight: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Crazy Al

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So I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day about science and scientists, and in particular what on earth we theoretical physicists actually do.

She (mostly jokingly I think) said we’re really all a bit weird, just sitting around thinking about quantum physics all day. einstein_imagesI tried to begin to explain that we don’t sit around thinking about quantum mechanics all day any more than a tailor sits around all day thinking about needles. (Or how many angels or demons can fly through the eyes of said needles at the same time.) No, we’re mostly getting on with using the needles in the making of new suits and so forth. (To continue the allegory.)

But I did not get to that analogy, because another thing came up. She went on to say “…like Einstein, with crazy hair…”, to invoke her primary example of the crazy quantum scientist. Now, given that she was talking to me (er… no crazy hair, in case you are wondering), she was clearly joking, but in my view, at the core of all that is a serious image problem that science has to deal with – bizarre cliches about who we are and what we look like. So I thought I’d point something out.

The most famous image of the crazy/eccentric scientist is largely based on a lie (or […] Click to continue reading this post →

Mathematics in Your Business

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Terry Gross interviewed Scott Patterson and Ed Thorp on NPR’s Fresh Air. I heard it yesterday. It was very interesting to listen to Thorp in particular, a mathematician, describing his curiosity about how to construct a system for beating various gambling games, and going from there to the stock market, in effect becoming one of the earliest of the “quants”,

Thorp and the people who use such systems have come to be known as “quants” — it’s a reference to the quantitative-analysis techniques they employ — and their stories are told in Scott Patterson’s new book The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It.

You can hear the interview here, and read an extract from the book. Very interesting are the questions about what they think really went wrong in the market crash of […] Click to continue reading this post →

You Don’t Need Magic To Use Energy Wisely

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energy_posterThis is a fun poster I saw at the Grove the other day. (Click for a larger view.)

The good fairy (Tinkerbell, apparently) speaks the truth!

It’s nice to see such a campaign, and aimed at the younger set (who in turn might bug their parents into thinking about it too). It is sponsored by the Department of Energy (the same people who sponsor most of my research), and you can look at the website here. Maybe you’ll direct some others to it too! There’s an energy action checklist, and lots of useful tips and guidelines for everyone (young and old) to follow in order […] Click to continue reading this post →

Meteorite Men!

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meteorite_men Did you watch Meteorite Men last week? If not, you can probably catch a repeat. It is a new series, airing 9pm ET/PT Wednesday nights, on the Science Channel about two guys who search for meteorites. Check your local listings for times. (Photo cheekily snapped from their site. Copyright aerolite meteorites.)

I learned about it from Bob Melisso, my producer/filmmaker friend (and occasional collaborator: see here, here and here) who made the pilot and is the supervising producer for the series. From […] Click to continue reading this post →

On Art, Fairy Tales, and Creativity

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grimms2

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

Do you know who said that? I’ll break the post here to give you a moment to think about it. I’m not going to ask for the answer in the comments since you have Google on your side, but you can, if you like, share in the comments whether you knew or guessed it right before you moved to the rest of the post below to learn the answer. (Image above is an illustration by Walter Crane for ‘Snow White’ (1882).) Continuing… […] Click to continue reading this post →

News From The Front, VIII: One Down…

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work_snap…more to go. I’ve finished one of the papers I’ve been writing (this one co-authored with my student, Tameem) after delaying on it for months. I’m not sure how things got quite this backed up in terms of things I have to do, but they have. I meant to start on a new, long project last week, and all my efforts these days have been toward clearing away all those things I want to get done and dusted before focusing on that. It is taking time, but gradually the clearing is happening. Two more manuscripts to complete.

This paper reports on the continuation of the work we’ve been doing over the years in understanding the physics of various model systems in an applied magnetic field. This is in the context of holographic models of important strongly coupled phenomena that are of considerable interest in lots of fields of physics (particle physics, nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, atomic physics). (Since I don’t want to explain holography and so forth every time I talk about it, see a post I did about some of that here, and related posts in the list at the bottom of this one, if not sure what I’m talking about.) (Hmmmm, I see from my SPIRES listing that I’ve got seven papers mentioning magnetic field explicitly in the title in the last three years, and three or four more of the rest are occupied in large part with the issue too. No, really, I’m not obsessed.)

The issue here is the study of structures that suggest themselves as earmarks of Fermi surfaces in strongly coupled systems. It has been a goal for a long time in the context of gauge/gravity duals to understand what the signals of a Fermi surface would be. Would it be some geometrical object in the dual gravity theory, perhaps? Access to a computationally tractable description of such an object would be rather […] Click to continue reading this post →

Eye on the Sky

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WISE First LightAmy Mainzer has shared and discussed the first released picture from the WISE project that was launched (you’ll recall) not so long ago. It looks marvellous. Press release here.

By the way, I hope you’re following Amy’s blog to learn more about the mission now it is in full swing. She’s giving you a window into the science as it breaks and the excitement of doing the science itself, seeing a project come together […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales from the Industry XXX – Specialty Act

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I just thought you’d like to know this. I’m a Specialty Act. Got that?

Last month, just before taping some material for a new TV show (that you can see on a major broadcast network starting in a week or so) I signed some routine documents. One of them involved me ticking a box to specify my official status for […] Click to continue reading this post →

Amazing Asimov

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Happy New Year, dear Reader!

my_robotForgive me for starting the year with an article on environmental problems, but it was Isaac Asimov’s birthday (at least the official one) on Saturday (I learned that here), and I found an excellent video of him talking wonderfully about global warming, united world action on such matters, and other issues back in 1988. It is below. I read a ton of Asimov back when I was a teenager. While not the greatest writing in a literary sense, it was full of wonderful ideas and compelling stories, and was quite inspiring for me at the time.

It is a pity that it was yesterday I switched on the little robot I use weekly to help me fight the good fight against dusty floors (see above right; the company that makes them is called iRobot, by the way – hardly any doubt that an Asimov reader was […] Click to continue reading this post →

New Voices, Great Name

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13point7_roster I noticed yesterday that there’s a new group blog, at NPR, on science and culture, and – to my pleasant surprise – one of the co-authors is my friend and colleague KC Cole, the well known (and quite marvellous) science writer! I’ve met the physicist Marcelo Gleiser who will be a co-author and he seems like an excellent new voice to hear from. Astrophysicist Adam Frank and Biologists Ursula Goodenough and Stuart Kauffman round out the exciting-looking roster. (I cheekily grabbed a screen shot of the roster photos (left) from their site.) There are a number of lovely pieces up on the site already for you to read.

The blog is called 13.7, a number that might be familiar to you.

No? You might be thinking that it is the new high price for a basic over-priced cup of “gourmet” coffee in some new tediously pretentious cafe in LA (and believe me, I’d not be at all surprised), but I was in fact referring to the 13.7 billion years that is the age of our universe. I think that is the primary meaning they had in mind too. I’m pleased to see these new voices in the blogosphere, and pleased that authors of blogs of this sort can still come up with excellent names! 13.7 is a really rather nice name and, in a slightly inside way, captures the scope, variety, and grandeur of the themes I expect they’ll explore in much the same way that the name Cosmic Variance promised (and delivered) for that group blog back in 2005. I came up with that name a little before we launched the blog (we mulled […] Click to continue reading this post →

Final Morsels

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cheesy_biscuitsThey’re sitting the final exam for my graduate electromagnetism class right now, having started at the ungodly hour of 8:00am. I’m sitting outside in the bright, lukewarm Winter sun with a cup of coffee, two cheesy biscuits I baked at 6:30am for no reason other than feeling in a baking mood (see right), my phone in case there’s a reason for the TA on duty to contact me, and my iPod, which I am of course using to write to you.

It has been an odd few days. Not so much because of the pair of them that had me wandering around a huge studio lot, being wardrobe-checked and make-up checked, shot from all angles with a live cheering studio audience in attendance (for your viewing pleasure on a new prime-time series on Fox to begin airing next month – more on this later, perhaps), but because early on Saturday I woke up with a severe vertigo attack. vertigoVery odd indeed and although I managed to get it under control and it had worn off over the days, every now and again it gets close to being triggered again. I don’t know the source for sure – I think it was correlated with a reaction to some of the food I had on set, maybe combined somehow with the severe ear blockage I had about a month ago after catching a (short-lived) cold on a long transatlantic flight? – but I have to say (and this is the point of my digression here) that it is a remarkably odd experience for me to feel slightly off balance for such an extended period. I’m used to being on the tips of my toes ready to skitter along the line at the edge of a low wall if the mood takes me while walking along. But I can’t imagine doing that now. I feel like I’ve lost my powers… it’s often amazing to me how little it takes to make a person feel very mortal, even fragile, again. It will no doubt pass.

I’ve been gentle on this final exam. I still find it disturbing that kids today (yes, I said “kids today” – perhaps my lack of equilibrium has put me in crotchety-old-man mode), even the very smart ones, typically do badly on any advanced exam that […] Click to continue reading this post →