Category Archives: work

Slow Writing

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Well, the workshop is going well. I had to miss a talk this morning in order to carry on with this writing of a paper I was doing. Basically, we’re over due in producing our submission to a special volume of some publication or other that is going to be all about magnetic fields and models of strongly coupled matter… As you may have gathered by now, I’ve dabbled in magnetic fields for some several years by now, so it was natural to be asked. My collaborator in a lot of these dabblings, Tameem Albash, and a student, Scott MacDonald, and I have been working on a suitable project for a while, and due to my travels and entanglements with a previous project, I’ve made us all a bit late.

The last few days have been difficult for writing. I’d forgotten […] Click to continue reading this post →

Happy Higgs Day?

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Dont forget that today there will be big announcements of the latest results from the LHC about the search for the Higgs…(and some of us are hoping for news about what might be the beginning of the search for what lies beyond…)

There are so many live blogs, so follow a few… Like Resonances… for an expert view, Matt Strassler, for another expert view, or Quantum Diaries, for a non-expert view.

Exciting!!

(update… Looks like it is a strong enough set of results, statistically, to call the Higgs discovered… Hurrah! And with possible hints of new physics too? Excellent….)

Further update… A CERN press release is to be found here. Also, looks like any deviation from the standard model Higgs, at least for the decay channels examined so far, is very small… So there’s a lot left to do and understand…

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Amsterdam!

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20120703-164422.jpgAmsterdam! I’m here for a workshop for a while. It is on string theory – many aspects – and so the mix of people is a good one overall, with conversations ranging from high energy physics, the LHC (including the Higgs announcement at CERN expected tomorrow) and black holes all the way over to condensed matter and various kinds of exotic physics one can do in the laboratory in that context. It should be an excellent time here… It is good to be back in the city after over a decade, and to catch up with a number of friends and colleagues in the field. I also want to properly explore the city this time, not having done that much exploration last time. (Photo above is a snap taken of the lovely moon that came out last night, with the Amstel and accompanying reflections and so forth… Was pretty to see.)

I’ve been trying to read some notes in preparation for working on a draft of a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Voice of God

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With the Aspen Center for Physics film almost completed (see several earlier posts, e.g. here, here, and here), various things get set in stone once and for all, so that other things can be built on top of them. At some point, I had to be certain of the final form of the voice over, so that Dave (the editor) can lay it in and time various transitions around it. This was done on Friday along with a huge rewrite of the whole film script, and lots of work on picking b-roll footage and other material to illustrate the film and create atmosphere. Once my co-producer/director Bob had glanced at it and made some helpful remarks (always good to have more eyeballs to spot any mistakes that could get frozen in) I was ready for Monday’s exercise – recording the final voice work. No turning back, no second chances, since we need to deliver the film this week.

While I’ve directed a bit before, I’ve not ever had the chance to direct a hugely experienced star actor, so this was going to be a blast! A while back, over food and drink at a party, my friend Harry Lennix (who loves contemporary physics – that’s in fact why we met, years ago) had generously agreed to do the voice narration for this project, and I was very pleased since it was his voice I had in mind since late August […] Click to continue reading this post →

Speaking of Time…

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Just finished a complete redo of a nine (plus one) panel page of the Arena story that was the prototype outing for the graphic novel project. (See some earlier posts, e.g. here, about this redo process.)

I shudder at the horrible drawings on the page it replaced.

To the left are some parts of the new page… Click for a larger view.

In other news, I met our new Dean (of the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences) today, during a short session where a few of us had a conversation with him while someone filmed us. I think it is some film they are doing about the new Dean taking up the reigns, or something similar. He seemed a nice enough fellow, and he seems to be coming with definite ideas for interesting changes… I’m looking forward […] Click to continue reading this post →

Peek Over My Shoulder

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Been splitting my time between being a physicist and being a filmmaker making a film about physicists. It has been an interesting time. Recall from earlier posts (see e.g. here and here) that I am working on getting a film made for the Aspen Center for physics in celebration of its 50th Anniversary. I’ve got rather sucked into the process – a lot more than I intended – and so find myself putting together the script that will guide the editor in cutting the film. This means that I’m reviewing acres of footage of interviews and picking out some great quotes from my awesome cast of interviewees. You might recognize some of them (feel free to try to name them, and their field…).

What you’re seeing in the picture is a screenshot of some of the windows I have open […] Click to continue reading this post →

Before and After

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The last several sessions on The Project have been an exercise in revisiting some older pages. In fact, in the sample you can see to the left the subject is the very first page that I started experimenting with seriously for developing and learning production techniques.

Back then I was doing my inking digitally, and I ended up with work that I did not like the look of. I hate the clean straight lines that resulted. Also it was too slow on the computer to control the brush with the fidelity I wanted…various other things bothered me as well, which I won’t trouble […] Click to continue reading this post →

Film in Progress…

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This was an incredibly busy visit, but worthwhile. We pulled 12+ hour days in getting everything needed for the film (about the Aspen Center for Physics), with lots of backup, and oodles of great footage. So much that I fear we have so much great material we can make five completely different short films instead of the one that is supposed to be delivered. It is going to be tough. I’m so excited about some of the things that we’ve shot. A number of ideas I had for the arc of the film, the feel and tone, and the opening moments, look to be falling together almost _exactly_ as I envisioned them months ago.

Ouf excellent DP, Dave Gaw, (an accomplished filmmaker in his own right) seems to almost immediately get what I’m trying to do when I explain something I’ve visualized, or when I draw it, and so the shots work out quite nicely, and sometimes he’s gone and filmed some sequences that look very much like ones I’d been imagining, sometimes without us even having had a discussion about it! It has been a great collaboration among the three of us – Dave, Bob Melisso (my co-Producer/Director), and myself – as we exchange ideas about how to best implement something or other to make it tell part of the story…

Anyway, while preparing for getting some nice outdoor shots of physicists doing […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Shooting Party

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20120529-112915.jpgI’m at the Aspen Center for Physics for some time this week. It is a big week. You will perhaps recall that I’m involved in making a short film for the 50th Anniversary celebrations of the ACP (see some earlier posts) and now we are doing another batch of shooting. Not just interviews, as we have been doing so far, but much of the other footage we need, such as the lovely grounds, the various physicists using the center, in myriad ways, and so forth. We’ve had a super long day today, which[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Speed and Flow

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One of the key things I keep trying to maintain and improve by drawing regularly is speed. I’ve shown you drawings of various sorts here, but maybe not enough of the experiments I try to do relatively quickly. When things are working well and my eye is in, so to speak, shapes and lines jump out at me and beg to be put on to the paper, and a convincing form appears, giving a sense of the pose that was being done at the time. This can be someone on the train, or it can be a model in a studio I’ve dropped in to draw for a while.

I sort of love incomplete drawings that are a mixture of schematic structures, implied flow, more finished forms, and so forth. The results can be quite fun to look at. Above is a bunch I did last week. Click for a much larger view. (I apologize for the copyright watermark in everything, but I’m tired of the business people have on the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Bringing Science to Schools

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Here’s a nice article (by Ambrosia Brody) about some of the work the Joint Educational Project (JEP), Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) and the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences (all here at USC) have been doing to get school students excited about science. It looks like a fun and valuable program, and it is always great to see the look of wonder on the faces of the students as they explore (see film below). (Photo is by Nick Pittarides for USC News.)

A nice aspect of it that caught my eye is that one of the films that got made for the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Revisiting Old Haunts

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Since you asked, here’s an update on The Project. I was a bit quiet on it the last two weeks with the end of semester duties taking up lots of time (setting finals, grading them, extra homeworks and so forth – see several recent posts). Just before that however, I did a bit of a push to finish some pages that I wanted to include in my presentation to the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities (I mentioned that to you before – see here. It went very well by the way, with lots of enthusiasm from lots of those who were kind enough to attend.)

Over the four or five days I’ve started on a new aspect of the project that has led me in an interesting direction – revisiting some of the original pages I did, two years ago. I decided then that the best thing to do to learn what I needed to learn about production of a graphic novel is just to… produce one. So I set upon a prototype, learning lots of techniques along the way, making lots of twists and turns in developing the methods that worked best for me, and so forth. I’ve refined the route I take from pencil to final product over the time (I’ve described it to you a number of times here on the blog), and in addition, my basic drawing skills have moved along a lot too… Anyway, looking back, I see that the first few pages especially are quite dreadful, a combination of bad drawing and also the struggle with digital inking techniques that I decided to abandon in favour of old school nib pens and ink. (It is actually satisfying to see just how far I’ve come in a short time… fixing various things took a relatively short time compared to how long I’d have agonized over them back then…)

So since I want to show this prototype to people, I’ve decided to re-draw and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Heaven’s Parameters

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Oh… I forgot to get around to letting you know the result of designing the universe required in a previous post. The result is that it is a radiation (“light”) filled universe with positive cosmological constant [tex]\Lambda[/tex](and so space wants to expand due to negative pressure – much like ours seems to be doing). The radiation density wants the thing to collapse. There’s a balance between the two, and it turns out that it is when the two densities (radiation, and vacuum energy) are equal. This is only possible when there is positive curvature for the universe (so, not like ours), as you can see from the Friedman equation if you were that way inclined. So the universe is a 3-sphere, and if you work it out, the radius of this 3-sphere turns out to be [tex]a=\left(\frac{3}{2\Lambda}\right)^{1/2}[/tex]. The temperature of the radiation is then computed using the usual Stefan-Boltzmann relation.

The equality of densities turns out to result from the fact that the effective potential of the equation is at a maximum, and so this universe turns out to be unstable… It is a radiation-filled version of Einstein’s matter-filled static universe, which is also unstable. It is larger than Einstein’s by a factor of [tex]\sqrt{3/2}[/tex].

Einstein was said to have arrived at his static universe on the grounds of what he thought was observationally clear – the universe was unchanging (on large scales). […]
The equality of densities turns out to result from the fact that the effective potential of the equation is at a maximum, and so this universe turns out to be unstable… It is a radiation-filled version of Einstein’s matter-filled static universe, which is also unstable. It is larger than Einstein’s by a factor of [tex]\sqrt{3/2}[/tex].

Einstein was said to have arrived at his static universe on the grounds of what he thought was observationally clear – the universe was unchanging (on large scales). Hubble […] Click to continue reading this post →

Project Heaven

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This is an extra homework that some students of the General Relativity class did to make up for one that did not count earlier in the semester. While writing it, I realized that this universe is in fact, Heaven! You know, we become beings of light, and live forever, etc…

I thought it would be fun to share its final form:

“You work in the design section of the company that manufactures universes. (This is […] Click to continue reading this post →

Fractal in Progress…

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So last week we had a visit from Kelly Stelle (he’s part of the high energy theory group at Imperial College) who gave us an excellent talk about aspects of supergravity. His work connects to the fascinating ongoing story about finiteness, and the new techniques being used to do the multiloop computations (see a recent Scientific American cover story about some of that – it is misleadingly packaged by the magazine, as usual (preview here) , but the article itself, focusing on the computational issues, is nice).

After his talk, I gave him a tour of the campus, and as we passed through the Doheny Library to view the lovely interior, we stopped by the ongoing construction of the Mosely Snowflake Sponge fractal that I told you about here.

They’re making a lot of progress.

We spent a few minutes folding some business cards to contribute some component cubes to the construction, and I took a snap (see photo on left) of Kelly at work. We made two or three cubes each…

Here’s a shot of one of the completed modules […] Click to continue reading this post →