Category Archives: science

String Theory Goes A Little Bit Country?

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n these hard times for basic science research, scientists look elsewhere for supplementary financial support. It seems that the monolithic entity simply known as “String Theory” is trying to diversify its funding sources even more creatively than before! Some recently spotted* evidence in the Nashua Telegraph in New Hampshire:: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Government Gets Stern

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Well, as you can tell by looking in the “environment” category here, I’m likely to be pleased to hear about the Stern report, released yesterday (Guardian article and links to report here) and also pleased to hear that the UK government is taking the report seriously…. more or less.

I’d have a lot more to say, but I’ve said so much about this already, and I’m not really up to a long post on this right now. But I could not let this excellent (and hopefully landmark) event go unmarked. The point, as has been said before:- Nobody is going to get going on this because it is “the right thing to do”, since it is difficult for individuals and businesses to act in a way that makes things less than convenient for yourself for a cause that seems so abstract. Pure market forces will not do it either. We need actual leadership from the scientists -which has more or less happened for a while now- and action and structure put in place by the people who will really get things going: economists and then governments (because they follow the money).

Well, Stern is a major figure in the “economists” group, and so this is good news. I must admit though that it really did make me cringe every time I heard the announcers on BBC Radio 4, while trying to emphasise how significant the report’s findings were, saying things like […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Promising Sign?

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Hopeful sign of the future*?

[two higgs image]

There could be other store names of this sort breaking out depending upon what is found at the LHC and the ILC. You could have the “Superpartners” dating agency, for one, and perhaps “Dark Matter” chocolate bars (made by same company that brought you “Milky Way”, of course), as another… the possibilities are endless. […] Click to continue reading this post →

More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, V

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At the (K)ITP the other day there was a journalist-led discussion/presentation on the largely-media-driven “controversy” about string theory. You know my opinion on this -it’s a largely made up story based on two inaccurate chariacatures (in book form) of research in the field- told by the same journalists and editors who some time earlier brought you the glossy stories about string theory that played up the excitement and promise, and played down the often-said but often-ignored cautionary remarks. The irony of all of this seems to have been lost on most. (I’m not saying that string theorists are entirely blameless in this, but I’ve seen how hard it is to get a balanced remark -about the basic process of seeing a complex scientific program through to its end- survive next to a glossy one-liner).

The point is that the story being told now in the press is simply the one that journalists and editors want to tell now – a David vs Goliath story. It has little or nothing to do with what is actually going on in the science research. The journalist -George Johnson- does a good job of pointing out supporting evidence for this by going through a number of stories from a decade ago and looking at their structure. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Ballooning Costs

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I’m still excited about the news that Branson has joined the fight to put money aside to lead the way in fighting global warming issues. I blogged about it here a month ago, you’ll recall. Well, of course the Onion has a take on this. It’s mean, but it is funny:

Analysts are predicting that the $3 billion Sir Richard Branson has pledged for developing energy sources to combat global warming could come close to matching the amount the entrepreneur, adventurer, and Virgin CEO has already spent on elaborate balloon-based excursions.

That’s the main joke, but to me, even funnier is the ending line of the artice: […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Positive Sign

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I’m always pleased to see this sign. It is at Heathrow, on the walk down the perpetually dingily lit underground corridors connecting the terminals, the tube, the extortion Heathrow express, and the parking lots.

For a start, I generally like the idea that the ground floor of a building (the one you walk onto off the street) is the “zeroth” floor. (I mean no disrespect to this splendid country I live in, that has largely chosen otherwise, although every now and again in older buildings you see it.) So it is just great to see […] Click to continue reading this post →

News From the Front, IV

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So imagine the following:

You’re walking along the street, minding your own business, and somebody walks up to you and tries to sell you a string theory. So you stop and examine the goods, since you’re in the market for string theories, on the lookout for any that might be novel, useful, bright, or shiny, etc. You never know when one or other property might come in useful.

Question: How do you know that it is a string theory? Let me be sure to point out that it comes with a lot of the defining path integral done for you. In other words, you don’t have to do the integral over string world sheet metrics and world sheet fields. This was done in the factory for you. What you have access to are parameters such as the coefficients of the operators in the theory, and you can also adjust the value of the string coupling.

So a lot of the stuff you would recognize as a string theory in your typical string theorist’s notebook have been cleaned up. They’ve been integrated over. The observable physics actually never cared about them (the technical details of summing over metrics – slicing up the moduli space of inequivalent metrics properly at each genus, etc etc…. all done), assuming you’ve done the integrals properly. The factory did it all for you.

So what criteria do you use to decide that it is a string theory at all? Actually, this is not an idle question. Think about the issue in the context of trying to understand some […] Click to continue reading this post →

Finding the Orionids Tonight

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When I was a child, I was fascinated with a straight line of three stars that were evenly spaced. Whenever I looked up in the sky, I would be comforted by being able to find those stars, especially when I was about to embark on a long walk home at night. I later learned that they were actually known as Orion’s Belt, part of the constellation of Orion. So Orion remains my favourite constellation.

These nights, Orion takes centre stage in stargazing circles since the Orionid meteor shower will be originating from a point near the constellation. Of course, Orion has nothing to do with the shower. It merely marks the apparent direction that it comes from (see red dot in image below).

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(Above is the view of the sky looking Southsoutheast from mid northern latitudes at 3:00am today.) We will be traversing a debris field made of stuff left over from Halley’s comet’s tail. That stuff will rain down into our atmosphere, glowing brightly […] Click to continue reading this post →

Those Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

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You may recall that we were recently discussing stereotypes as a result of an earlier post. Particularly, I was talking about the effects those sterotypes can produce as a result of modifying the expectations of others, making it hard for some people to be taken seriously, and resulting in them having to go that extra mile (or several) as a result.

Well, I’d like to point your attention to a recent study about the direct effects of those stereotypes on the stereotyped. Quoting from an article by AP science writer Randolph E. Schmid:

[Steven J.] Heine and doctoral student Ilan Dar-Nimrod wanted to see how people are affected by stereotypes about themselves. They divided more than 220 women into four groups and administered math and reading comprehension tests between 2003 and 2006. Their results are reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

What they actually did was to provide the different groups with different images and reading materials before they did the tests. They seem to have found significant differences in the results that suggest that having a negative stereotype of yourself in mind actually makes things worse. In other words:

It’s a process psychologists call a stereotype threat, Heine explained. “If a member of a group for which there is a negative stereotype is in a position to test the stereotype, they are likely to choke under the pressure.”

So reminding them of the stereotype affects them.

Here’s what they found: […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Lives Of The Stars

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Well, I’m back from the visit to the preview of the Griffith Observatory that I mentioned to you I was going to. It was a rather good visit. They organised it well, and -boy!- have they done a great job on the restorations! I’ll try and assemble the several pictures that I took into some sort of narrative for you, and report soon. While you wait, here’s one of my favourites:

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This is particularly poignant, in my opinion. The children are looking at the lovely […]
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