Category Archives: science

Diverse Futures

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I was asked by editors of the magazine Physics World’s 30th anniversary edition to do a drawing that somehow captures changes in physics over the last 30 years, and looks forward to 30 years from now. This was an interesting challenge. There was not anything like the freedom to use space that I had in other works I’ve done, like my graphic book about science “The Dialogues”, or my glimpse of the near future in my SF story “Resolution” in the Twelve Tomorrows anthology. I had over 230 pages for the former, and 20 pages for the latter. Here, I had one page. Well, actually a little over 2/3 of a page (once you take into account the introductory text, etc).

So I thought about it a lot. The editors wanted to show an active working environment, and so I thought about the interiors of labs for some time, looked up lots of physics breakthroughs over the years, and reflected on what might come. I eventually realized that the most important single change in the science that can be visually depicted (and arguably the single most important change of any kind) is the change that’s happened to the scientists. Most importantly, we’ve become more diverse in various ways (not uniformly across all fields though), much more collaborative, and the means by which we communicate in order to do science have expanded greatly. All of this has benefited the science greatly, and I think that if you were to get a time machine and visit a lab 30 years ago, or 30 years from now, it will be the changes in the people that will most strike you, if you’re paying attention. So I decided to focus on the break/discussion area of the lab, and imagined that someone stood in the same spot each year and took a snapshot. What we’re seeing is those photos tacked to a noticeboard somewhere, and that’s our time machine. Have a look, and keep an eye out for various details I put in to reflect the different periods. Enjoy! (Direct link here, and below I’ve embedded the image itself that’s from the magazine. I recommend reading the whole issue, as it is a great survey of the last 30 years.)

Physics World Illustration showing snapshots in time by Clifford V. Johnson

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Jumpers, Sweaters, and So Forth…

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If you’ve been following on instagram you’ll know that I spent some time over the last weeks working on an illustration that was commissioned by a physics magazine. (Feels odd saying that, commissioned, but that’s exactly what happened. Apparently I’m able to add professional illustrator to my CV now. Huh.) Anyway, the illustration will show the interior of a lab. I’ll let you know more about it closer to publication. Much of the focus was on the people, and for reasons that will become clear, I did a bit of a throwback to the 80s, and so tried to reflect that period somewhat, old computers and ghastly sweaters and all. Here’s a sequence of stages of a corner of the work (click on it for a larger view):

-cvj
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Science Friday Book Club Wrap!

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Don’t forget, today live on Science Friday we (that’s SciFri presenter Ira Flatow, producer Christie Taylor, Astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, and myself) will be talking about Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” once more, and also discussing some of the physics discoveries that have happened since he wrote that book. We’ll be taking (I think) caller’s questions too! Also we’ve made recommendations for further reading to learn more about the topics discussed in Hawking’s book.

Join us!

-cvj

(P.S. The picture above was one I took when we recorded for the launch of the book club, back in July. I used the studios at Aspen Public Radio.) Click to continue reading this post →

And So it Begins…

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It’s that time of year again! The new academic year’s classes begin here at USC today. I’m already snowed under with tasks I must get done, several with hard deadlines, and so am feeling a bit bogged down already, I must admit. Usually I wander around the campus a bit and soak up the buzz of the new year that you can pick up in all the campus activity swarming around. But instead I sit at my desk, prepping my syllabus, planning important dates, adjusting my calendar, exchanging emails, (updating my blog), and so forth. I hope that after class I can do the wander.

What will I be teaching this semester? The second part of graduate electromagnetism, as I often do. Yes, in a couple of hours, I’ll be again (following Maxwell) pointing out a flaw in one of the equations of electromagnetism (Ampere’s), introducing the displacement current term, and then presenting the full completed set of the equations – Maxwell’s equations, one of the most beautiful sets of equations ever to have been written down. (And if you wonder about the use of the word beautiful here, I can happily refer you to look at The Dialogues, starting at page 15, for a conversation about that very issue…!)

Speaking of books, if you’ve been part of the Science Friday Summer reading adventure, reading Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, you should know that I’ll be back on the show on Friday talking with Priyamvada Natarajan, producer Christie Taylor, and presenter Ira flatow about the book one more time. There may also be an opportunity to phone in with questions! And do look at their website for some of the extra material they’ve bene posting about the book, including extracts from last week’s live tweet Q&A.

Anyway, I’d better get back to prepping my class. I’ll be posting more about the semester (and many other matters) soon, so do come back.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

DC Moments…

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I’m in Washington DC for a very short time. 16 hours or so. I’d have come for longer, but I’ve got some parenting to get back to. It feels a bit rude to come to the American Association of Physics Teachers annual meeting for such a short time, especially because the whole mission of teaching physics in all the myriad ways is very dear to my heart, and here is a massive group of people devoted to gathering about it.

It also feels a bit rude because I’m here to pick up an award. (Here’s the announcement that I forgot to post some months back.)

I meant what I said in the press release: It certainly is an honour to be recognised with the Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award (for my work in science outreach/engagemnet), and it’ll be a delight to speak to the assembled audience tomorrow and accept the award.

Speaking in an unvarnished way for a moment, I and many others who do a lot of work to engage the public with science have, over the years, had to deal with not being taken seriously by many of our colleagues. Indeed, suffering being dismissed as not being “serious enough” about our other […] Click to continue reading this post →

Radio Radio Summer Reading!

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Friday will see me busy in the Radio world! Two things: (1) On the WNPR Connecticut morning show “Where We Live” they’ll be doing Summer reading recommendations. I’ll be on there live talking about my graphic non-fiction book The Dialogues: Conversations about the Nature of the Universe. Tune in either … Click to continue reading this post →

Retreated

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Sorry I’ve been quiet on the blog for a few weeks. An unusually long gap, I think (although those of you following on instagram, twitter, Facebook and so forth have not noticed a gap). I’ve been hiding out at the Aspen Center for Physics for a while.

You’ve probably read things I’ve written about it here many times in past years, but if not, here’s a movie that I produced/directed/designed/etc about it some time back. (You can use the search bar upper right to find earlier posts mentioning Aspen, or click here.)

Anyway, I arrived and pretty much immediately got stuck into an interesting project, as I had an idea that I just had to pursue. I filled up a whole notebook with computations and mumblings about ideas, and eventually a narrative (and a nice set of results) has emerged. So I’ve been putting those into some shape. I hope to tell you about it all soon. You’ll be happy to know it involves black holes, entropy, thermodynamics, and quantum information […] Click to continue reading this post →

Google Talk!

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I think that I forgot to post this link when it came out some time ago. I gave a talk at Google when I passed though London last Spring. There was a great Q & A session too – the Google employees were really interested and asked great questions. I talked in some detail about the book (The Dialogues), why I made it, how I made it, and what I was trying to do with the whole project. For a field that is supposed to be quite innovative (and usually is), I think that, although there are many really great non-fiction science books by Theoretical Physicists, we offer a rather narrow range of books to the general public, and I’m trying to broaden the spectrum with The Dialogues. In the months since the book has come out, people have been responding really positively to the book, so that’s very encouraging (and thank you!). It’s notable that it is a wide range of people, from habitual science book readers to people who say they’ve never picked up a science book before… That’s a really great sign!

Here’s the talk on YouTube:

Direct link here. Embed below: […] Click to continue reading this post →

News from the Front, XV: Nicely Entangled

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This is one of my more technical posts about research activity. It is not written with wide readability in mind, but you may still get a lot out of it since the first part especially talks about about research life.

Some years ago (you’ll perhaps recall), I came up with an interesting construction that I called a “Holographic Heat Engine”. Basically, it arises as a natural concept when you work in what I call “extended” gravitational thermodynamics where you allow the spacetime heat_enginecosmological constant to be dynamical. It is natural to associate the cosmological constant with a dynamical pressure (in the usual way it appears as a pressure in Einstein’s equations) and if you work it though it turns out that there’s a natural conjugate quantity playing the role of volume, etc. Black hole thermodynamics (that you get when you turn on quantum effects, giving entropy and temperature) then get enhanced to include pressure and volume, something that was not present for most of the history of the subject. It was all worked out nicely in a paper by Kastor et. al. in 2009. So…anyway, once you have black holes in that setup it seemed to me (when I encountered this extended framework in 2014) that it would be wilful neglect to not define heat engines: closed cycles in the p-V plane that take in heat, output heat, and do mechanical work. So I defined them. See three old posts of mine, here, here, and here, and there are others if you search.

Well, one of the things that has been a major quest of mine since 2014 is to see if I can make sense of the extended thermodynamics for quantum field theory, and then go further and translate the heat engines and their properties into field theory terms. This seemed possible to me all the way back then since for positive pressure, the cosmological constant is negative, and when you have gravity with negative cosmological constant you’ve got duality to strongly coupled field theories. So those heat engines must be some kind of special tour in the field theories. the efficiency of an engine must mean something about the tour. Moreover, since the efficiency of the engine is bounded by the Carnot efficiency, it seems we have a naturally defined dimensionless number that has a fundamental bound… Alarm bells ringing! – Opportunity knocking to learn something new and powerful! Maybe even important!

So I chipped away at this for some time, over years, doing various projects that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Make with Me!

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Bay Area! You’re up next! The Maker Faire is a wonderful event/movement that I’ve heard about for years and which always struck me as very much in line with my own way of being (making, tinkering, building, creating, as time permits…) On Sunday I’ll have the honour of being on one of the centre stages (3:45pm) talking with Kishore Hari (of the podcast Inquiring Minds) about how I made The Dialogues, and why. I might go into some extra detail about my research into making graphic books, and the techniques I used, given the audience. Why yes, I’ll sign books for you afterwards, of course. Thanks for asking.

I recommend getting a day pass and see a ton of interesting events that day! Here’s a link to the Sunday schedule and amor there you can see links to the whole faire and tickets!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Feynman Centenary

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Turns out that 100 years ago today, Richard Feynman was born. His contributions to physics – science in general – are huge, and if you dig a little you’ll find lots of discussion about him. His beautiful “Lectures on Physics…” books are deservedly legendary, and I wish that my old Imperial College lecturers had spent more time impressing upon us young impressionable undergraduate minds (c1986) to read those instead of urging us at every opportunity to read the famous “Surely You’re Joking…” book, which even back then in my naivety, I began to recognise as partly a physicist’s user manual for how to be a jerk to those around you. (I know I’m in the minority on this point…)

But anyway, in honour of the occasion, I give you a full page from my book containing a chat about the Feynman diagram. It’s an example of how something that’s essentially a cartoon can play a central role in understanding our world (something that’s of course, not unknown in cartoons…) Click the image above for an enlarged view.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Frank Buckley Interviews…

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Turns out that Frank Buckley, the news anchor at KTLA 5, is not just a really great guy (evident from his manner on TV), but also a really excellent interviewer with a sharp curiosity that gives me hope that great journalism is still alive, well, and in good hands. I showed up at the station expecting to just have a pleasant chat around the book and be done with it, but I walked into the room and he’d done all his research and was sitting with extensive notes and so forth about lots of physics ideas he’d read in the book that he wanted to talk about! So we have a blast talking about the physics of our universe and the world around us in some in-depth detail. It was fantastic, and just the kind f conversation I hope that the book celebrates and inspires people to have!

Check out our interview here (embed below), and be sure to tune in to his […] Click to continue reading this post →

Take Your Pick

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I’ll at two festivals this weekend, which I admit seems a bit over-ambitious! Let me tell you a little about both.

One event is the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which you’ve read me talking about many times over the years (that’s a photo from 2015 above). It’s the largest such festival in the USA, and is a wonderful celebration of books and related things. It is on Saturday and Sunday.

The other event is the San Diego Comic Fest, which also runs through the weekend (although it starts Friday). Don’t mix this up with ComicCon (although there are connections between the two if you care to dig a little to find out).

As I write this post I’m actually basking in the sun as I ride on the train (the Pacific Surfliner) from Los Angeles to San Diego, as tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk at the comics fest. Here are the details:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

North Carolina Science Fair!

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Tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk at the North Carolina Science Festival! The talk will be about black holes, time, space, movies, and books, held inside the historic Morehead planetarium. I’ll sign the book for you after if you want.
Here is a link to the event.

(On the plane over, rather than doing my usual sketch-a-face-from-a-magazine exercise you might be familiar with from earlier posts, e.g. here, I made some new sketches for use in the talk. One of those is above.)

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →