Category Archives: science

Nick Halmagyi: Why I do Science

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Nick HalmagyiI’m pleased to introduce a guest blogger today. It’s Nick Halmagyi, who you might have seen comment here from time to time. Nick is a postdoctoral researcher in Theoretical Physics, currently at the Enrico Fermi Institute in Chicago. Before that, he was a graduate student in our High Energy Physics group at USC, which is where I met him. Nick wrote his reflections below for Seed, and he reproduces a version of it (with permission – see details below*) here. I hope you enjoy it.

-cvj

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Theoretical physics is a tough subject. Just one example of how hard things can get is when you ramp up the energy density of a system, the physics used to describe the system itself starts to change. At first it may be a small tweak in the parameters that appear in the equations (the electric charge for example), but then there can be large, abrupt transitions.

The biggest system we study is the universe, and immediately after the big bang all of its energy occupied a tiny region of space. Back then, the energy density was enormous, and as the universe grew over time it underwent several transitions before it became what we now observe.

I’m a theoretical physicist, in part, because I relish the challenge of studying the entire […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From the Industry XVII: Jump Thoughts

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A commenter asked how the aforementioned movie viewing and panel discussion went on Friday (movie: Jumper), and so I thought expand a bit on the answer I gave:
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It went very well. We were at the School of Cinematic Arts, at USC. We had a full house in the Norris Theatre, which was great to see. Most of the audience was students from the SCA, I think, with some of the faculty present, and people from the film’s parent studio, and several others. For the panel, present were two of the film’s producers, the visual effects supervisor, costume supervisor, production designer… basically, the perfect people to have a discussion with about the physics! I won’t try to list all names since I did not catch all of them and don’t want to mis-credit people for being there who weren’t.

Teleportation physics aside for a moment, I’m very impressed with how they realized […] Click to continue reading this post →

Movie Spoiler?

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No, not spoiler in that sense. Doug Liman’s new action movie “Jumper” is all about teleportation, you see, and one of the questions that’s going to be on people’s minds is something like “Is teleportation really possible, or is it just some silly science fiction thing?”. I like it when such questions come up, and I like trying to answer them too.

This time I get to do it officially, since Doug Liman’s people are doing a private screening of the film this evening and there’ll be a panel of some of the film’s creators and a scientist for questions and answers afterward. I’ll be the scientist.

The downside is that I’ll be the bad guy of the evening by having to pour a bit of cold water on some of the flights of fancy. The spoiler, you see, as in spoilsport. The upside (besides, you know, free movie) is that I’ll maybe get to explain some really […] Click to continue reading this post →

Stellar Basketball Physics

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shaq on supernovae (from the onion)So the Onion’s gone and mixed some astrophysics with basketball. Headline:

“Shaq Terrified Of Phoenix Suns After Reading About Supernovas”

(Image on right also from the Onion.)
You can tell how it’s going to go from the title, although it’s rather amusing just how much stellar astrophysics they pour into the article (not even trying to disguise it much). Extract:

…new Phoenix Suns center Shaquille O’Neal admitted Monday that, upon reading about the phenomenon of massive stellar explosions popularly known as supernovas, he is now terrified of the entire organization.

(Wow… Shaq isn’t in LA any more? Huh. I’m so out of it. Update: Oh, yeah, I remember now. He went to Miami in 2004. Evidently I don’t follow the NBA.)

…and further: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Mass Matters

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Well, only four weeks and change behind us in this course, and… the class (see here and here) is ready to understand this wonderful equation:

the schwarzschild solution

and all that it implies. What is it? It encodes the shape of spacetime around a spherical blob of mass of total mass M. No, don’t worry too much about the details, since this is not a lecture about General Relativity….. it is just nice (I hope) every now and again to get a look at the sorts of things we use in our day to day work. This “warped” spacetime encodes what we interpret as the gravitational field (in the old Newtonian language) due to a spherical (or, to a good approximation, almost spherical) mass. Like the sun, or the earth, or that tennis ball in the corner there*. It is an exact solution […] Click to continue reading this post →

Randall on Colbert

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lisa randall on colbertMy first time sitting down to watch this show in a while and, bizarrely enough, there’s a colleague on the telly! Well, I think that perhaps Lisa was trying a little bit too hard in one or two places to get the physics out. On Colbert, I think you just have to go with the flow and the comedy! But she got quite a bit out in the short time she had…

My favourite bit:

Randall: “Like…the fact that Einstein has taught us that spacetime can be curved or warped…”

Colbert: “Don’t patronize me, I know that…”

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Science Debate 2008 – Closer to Reality

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So Chris and Sheril have announced the next step in the journey to a real debate about science issues of note that intersect with the current political sphere. And they’ve come a long way in a short time! Here’s some of what they said in a recent post:

ScienceDebate2008 is now co-sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academies, and the Council on Competitiveness. We were looking at venues, and finally settled on an offer from the Philadelphia-based Franklin Institute–named, of course, after one of this country’s first and greatest scientists. We can’t think of a more appropriate venue.

And guess what?! They’ve actually invited the candidates: Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Barack Obama.

So the next step is to get the event (they suggest April 18, 2008) taken seriously by the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Equivalence

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equivalence principle

Well, Tuesday was a big day in class. We reached a landmark – the introduction of one of my very favourite thoughts of the 20th Century: the Equivalence Principle. This is the realization of Einstein’s that there’s something profoundly odd about Newtonian mechanics and Newtonian gravity that hints at something deeper.

Quick reminder from high school (just two formulae, please bear with me): You know […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Reply

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Explorer 1 SpacecraftToday is the 50th anniversary of the day the USA replied to the world-changing Sputnik launch by the USSR almost four months earlier (see my post), as well as Sputnik 2 (carrying the dog Laika) a month after. In some sense, the space race began in earnest with this launch of the craft called Explorer.

A great thing about the Explorer 1 craft was that it even did some groundbreaking […] Click to continue reading this post →

Oliver Sacks on Music

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Oliver Sacks must have a new book out or something*. I’ve heard him twice in as many days in radio pieces, and that usually means only one thing. He’s always an interesting interviewee, and this time the focus is on music. The first piece I heard was one of those amusingly produced pieces by Robert Krulwich, on NPR’d Morning Edition. It was all about people who essentially hallucinate music – it spontaneously appears in their ears and there’s often nothing they can do about it. The audio for the piece can be heard here. It was quite a good piece and I recommend it.

The next thing I heard was on the BBC World Service (my usual late night listening) the segment called “The Interview”. This is a much longer piece, talking about the role of […] Click to continue reading this post →

Science Communication

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At the Science Blogging conference earlier this month, there was a very interesting discussion about communication of science, science and the media, and science in politics. It was led by Jennifer Jacquet of Shifting Baselines, and Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney (both of The Intersection), who each did a mini-presentation (Sheril and Chris doing a sort of tag-team double act, starting off with discussing Sciencedebate 2008, and moving into discussions of “framing” science, the separation of the cultures, and so forth – and of course, opportunities for bloggers). Happily there was a video made, and I’ve embedded it below (the quality is mixed, but overall […] Click to continue reading this post →

Near Enough

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asteroid 2007 tu24It’s not going to be naked-eye visible, but give a thought tonight to the 250 metre asteroid (2007 tu24) that is going to swing by close to earth tonight! Or, if you have a “modest” telescope, go and look at it. It’s going to scrape by at 1.4 times the distance of the moon. That’s pretty close, by astronomical standards, and gives scientists a chance to see a near earth object rather more closely than usual. From the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Gandalf, Balrog, Physics…

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So while you have a look at the following enthusiastic and amusing discussion about how far the Balrog and Gandalf must have fallen (in the film version of the Two Towers), involving discussions of terminal velocities and Balrog profile approximations for air resistance estimates (and so forth)…

(links here, here, and here*)

…ask yourself why on earth nobody in the discussion (as far as I can tell from a quick […] Click to continue reading this post →