Category Archives: work

Space Travel Thoughts…

By | | , , , , ,
27 Comments

opinions_about_space_travelOn Wednesday (if I recall correctly – last week is a blur) I spoke on camera to producer Peter Savodnik about challenges involved in mounting space missions to colonise distant planets. It was a fun and short shoot -Peter kept it relaxed and conversational- and it will be part of film that will be released by an online property I’m sure you know well some time in the coming year (I think). I will give you more details when they emerge.

One theme that I kept bringing up that you might find interesting (thoughts welcome): Space is a big place. It takes a long time to get from one place to another – even if you are moving close to the speed of light (and we’ve no foreseeable technology to get us even close to that any time soon). That makes the journey itself a huge challenge, and that is often the part that is most neglected in popular (fictional) films about space travel, and so it also affects our perception of how things must be in the real world of space travel. Result: an under-appreciation of (and possibly false expectations about) the whole business of the journey itself.

Of course, in fiction, much of this business is avoided by inventing propulsion systems that use physics that we’ve no good reason to believe actually exists to shorten the journey – warp drive, hyperspace jumps, wormholes, and the like. That’s all fun, sure, (and I spoke about such things and their place -or lack thereof- in the real world of near future travel) but I think that there can be some really creative challenges for fiction films by focusing on the long […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales from the Industry XXXXI – Puppet Black Hole

By | | , , , , , , , ,
47 Comments

Yeah. Not sure how to best title this post or fully explain the picture [edit: Picture taken down temporarily until the show is ready to be promoted]. Let’s just say that I spent a bit of this afternoon explaining some of the science of the Large Hadron Collider to a bright orange puppet that was determined to not believe whatever I told him/it. It was fun, and was done to camera at Los Angeles Center Studios downtown. (I was actually speaking about things that intersect with the subject of yesterday’s post, if you’re interested.) It is for a new show on a channel that I can’t mention yet*, and I’ll let you know as soon as I know what the air date is, etc.

Well, one more thing, in support of the old “It’s a small world after all” saying. I noticed from the call sheet that this morning they were shooting a fun segment that was hosted by my friend Hal Rudnick the host of Screen Junkies! (Have a look at some of the science-meets-movies things we’ve done together here, here and here.) Also, a friend I’d not seen in […] Click to continue reading this post →

Earth Not Swallowed!

By | | , , ,
41 Comments

So, here we are. Still in existence. Hurrah!

cern_LHC_tunnelThe Large Hadron Collider (image right is courtesy of CERN) started a new phase of experimental work today, colliding particles at double the energy it was working at a few years back when the Higgs was discovered. By time I was making breakfast and checking email, their live blog, etc., this morning, it was clear that (contrary to fears expressed by some) the LHC had not created a black hole that swallowed the earth, nor had it created some sort of strange chunk of new vacuum that condensed that of the entire universe into a new phase. (Or if it did either of those things, the effects are hardly noticeable!!)

As I keep emphasising (actually I’ll be talking about this to a puppet character on a TV show tomorrow too – details later) the LHC (or any of the particle collision experiments we’ve ever done) is not doing anything that Nature does not do routinely right here at earth (and most times way more violently and […] Click to continue reading this post →

‘t Hooft on Scale Invariance…

By | | , , ,
32 Comments

Worth a read: This is ‘t Hooft’s summary (link is a pdf) of a very interesting idea/suggestion about scale invariance and its possible role in finding an answer to a number of puzzles in physics. (It is quite short, but think I’ll need to read it several times and mull over it a lot.) It won the top Gravity Research foundation essay prize this year, and there were several other interesting essays in the final list too. See here.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

LAIH Field Trip – Parks and Recreation

By | | ,
26 Comments

Last Friday’s luncheon for the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities had a double treat. First, it was a field trip to another interesting and exciting Los Angeles space – Clockshop/Elysian, down near the river in Frogtown. Clockshop is a wonderful arts organisation whose concerns fit very neatly with many of ours: From their website:

Clockshop is a multifaceted arts organization that works at the intersection of politics, urban space, and cultural production to explore the forces that shape our lived environment. We program events and screenings, and produce artist projects and conversations. […]

Elysian is an excellent restaurant, the main space where Clockshop events are held, and we were served splendid lunch there while Clockshop director Julia Meltzer told us a little about Clockshop.
LAIH_clockshop_1 [click for larger view]

The second treat was a talk (over coffee and cookies) by Jon Christensen (editor of Boom) entitled “A Century Beyond John Muir: A 21st Century Vision for California Parks”, detailing a project to rejuvenate, expand (and enhance the awareness […] Click to continue reading this post →

In Case You Wondered…

By | | , , , ,
8 Comments

Dear visitor who came here (perhaps) after visiting the panel I participated in on Saturday at the LA Times Festival of Books. (“Grasping the Ineffable: On Science and Health”) What a fun discussion! Pity we ran out of time before we really began to explore connections, perhaps inspired by more audience questions.

In any event, in case you wondered why I was not signing books at the end at the designated signing area, I thought I’d write this note. I was given the option to do so, but the book that I currently have out is a specialist monograph, and I did not think there’s be much demand for it at a general festival such as the one on the weekend. (Feel free to pick up a copy if you wish, though. It is called “D-Branes”, and it is here.)

The book I actually mentioned during the panel, since it is indeed among my current attempts to grasp the “ineffable” of the panel title, is a work in progress. (Hence my variant of the “under construction” sign on the right.) It is a graphic book (working title “The Dialogues”) pitched at a general audience that explores a lot of contemporary physics topics in an unusual way. It is scheduled for publication in 2017 by Imperial College Press. You can find out much more about it here.

Feel free to visit this blog for updates on how the book progresses, and of course lots of other topics and conversations too (which you are welcome to join).

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Festival Panel

By | | , , , ,
14 Comments

father and son at LA Times Festival of BooksDon’t forget that this weekend is the fantastic LA Times Festival of Books! See my earlier post. Actually, I’ll be on a panel at 3:00pm in Wallis Annenberg Hall entitled “Grasping the Ineffable: On Science and Health”, with Pat Levitt and Elyn Saks, chaired by the Science writer KC Cole. I’ve no idea where the conversation is going to go, but I hope it’ll be fun and interesting! (See the whole schedule here.)

Maybe see you there!

-cvj
Click to continue reading this post →

Beyond the Battling Babes

By | | , , , , ,
19 Comments

Screen Shot 2015-04-16 at 14.03.58The recent Babe War (Food Babe vs Science Babe) that probably touched your inbox or news feed is a great opportunity to think about a broader issue: the changing faces of science communication. I spoke about this with LA Times science writer Eryn Brown who wrote an excellent article about it that appears today. (Picture (Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times) and headline are from the article’s online version.)

(By the way, due to space issues, a lot of what we spoke about did not make it to the article (at least not in the form of quotes), including: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Excellent Witten Interview!

By | | , , ,
26 Comments

ooguri_witten_kavli_ipmuI just learned of an excellent interview with Edward Witten, one or our field’s grandmasters, or rather: the grandmasters’ grandmaster. I strongly recommend reading it. (This is for technically equipped people working in the field, most likely – I believe that it is not intended for the general public, although you are welcome to read it too!)

There’s a lot of discussion (of among other things like his current work) of that golden period during the 1990s that I had the privilege to work in during my postdoc years (some of them under the guidance of Witten) that remain one of […] Click to continue reading this post →