Category Archives: science

MiniBooNE for Neutrinos

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MiniBoone
(Image from the MiniBooNE archive. This depicts a neutrino signal in the detector. )

There was a new result announced today. The MiniBoone collaboration has confirmed the more “standard” scenario for neutrino oscillations, and ruled out suggestions by an earlier experiment (LSND3) from a while back that might have implied the existence of sterile neutrinos. Two commenters, Scott H. and Bee, alerted me to this in another thread. Rather than me trying to paraphrase things, I’m going to first reproduce Scott H.’s comment here (he came back from a colloquium by Jocelyn Monroe on the topic earlier today): […] Click to continue reading this post →

Quark Soup Al Dente

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Here’s Rob Myers in action, giving Monday’s excellent departmental colloquium, entitled “Quark Soup Al Dente: Applied String Theory”:

robert c myers quark soup al dente

Here was his abstract:

In recent years, experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have discovered an exotic new state of matter known as the quark-gluon plasma. Simple theoretical considerations suggested that this plasma would behave like an ideal gas, however, the experiments show that it actually behaves very much like an ideal liquid. Thus the standard theoretical tools, such as perturbation theory and lattice gauge theory, are poorly suited to understand this new phase. However, recent progress in superstring theory has provided us with a theoretical laboratory for studying very similar systems of strongly interacting hot non-abelian plasmas. This surprising new perspective extracts the fluid properties of the plasma from physical processes in a black hole spacetime. At present, this approach seems to provide some of the best tools which theoretical physicists have to understand the heavy ion collisions at RHIC.

For a very good blog post on this issue, see Bee and Stefan’s post at Backreaction.

It was really excellent to see Rob and spend some time with him at dinner afterwards and at lunch the next day with my students. We got to chat over a nice Tapas-style meal and catch up a bit on what each other has been up to (both in and out of physics – Rob is one of my most long standing friends and collaborators in the field), and he even gave us a seminar on Tuesday before leaving.

Now, here’s a physics question for you: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Small Things Considered

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What small things? Elementary particles! The second of David Kestenbaum’s excellent report on CERN’s LHC aired yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered. You can see what I said about the first part here, and the second part can be listened to on the NPR website here. There’s also more video, extra audio, and a transcript.

atlas detector
(Image: The seven story tall Atlas detector at the LHC. (photo: Serge Bellegarde))

The focus on this one broadens out to marvel at the sheer scale of the experiment as a civil engineering feat, and also as a feat of human cooperation (consider the many countries, languages, different people, etc, who are collaborating to make this happen). It’s great to hear the many voices of the various scientists he talks to.

(It’s also great, on a personal note, to hear Jim Virdee (the CMS spokesperson) […] Click to continue reading this post →

NPR goes to LHC

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National Public Radio’s David Kestenbaum, who’s quite reliably an excellent reporter whose field reports I always enjoy, did a report on CERN’s (soon to be switched on) Large Hadron Collider (see also a Wiki here) today! Or rather, it was played on this morning’s Morning Edition. Here’s the site where you can listen to an archived version of the report, and read a transcript of some of it. It’s rather well done.

CMS Higgs simulation event

(Image: A simulation from the CMS experiment – part of the LHC – showing the decay of the Higgs particle after being created in one of the high energy collisions.)

It starts with a few theoretical physicist clichés in the introductory remarks leaving up to talking to Alvaro De Rujula, but it’s fine – not really too over the top, and done with good humour. Really good is that fact that once the physics issues start being discussed and described, he focuses on doing that well. The bottom line is that if your subject -the science- is good, that should take center stage in forming the core of the report for attracting and holding the audience’s attention.

And report does it well. Through interview and Kestenbaum filling in with further […] Click to continue reading this post →

Mexican Superlattices

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I grew some decent crystals once when I was younger. Perhaps you did too? It’s an excellent (and cheap) science project for a young person to do, so do encourage them to have a go, whenever you get the chance.

Whatever you do, perhaps it is not a good idea to show them these giant selenite (gypsum) crystals first:

mexico crystals

Fantastic aren’t they?! (Click for larger view.) They are in some truly extraordinary […] Click to continue reading this post →

Finding Your Way

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Here’s a map of science*!

map of science

map of science keyThe work, by Richard Klavans and Kevin Boyack, shows aspects of the connectivity of relations between scientific disciplines (colour key to the left), based on analysis of about 1.6 million scientific articles. Rather pretty isn’t it? And, yes, of course, very interesting to see the connectivity visualized like that.

Please visit their website to see how to visually slice all of this to highlight areas of the map by (a limited selection of) countries, regions, institutions, blue vs red state (!), etc.

There’s more information about the relationships in this Seed article, where there’s a […] Click to continue reading this post →

The First Green Shoots of Recovery?

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From the BBC, I learned that there’s been an unexpected turn around in science education in the UK:

The latest statistics from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service on applications to join full-time degree courses, show double-figure percentage rises compared with the same time last year for physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and technology.

The speculations have begun:

While admission officers admit that they are baffled by this sudden and unexpected surge in interest, many secondary school and university tutors are convinced this is a result of long hard work by many working our education system.

“We really make a point of doing fun, practical things with all pupils when it comes to the sciences,” said Richard West, the head of science and physics at St Peter’s Collegiate School in Wolverhampton.

“We are encouraging after school science activities like astronomy and animal clubs and taking part in national competitions.”

Various other possible reasons are discussed as well, such as: […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Fair Cop

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RibenaSoon time to sign up to help judge the California State Science Fair. I hope I can make it. Just to reassure you that not every entry is another trebuchet (just the physics, mechanics, etc., section and you’ll know what I mean), here’s a story about two schoolgirls from New Zealand, Jenny Suo and Anna Devathasan, who decided to test the claims of GlaxoSmithKline that their product – cartoned ready-to-drink Ribena – has high Vitamin C content. They set out to show that cheaper drinks were less healthy than Ribena, and found to their surprise that there were only trace amounts of Vitamin C at best.

I’m a bit shocked by this since I love Ribena, and grew up with it for years. I seem to remember that some of the largest writing on the packaging is about the huge amount of Vitamin C that you’re going to get. Admittedly, it’s not the vitamin C aspect that attracted me to it, of course -I just love the taste! But all the same, it’s a bit disappointing….

From an article by Mike Steere: Click to continue reading this post →

Questions and Answers about Theories of Everything

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joke hollywood star of brian greene Sometimes the journalists and editors get it right. In fact, they get it right a lot of the time, but you hear more about the complaints (sometimes from me, sometimes elsewhere) about them getting it wrong, when it comes to things like science coverage especially. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the set of questions and answers that are in a new article on MSNBC that a number of people pointed out to me yesterday and today. It starts out as an article about Brian Greene’s science outreach efforts (books, and tv and movie appearances, including a new one), with some discussion of how this is regarded by his colleagues, the value it has had in raising public awareness of physics (and fundamental science in general, I would argue), and so forth. All that is interesting, but not nearly as interesting to me right now as the later parts of the article which is simply a question and answer session. (Picture above right is from a fun joke I carried out last year that you can read here – be sure to read the comments too.)

Alan Boyle, the science editor, asks Brian a series of very thoughtful questions, and Brian gives some very thoughtful answers. The topics include research in string theory (of course), hopes and possibilities for experimental and observational results (such as from the LHC and Planck) that can inform and ultimately test the ideas coming from string theory and open up new vistas in fundamental physics, research on issues such as the landscape and the idea of multiple universes, research on better developing our understanding of string theory (to the point where we can, it is hoped, extract firm predictions from it), and many other things. (I wrote an introduction to aspects of the landscape issue here, and talked a bit about a Tom Siegfried article on the discussion amongst researchers here.)

It is nice to see an honest, non-inflammatory and non-hyped conversation about the issues, and read Brian’s personal take on some of these matters. The bottom is, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Vulgarization

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The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 25th March. 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. There’s a new website showing past and upcoming events here. You can also have a look at some of the descriptions I did of some events in some earlier posts (such as here and here), and the description of some of the recent special ones on Point of View and Uncertainty that I organized with K. C. as USC campus events (here, here (with video) and here).

Here is a description from the poster for the upcoming programme: […]
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E8

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E8 and the Gosset polytope 421

No, not another flower from my garden. This is a two dimensional projection (originally hand drawn in the 1960s by Peter McMullen, of a polytope that lives in eight dimensions, known as the Gossett polytope 421. Click here to be taken over to the American Institute for Mathematics (AIM) site for more information about it. (This image was computer generated by John Stembridge, and you can get higher resolution there for use on your T-shirts and so forth.)

What does this all pertain to? A new result from a team of mathematicians. They’ve done what some are calling the mathematician’s equivalent of mapping the genome of a Lie group, the one called E8. Groups pertain to symmetries. Symmetries are […] Click to continue reading this post →

More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, VII

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You can catch up on some of the earlier Scenes by looking at the posts listed at the end of this one. Through the course of doing those posts I’ve tried hard to summarize my views on the debate about the views of Smolin and Woit – especially hard to emphasize how the central point of their debate that is worth some actual discussion actually has nothing to do string theory at all. Basically, the whole business of singling out string theory as some sort of great evil is rather silly. If the debate is about anything (and it largely isn’t) it is about the process of doing scientific research (in any field), and the structure of academic careers in general. For the former matter, Smolin and Woit seem to have become frustrated with the standard channels through which detailed scientific debates are carried out and resolved, resorting to writing popular level books that put their rather distorted views on the issues into the public domain in a manner that serves only to muddle. On the latter, there is a constant claim that string theory and its proponents are somehow brainwashing and/or frogmarching young people into working on that area to the exclusion of all else. The authors seem oblivious to some simple facts to the contrary there: (1) that you simply can’t do that to genuinely smart, creative young people; (2) that even students who have string theorists as their Ph.D or postdoc advisors often work on non-string theory research topics (3) that they’re doing an excellent job of either driving young people away from working on some of their favourite alternatives – or from pursuing theoretical physics altogether – by failing to clearly explain their merits and by using the press to help turn this into a distorted spectacle.

I’ve summarized a lot of what I think in the latter part of this post.

There are two major problems with how live debates take place in the public sphere. One is that the average person listening to the debate cannot know whether much of what Smolin and Woit claim as facts are right or wrong (or anyone on the other side of the debate, for that matter). When someone disputes a […] Click to continue reading this post →