Category Archives: science

Dawkins, Atwood and More – On Darwin!

By | | , , , , , , , ,
2 Comments

As you may know I’m a Margaret Atwood fan (read my immoderately breathless account here), and I also think that Richard Dawkins is an excellent scientist and science communicator. On the other hand, as you also know from earlier discussions, I don’t think that his take-no-prisoners approach to the science and religion discussion is the best way forward. Anyway, I found this marvelous Newsnight special from last month. A celebration of Darwin and his work. It has lots of discussion about Darwin then and now, cultural and scientific impact, the ongoing debates, a new staging of a play, a recent film, and participating is Atwood, Dawkins, and the Rev. Richard Coles and the poet Ruth Padel (who is also a descendant of Darwin.) It is in four parts and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Audience View

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on Audience View

colloquium_audienceA shot of the gathering audience for my colloquium two weeks ago. (Click for larger view. I mentioned the circumstance behind it here.) It was a lot of fun, I must say. I spent a good deal of time preparing the slides in the day and a half leading up to it, and it was worth it. The audience seemed very attentive (or perhaps they are collectively very good at faking) and I got some great questions along the way, and at the end. My hope was to do a short and sweet colloquium […] Click to continue reading this post →

Emergence

By | | , , , ,
3 Comments

emergence_snapYou might remember a post I did back in January from Cambridge (the one in England), mentioning what I was up to on that quick trip.

It was a board meeting of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM), and I said, among other things:

ICAM has a great deal of interest in outreach -communicating science to the general public- and education, and this is one of the reasons I’ve been added to the board, since I’ve some experience and ideas to share in an advisory role. I’ll be giving a talk about some of these things using some projects of mine as examples (ASTI, blogging, etc). They’ve already been doing wonderful things in education and outreach, and have made it a priority to make it a major part of future activity. […]

I mentioned that one of the projects under development was their site called Emergent Universe, which promised to be rather fantastic to explore. It was under development at the time, and we (the board) spent some time at the meeting commenting on and making suggestions for its improvement. Well, it is finished, and boy it looks great! Suzi Tucker and her team should be immensely proud of their accomplishment.

There’s so much material there, beautifully presented (a still taken from it is […] Click to continue reading this post →

Friday Night Observations

By | | , , , ,
3 Comments

Friday evening was very enjoyable indeed, with some arts and literature near the start, and live scientific research toward the end. It began with a nice trundle across town on the 920 bus, when it eventually arrived (why are there still so many long gaps in the 720 and 920 schedules at crucial times of the day?) heading over to Westwood to the UCLA campus. I listened to music, read Jonathan Gold’s column in the LA Weekly, and listened to conversations around me. I got to Westwood and Wilshire after half an hour or so and walked up to campus and to Royce Hall, getting coffee on the way and even stopping in to an AT&T store to check on something. The campus was surprisingly quiet at 7:30 or so and I made my way over to Royce Hall, sending a text to a friend about later.

Besides the environmental reason I like to try to take public transport, it is also nice to plan it out and then be 15 minutes early and nice and relaxed before an event, and not be arriving all stressed due to traffic and then worried about parking and so forth. The show started late (as everything does in LA because there is a tacit assumption that everyone will be late due to traffic and parking and so people mostly were late because, of course, they know this assumption is in place. (At the 8:00pm actual official start time only about 20% of the audience that would arrive in the next 15 minutes were actually seated.)

atwood_gods_gardenersThe event, you’ll recall, was all about Margaret Atwood’s new book Year of the Flood. The author and the actors and musicians came onto the nicely decorated set and started with one of the songs specially written for the event. There is a limited set of engagements in 16 or 20 (I’ve forgotten) cities performing this reading and this is one of them. Margaret Atwood was the narrator and there were three actors reading the parts of three characters from the book. A central cult/religion that appears in the book (and the previous book with […] Click to continue reading this post →

Physics Nobel for String Theory Instead?

By | | , , , ,
4 Comments

So I don’t usually talk too much about raw politics here, but when the news broke early this morning about the Peace Prize for Barack Obama, I was sure it was a joke. (Or perhaps I was mishearing given that it was almost 2:00am and I was just coming home from a long night downtown which finished with several hours at the Edison bar.) When I woke up five hours later and heard that he’d accepted, I was a bit sad. I think it is simply a mistake, and a distraction. You give the prize to someone for having done stuff. Plain and simple. He has not really left the starting gate yet. (And frankly, on almost all counts – not just peace – he seems to be still at the starting gate trying to find his way out of that little box.) But it is nine months into his presidency, so good or great things can happen yet. But they have not yet. So this prize looks like a lazy political slap in the slap in the face of the Bush administration, a cheap political statement that backfires and cheapens the prize. Obama would have had a huge amount of respect from me if he’d at least tried to respectfully decline.

So stepping away from direct politics I was trying to think what might be a fun and instructive thing to think about this. How about alternative prizes for this week’s categories? Prizes to work (or authors of the work) that while extremely promising, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Jane Goodall

By | | , , , , ,
1 Comment

jane_goodall_bovardJust went to a marvellous talk by Jane Goodall here on the USC campus, in Bovard auditorium. She’s signing her new book as we speak! Among the many things she said, she emphasized one of my favourite themes with regards the environment (and so many other things, like community, education, etc): Act locally.

Have a look at her roots and shoots organization for example. It is very youth driven […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Nobel Prize Week is here!

By | | , , ,
2 Comments

As you already know, I am sure, it is Nobel Prize week. (See posts below for earlier such discussions.) Physiology/medicine has already been announced (see here: Yes, I definitely approve any effort to encourage research work on how aging and related mechanisms work)…. what was I saying again?… Oh, right …and Physics, Chemistry, literature, Peace and Economics will trot along into the spotlight day by day, into next week. All very exciting.

Now I have to say I don’t have any good ideas or strong feelings for what the Physics prize might be this year. Do you? I’ve a vague feeling that it might be some sort of important experimental effect (you know, like GMR a few years back – perhaps whatever it is that makes my ipod know which way is up all the time) instead of something flashier (but no less important) like inflation (the cosmic kind), which I am sure will have its day one day soon.

Ideas?

By the way, my “Nobel Prize: Who/What/Why” colloquium idea of a few years back has now been converted into a pair of lunches for the College Commons series. […] Click to continue reading this post →

All Went Well…

By | | , , , , , ,
1 Comment

When all is said and done (and since it is midnight and there’s nobody else here, I’ll take it that it has been and is) it was a good day at the West Hollywood Book Fair. I made it there in time to wander a bit and take in a number of the things on offer, just flitting from booth to booth and stopping to listen at various panels on various of the stages. chair_at_pdcI arrived early enough to check to see where my panel would be, double check that there were no schedule changes, and then set about to look around. Just before the panel I found a place doing a nice tasty hot sausage on a bun for lunch (plenty of fried onions and a sliver of mustard to top it all) and nibbled on that while listening to some poetry readings. (Or at least I think that is what they were.) (The picture shows the late afternoon sky with the giant chair sculpture at the Pacific Design Center across the street from the park the fair was in.)

Then I went to find my fellow panel members and we, uh, panelled away for an hour. Crucially, I found out what my panel was really about, which is good. The title “Eyeballing the Universe: Big and Small” was intended to invoke not just the act of […] Click to continue reading this post →

There Goes the Weekend

By | | , , , , ,
12 Comments

viscosity_scatterI’ve no idea why I do this to myself. I was just about managing things schedule-wise and aiming to make sure I have some fun on the weekend when the following thing happened. I went to Monday’s departmental colloquium and before it, ran into Moh, our organizer this year. I’d been trying to see if there was still room to schedule a speaker I’d thought of inviting, and he mentioned that the dates we’d earlier discussed had all been filled. Then he mentioned that he was desperately trying to find a speaker for next Monday, and was thinking that he’d have to simply cancel it that week.

This was at 4:05pm. Now watch how rapidly I move to ruin a perfectly good schedule […] Click to continue reading this post →

Out There

By | | , , , , , ,
3 Comments

cvj_scribbling_boardWell, I’m always a bit embarrassed to point to articles that are about me, especially ones that are decidedly generous – I’m British, remember – but it is specifically about some of the work I do when I’m not doing research, classroom teaching, sitting on committees, and so on and so forth. Things like blogging, and things that might be called “media outreach”. Lots of people ask why I do so much of this sort of thing, and so it is worth pointing to this recent piece by way of a partial answer. (The other part of the answer is to do with the response to and (possible) lasting effects of this sort of work. It is surprising in both quantity and variety, and quite humbling at times, and I’ll tell you about it in another post.) The article, written by Laurie Hartzell (with photo above left by Mara Zimet) for USC […] Click to continue reading this post →

Clusters

By | | , ,
2 Comments

I’m sitting on the sofa watching what has so far been a really excellent episode of The Universe on the History Channel. It is entitled “Cosmic Clusters” and it has been a lovely journey (15 minutes show time gone by so far) on an imaginary spaceship ride through the galaxy looking at formations of star clusters, and discussing the process of star formation in those clusters, their birth and the conditions involved, how those conditions change as things progress, the different kinds of stars that can result, the curious case of globular clusters (M13 is pictured below, by Yuugi Kitahara) and so forth. I think it is going to go on to discuss clusters of galaxies, and clusters of those…

m13_kitahara

I’ve learned quite a bit so far from watching it, actually. It is a really lovely discussion with excellent contributions from my friend and colleague Amy Mainzer, Alex […] Click to continue reading this post →

More Book Fun!

By | | , , , , , , ,
2 Comments

bookfair_homeMark your calendar for Sunday! The West Hollywood Book Fair is on from 10 am to 6:00 pm that day, and there’s so much to see and do with readings, panels, discussions, authors, special celebrity guests, food, exhibitions, writing workshops, discount book offers, signings, swag (no doubt), and so forth. I’ve not been before, but as you know from reading here I’m a big fan of cities going gaga over books for a while, being a regular visitor to the LA Times Book Festival when it comes in the Spring. The calendar of events and much more about the event can be found at the website here.

Here’s another thing. Despite the fact there was no mention of a spankingly splendid […] Click to continue reading this post →

Forward Looking

By | | , ,
2 Comments

optometerySo, do you like it? My new glasses. Think it’s a good look for me? Sort of gadgeteer-scientist extreme. With this I get all the different optical instrumentation combinations I need in one nifty device. Long distance viewing for seeing whether my bus is coming from a long way away, lenses for extreme closeup work in the workshop, night vision, the works…Neat, no?

Ok, I’m being silly. I went to the optometrist today after a bit of a long period between tests, and I always find it an interesting experience. I’m not sure why, but it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Moonriver

By | | , ,
2 Comments

moon Well, I’ve been somewhat neglectful of lots of space and astronomy type noticing (here on the blog) in the last couple of months or more, but it is not unusual for me to re-balance my foci a bit as my interests and available time permits. However, I’ve been meaning to point to the quite astonishing results that are being discussed in recent days… The confirmation of what appears to be a remarkable amount of water on the moon. It is an indirect set of measurements, using spectroscopy, (using results from three separate spacecraft) and is quite an interesting story. Happily, Phil over at Bad Astronomy has just put up a rather splendid summary of the story and I’m simply going to recommend that you pop over there and have a read. (There’s also a Space.com story by Andrea Thompson that is nice too.) Very interesting in the whole thing is the discussion of how the water got there, and why it is rather more mobile than you might expect (clue: the sun might be involved).

From a story by Ian Sample in the Guardian (which also discusses and speculates […] Click to continue reading this post →

Doomsday Fun and Games

By | | , , , , , , , ,
Comments Off on Doomsday Fun and Games

the_universeI’ve been wondering why over the last day or two I’ve been getting email about various apocalyptic scenarios. I’ve now figured out why, I think. On Tuesday, several scientists, myself included, played with the idea of how to destroy the earth! Well, it was on the History Channel in an episode of the show the Universe, (it was recorded back in June and July) entitled “Ten Ways to Destroy the Earth”. Of course, these are not scenarios we envision happening any time soon, but rather an excuse to talk about various kinds of science (from spontaneous symmetry breaking and the early universe, through planetary science, solar physics, and of course black holes and more). We list various favourite ways that were chosen to be discussed, and each physicist (although they called me an astrophysicist) picks a favourite. Fun stuff.

I chose putting a huge amount of antimatter at the core of the earth and letting it […] Click to continue reading this post →