Oh boy. Not what I really want to read just before going to bed. I’m likely to have dreams of falling into giant cracks* that open up under you no matter where you run. Did you have those when you were a child? I did. That one, and a slightly different version that involved a volcano, where….
Oh, wait. Back to the point. A report has come out with carefully researched projections from geophysicists and […] Click to continue reading this post
I was at an unusual and splendid event on Saturday. My friend and colleague, the writer Aimee Bender, organized a group of 25 of us to go to the top of Mount Wilson and spend the evening, mostly sitting in the dark, right up to well after midnight! What were we doing? Astronomy. We had the Mount Wilson Observatory’s 60 inch telescope entirely at our disposal!! This is not any old 60 inch telescope – it is one of the historic telescopes that’s up there, used since the early part of the 20th Century to discover things about our galaxy and beyond. (See also a post I did about the 100 inch, and the hike you can do up the mountain to see the site. [Update: Note – For this trip, we drove up, carpooling!])
Aimee had reserved the space well in advance, and we had a guide and a telescope operator (the excellent Shelley Bonus and Arbi Karapetian, respectively), and we brought food, which was spread out on a large table alongside vats of coffee and hot water supplied by the observatory.
This is an excellent way to spend an evening. Shelley is informative and enthusiastic, and does a great job of selecting various objects to be viewed (she also takes requests!) and giving lots of information and anecdotes about them, and much else besides. Arbi was also a gold mine of information.
The party was of 24 non-scientists (there were a lot of writers of various types, for example – poets, screenwriters, novellists, experts in poetry and literature and language…) and one physicist. As the latter, I tried to remain undercover, so as not to […] Click to continue reading this post
I really hope the scientists said that when they found this. Really. It’s a mountain, underwater, colonized by millions of starfish. Amazing.
It is at the Macquarie Ridge, near New Zealand. […] Click to continue reading this post
One of my favourite topics to think about, since I was very young, is the effect that direct contact with intelligent alien life would have on our society. It would be transformative, I think, whether it be initially seen as for good or ill. Of course, most imaginings of such an event usually considers the “ill” aspect. I was chatting about the issue recently with a friend of mine while hiking the other day and then I recalled that I forgot to do a blog post on last week’s Sunday night radio listening, part of which was about just this very topic!
The show was in two parts (both good… more on the second later) and the first was a 1994 recreation of the classic War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938. You know the one, I hope… It was a CBS radio broadcast by the Mercury Theater company, masterminded and led by Orson Welles, and was a Howard Koch radio adaptation of the 1898 H. G. Wells novel. As you may know, the radio show created a huge panic among the listening audiences at the time, brought on by a combination of the relative newness of the medium (it was done in the style of a series of on-the-scene breathless news reports) and the general atmosphere in world politics at the time. (There’s a rather good Wikipedia collection of information about it here.)
All of this puts me in a nostalgic mood, since during some of my school days I loved that War of the Worlds rock musical concept album by Jeff Wayne from 1978 (I knew of it only in the early to middle 80s), with a star-studded cast of musicians (Justin Hayward, Phil Lynott, Julie Covington, David Essex and Chris Thompson), and the wonderful voice of Richard Burton as the main protagonist (a journalist). Anybody else remember that? From so many listenings to it, I used to be able to sing along to every note and word of that album! Probably still can, even though I’ve not heard it in so long. Altogether now – Uuuu-Laaaa!!!, or Come on Thun-der-child!!… Here’s a Wikipedia link.
Anyway, I highly recommend the recreation of the broadcast. Find an hour and curl up next to your computer and pretend it’s a warm old valve radio. Leonard Nimoy plays […] Click to continue reading this post
Do you know about Pauli’s Other Principle? One statement of it is:
Fermions are discovered in the US, whereas bosons are discovered in Europe.
(In case you don’t know, it is useful to classify particles according to whether they come with integer (0, 1,2,…) multiples of a basic unit of spin, or half-integer (1/2, 3/2,…) multiples. Fermions include the electron and the quarks, bosons include the photon and the gluons…)
Jester at Resonaances examines the striking evidence for the Principle in modern particle physics, and examines some of the predictions that follow from it. It was clear from the principle, for example, that the SSC (Superconducting Super-Collider) in […] Click to continue reading this post
Hey, guess who was at Griffith Observatory recently? Brian May! He’s that astrophysicist who took some time off to play (excellent) guitar and compose songs in the band called Queen. Ring any bells? (I found the nice photo here.) So why was he in town? Well, a slightly giggly (but always great) Madeline Brand (of the NPR program “Day To Day”) went along to interview him, and you can listen to the interview here, and read a transcript, as well as see extracts from him book (written with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott), charmingly and blatantly (but knowingly?) unrealistically called “Bang! The Complete History of the Universe”. I actually looked through it in a bookstore the other day – looks rather nice. Wonderfully produced and I read some well-written passages, so might be worth picking up if you’re looking for a fresh read about the universe.
As a side note, I was a huge fan of his during my middle to late teenage years and early 20s, and […] Click to continue reading this post
I recommend these videos that show the inside workings of the ATLAS detector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using animation. They are quite stunning and simply lovely. Science aside for a moment (and you can learn about it in the posts listed below), remember that the LHC is simply the largest and most complicated device ever constructed, with the largest team of scientists assembled. It is a wonderful reminder of the international, collaborative, and cross-cultural nature of science. […] Click to continue reading this post
Oh! It is the open house for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory this weekend! I almost missed it since it was two weekends later last year. Image composite brazenly taken from their website.
I went last year and had a great time and so I strongly recommend it. Go along for your own interest, of course, but if you have any kids, take ’em along*. If interested, have a look at my detailed post from last year entitled “JPL the new Disneyland?”
As I said there: […] Click to continue reading this post
That’s it. The class is over… I have to admit that I’m pretty sad to see the end of it, although I’m very very tired. It was such a great group. (I’ll be toasting the end of it all with some of the splendid stuff to the right.)
Recall that we stepped away from black holes. After a look at cosmology for some lectures, where we understood the role of four crucial components in determining a universe’s properties (curvature, matter, radiation, and vacuum energy) we dove back into formalism for a short while (one lecture) to develop a little more the tools we needed to properly under stand how to formulate Einstein’s field equations.
It did not take long… You need only the idea that it makes sense to formulate everything in terms of objects that allow you to express the full sense of an equation in any coordinate system you care to write. Once that is done (the objects are called tensors, and the idea and how they work is pretty simple to get to grips with) the key to formulating the field equations of gravity is to have a look at the structure of other familiar systems. The field equations of electromagnetism (Maxwell’s equations) and the field equations for Newton’s formulation of gravity give the required clues. A rummage around the geometry to find the appropriate object to express the physics in terms of uncovers the Riemann tensor and its cousins (“contractions” to get Ricci and so forth), and you’re almost there. A step back to learn how to package energy […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, here’s a turn up for the books. I pass the buildings of the Center for Inquiry (West) in Hollywood quite regularly on my to-ings and fro-ings, and always wondered what it was. About what were they inquiring? My inquiring mind wanted to know, but by time I got back to a computer, I’d forgotten all about intending to Google it. I was sort of expecting that it might be some, er, fringe organization, given the neighbourhood (not 1/4 of a mile away is 
the mother ship (or one of them) for the Scientologists, and a similar distance in the other direction is the “Scientology Celebrity Centre” too, where John, Tom, Kirstie, and others from the remarkably large movie star Scientology set presumably go and hang out and feel… celebrated).
Well, it turns out that it’s not like that after all, but a place where, as far as I can tell, serious reason-based inquiry into issues surrounding the places where, e.g., science, religion, culture and superstition intersect (such as, you know, real life) is encouraged. I like that poster of theirs I found, for example (image to the right).
They have a number of speaker series, where all sorts of interesting people come to speak, and people come to […] Click to continue reading this post
Do you listen to the CERN LHC podcasts? They can be good. Every now and again, there’s a visitor there, and Brian Cox interviews them on site at the Large Hadron Collider. (Search archives for LHC or see links to lots of posts on it below, such as this one.) The most recent visit is by Phil Plait, aka the Bad Astronomer. They chat together about various aspects of the science to be done at the (soon to be switched on!) LHC, research in basic science in general, the scare-mongering business about the black holes destroying the earth (see here and here), conspiracy theories, and – of course – […] Click to continue reading this post
Wow, doesn’t time fly when you’re having a busy semester! I meant to tell you about this early March shoot a while back, but got swamped and it fell off the desk. I recalled that I’ve been neglectful because I learned that the show in which some of this will be used will air on Tuesday night (9:00pm I think – “The Universe” on the History Channel). The episode discusses the end of the universe, as far as I know. The point is to discuss the various speculations that have been made about how the universe might end, and what current knowledge (such as the famous 1998 supernova observations showing that the universe’s expansion is accelerating) seems to suggest about which of those scenarios might be more likely. Of course, for the discussions to make sense, you need someone to talk about some of the basics, such as what it means for the universe (indeed, the whole of spacetime) to expand and collapse. Who you gonna call? 
Ok. I’m one of many you can call. It was a new (to me) producer/writer, Savas Georgalis, who called this time, and we worked together on plans about how we might […] Click to continue reading this post
On NPR the other morning, I heard a piece about the Darwin Online Project. It sounds just amazing. I hope you find time to explore the site.
It has all sorts of fascinating things that you can download or view in the above (click for larger) manner (your very own copy of the Origin of Species, perhaps, or parts of his diaries and notebooks…), and is quite a treasure trove of one-stop-shop (but free) Darwin data. (There are even some of (his wife) Emma Darwin’s recipes.) The site is here.
Very importantly, the collection shows Darwin’s work in development, and not just the […] Click to continue reading this post
Taken at the Getty Villa, in Malibu. Well worth a visit. […] Click to continue reading this post
The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday April 27th (upcoming). 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 Loops Here’s the description from K C Cole:
“When you come right down to it, just about everything is loopy: planets, proteins or life stories, things have a way of coming around again, always with a slightly different spin. This month’s Categorically Not! was conceived as a tribute to Douglas Hofstadter’s new book, I am a Strange Loop, which uses […] Click to continue reading this post
