Category Archives: science

Physics Intervened…

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Well, I’d have hoped to have done a post today on a few things, but physics intervened. Recall that the Southern California Strings Seminar is on right now here at USC, and since I am the organizer, I’ve been nipping about serving up piles of various types of tasty cookies (hunted down on a late night visit to Trader Joe’s last night – gotta have good cookies to go with the coffee you see), announcing the speakers, and so forth, as well as actually sitting and enjoying the really excellent talks that we’ve had from several young people. Day one (finished off with dinner, wine, beer, and chats with people from USC, UCLA, and UCSB at Bacaro) was just great and day two is in the morning and so I’d better finish up this post and get to sleep.

sunset from home depot on sunset 5th december 2008

We had a spectacular sunset on Saturday. Another example of a physics intervention, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Are We There Yet?

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Well, no we are not.

Are we making progress? Sometimes I think we are, and other times I’m not so sure, but what do you think?

I’m talking about that thing I talk about a lot: science and scientists being part of the broader culture. This time on TV. A recent LA Times article by Mary McNamara (one of their television critics) surveys a number of shows on TV in this context and is, on balance, rather positive about where things are compared to where they used to be. I’m inclined to agree (and I should say that I found the article itself rather valuable as a quick survey – I don’t keep up with all the TV produced out there, and found myself surprised here and there). She also quotes conversations with Jennifer Ouellette (of Cocktail Party Physics) and yours truly on the issue, (mentions the recently established Science and Entertainment Exchange I blogged about two weeks ago), and overall produced a pretty good article. (The full article is here.)

I’m still on the fence about all this, though. Once you scratch the surface a bit, I don’t think there is yet a single example of what I think is possible, and what I think should be fairly routine before we declare that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Improv!

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categorically not! performers on seventh december 2008

(Categorically Not! presenters and performers on 7th Dec. 2008)

The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday December 7th. The Categorically Not! series of events that are 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 Improv!. Here’s the description from K C Cole: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Southern California Strings Seminar

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Takuya Okuda talking at the SCSS at UCLA, Dec. 2007Takuya Okuda talking about Wilson Loops at the SCSS, UCLA, Dec. 2007. Click to enlarge.

The next regional string meeting is a two-day one at USC, this Monday and Tuesday. It’s going to be full of interesting talks and conversations, as usual. Please encourage your graduate students to come, especially, 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 are: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Conjunction!

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Tomorrow night and the night after (Sunday and Monday), you should look West just after sunset, if you’ve a clear sky. There’s going to be a rare conjunction of Venus, Jupiter, and the crescent moon. Already, Jupiter and Venus look great together (they make a lovely couple) each night, but the trio – the three brightest objects in the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Cartograms

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electoral map of USA by areaThere was a lovely segment on NPR the other day about cartograms – representations or maps of regions that are weighted or highlighted according to the sort of data you’re interested in studying. It was an interview with Mark Newman (Univ. of Michigan) about the book “The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live” (by Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford).

electoral map of USA by electoral college votesTo the right is an example of the sorts of things they do in the book, showing the re-adjusting the map of the USA to have the size of a state correspond to its electoral college weight (below) instead of its geographical weight (above).

There are examples of the maps they have presented on the NPR site, and of course the audio of the interview (and a short […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXVII – Light Speed

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Here we go again! Tonight sees another new episode of the new series of The Universe on the History Channel (you can watch it as a warm up to The Atom Smashers, on PBS), and the episode is all about the speed of light! I’ve no idea how this one will turn out, but for my segments we did some rather fun things to illustrate some of the key concepts. The main idea is that the laws of physics are rather different from ordinary Newtonian/Galilean ones when you are moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed the light. This is what we learned from Einstein’s Special Relativity. How do you illustrate this for a TV viewing audience? Well, one way is to imagine what would happen if the speed of light was a lot closer to everyday speeds. Then you could illustrate some of the effects in a fun way.

Well, one thing led to another and somehow (after a lot of email discussions of the physics with Darryl Rehr, the writer/director) it ended up that I was supposed to do […] Click to continue reading this post →

Particle Physics on TV Tonight

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marcela carena in atom smashers independent lens

I learned from Katherine on the US/LHC blog earlier that tonight on PBS is an airing of a documentary called “The Atom Smashers”. It’s about particle physicists at Fermilab, in Illinois (including my friend Marcela Carena in the photo above). I’m curious to see what they’ve put together, hoping that it’ll give the public some insights into the life of the various kinds of scientist involved, and the exciting physics that engages them – and those of us on the outside who eagerly await the results of their work. The search for the Higgs boson is a focus. You can see a trailer here. I’ll be watching, I think. It is at 10:30pm on PBS, in the Independent Lens series, but be sure to check your local listings since times may vary.

Enjoy!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXVI – Science and Entertainment Exchange

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Well, I probably am not worthy of the press credentials I was carrying around with me on Wednesday, as several days later I had still not done my “report” on the event. Well, here it is.

science entertainment exchange

I went to a press conference and a symposium that relates directly to the issues I was talking about in my Tuesday post and its comment stream. All the things I was talking about with regards better contact between the science community and the filmmaking community so as to make films (and shows) that better represent science and scientists more accurately through something closer to a collaborative mode were brought up in these meetings and discussions. It was great to see this issue being taken seriously, and a well-meant effort being made. The core of the idea is to set up an office that will coordinate things – acting as a sort of clearing house that will put filmmakers (of all aspects of the process whether screenwriter or director) in touch with willing scientists who can be helpful in various topics. This is the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

A key thing that I have mentioned here many times before is the issue of it being about more than just fact-checking near-completed work. If scientists are involved at […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tiring, but Good

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mount hood oregonTo the left is Mount Hood, in Oregon. I often see it when I fly on my way up North. I often see it when I fly on my way up North. I love seeing it as it emerges from the clouds rather pleasantly, looking a bit like a cloud itself for a moment, perhaps oddly shaped, but then becoming something rather different entirely.

I was in Vancouver for a few days last week, and chatted with a few friends and colleagues (such as Moshe Rozali, Mark Van Raamsdonk, and Joanna Karczmarek) at the Physics department at UBC, and gave a seminar. I talked about ongoing work on ideas I’m still struggling to beat into shape (mentioned a lot in earlier posts about my retreat at Aspen this Summer). This was a deliberate choice. Sometimes it is very useful to force oneself to do a pedagogical seminar on work in progress. This is not so much because someone in the audience might toss up an idea that you did not consider (this can happen, sometimes as a result of a good question – but it is less likely when the audience has no expertise in the area under discussion, as was the case here) but mostly because of the very act of preparing the seminar itself. It forces you to take the wider view, consider the big picture, and try to motivate why you are doing what you’re doing, or why you picked on path over another along the way. I find this process can be quite valuable as an internal pruning and self-checking exercise.

So it was that I spent three hours at LAX writing the first 2/3 of the talk. This is not […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXV – Parallel Universes

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While most of the episodes of the History Channel’s The Universe series are firmly about scientific knowledge of the universe that has been tested and verified (from planetary science, to solar physics, to stellar evolution, and various topics in cosmology, and so forth), they also like to treat topics that have a higher component of more speculative material. This is of course fine, as long as it is made clear what is speculation, and what is established. Recall that I took part in a really fun episode called Cosmic Holes, which talked about white holes and wormholes -entirely speculative objects – right alongside the physics of black holes, objects that we know are physically realized in our universe. (See here, here, and here.) I think that Laura Verklan, the writer/director, did a really excellent job of separating out the speculative from the established. Similar things can be said for the episode Cosmic Apocalypse, done by writer/director Savas Georgalis (see here), which focused on scenarios about how the universe might end, given what we have already established about how it was in early times and how it is now.

I’m hoping that the upcoming (tonight!) episode entitled Parallel Universes will also be a nice and clear piece of work discussing the speculative ideas concerning the possibility of parallel universes – what the ideas are, why it is a fun idea, what it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Einstein on Monday

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You’ll perhaps recall that a few days ago I mentioned some upcoming science shows in which I talk about various science ideas. I said, among other things:

[…] one is called Parallel Universes and the other is called (I think) Light Speed, both doing more or less what it says on the packet. I’ve not seen the final cut of either show this time, so I’ll be curious to see how they put the material together. They’ll air in the upcoming new season of the series, on the 18th November and the 25th November, respectively. I think – not 100% sure – that is all that is coming up from me on that series for the rest of this year (there is another thing due on that channel in December, and then that’s certainly enough of me showing up in your living rooms for a while), not counting the reruns […]

Well, I was wrong about the latter. It is on Monday, I was recently informed! This is, i think, going to be a really very good documentary on Einstein and his work, from a somewhat different angle than maybe you’ve seen before. It’ll focus quite a bit on the ideas and concepts and, importantly, the process by which Einstein developed his […] Click to continue reading this post →

Science and the New President

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Last week the Guardian did a special podcast about Barack Obama’s science policies, and the challenges that lie ahead for the new administration. It’s actually rather good (at least the parts I’ve heard so far – I’m listening to it in pieces while travelling) and I recommend it. They have lots of guests, many of whom you’ve maybe heard of (Lesley Stone, Martin Rees, Diana Liverman, Chris Mason, P Z Myers, Lawrence Krauss, Martin Barstow), and the issue is explored from several angles, from climate change, through stem cells, to the space program. […] Click to continue reading this post →