Category Archives: work

Tales From The Industry XXXII: A Matter of Time

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patzcuaro_clocksHere are some clocks I saw at the House of Eleven Courtyards (Casa de los Once Patios) in the historic town called Pátzcuaro (at the aforementioned lake of the same name). It was a convent, and is now a place to go and see lots of arts and crafts in action, as well as buy some. The clocks, housed in copper, mark the entrance to an entire room of copper workmanship in various forms.

The clocks have reminded me to give you an update on something else. Through some of May and June, I did a lot of work for the show The Universe, which airs on the History Channel (as you probably already know from reading here over the years. See here.). There will be, as usual, several topics covered over the upcoming season, and it will be interesting to see how the various filmmakers put together their episodes. It is worth noting that the History Channel have done something remarkable here. This is now the longest run that any cable channel has had for a science show. They built an audience with a solid show, and kept producing good episodes and gathering more (and it is worth saying, an admirably diverse set of) viewers over the years.

In fact, the show has been so successful that they are going to, I predict, pay an […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tzintzuntzan

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yacata_1(Top prize for the best name on last month’s trip.) This is the name of an existing town as well as the nearby archeological site, the subject of this post. On the Sunday I referred to in a previous post, several of the School went off on a bus to do some sightseeing West of Morelia. This is one of the places to which we went. I learned a bit about the pre-Columbian mesoamerican civilization, the P’urhépecha (or Purépecha), whose capital was Tzintzuntzan (place of the hummingbirds). The structures in my photos (click for larger view) are called Yácatas, which are on a plateau overlooking the lake Pátzcuaro. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Scenes from School

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unam_astro_math_mexico_2Well, my work at the Quantum Gravity school over (see previous posts here, here and here), I hopped on a plane yesterday, in order to return to Los Angeles. It was an excellent time. I enjoyed being in Mexico again, and seeing a new part of it (see posts to come), and the school was well organized and very enjoyable. The students were very receptive overall, and I spent a huge amount of time chatting with them about physics between sessions, over lunch, and on the bus back and forth between the campus and the city (and on the excursion on Sunday for a while). A number of students seemed very interested in some of the quantum gravity phenomena that are possible to describe using string theory – surprised in most cases (since the background independence issue that keeps being waved about by some as a naive (in my view) and bluntly used principle seems to have served as a block to many) – and it was a pleasure to be able to open them up to new physical ideas. It worked pretty well because I gave them three lectures on the basics of string theory, and so could build on that material in the one to one discussions to explain more detail.

lunch_waiting_unam_mexicoDynamical changes of spacetime dimension is one thing that captured a lot of interest, as well as string theory’s various ways of showing in model examples how spacetime is an emergent, classical approximation to an underlying quantum description that does not have manifest spacetime geometry. The latter is something that all approaches to quantum gravity hope to realize in one way or another (since those sorts of ideas and fantasies about what quantum gravity should be appeared in the mid 20th Century), and exactly how it emerges in string theory is a beautiful story. Who knows, perhaps they will take these hints from string theory about how quantum gravity can work and develop them […] Click to continue reading this post →

Minority Report

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This is a quick update on the school. I’ve been trying to give the students some of the core concepts they need to help them understand what string theory is, how it works, and what you can do with it. Here’s the really odd thing about all this (and an explanation of the post title): While this is a school on Quantum Gravity, after talking with the students for a while one learns that in most cases the little they’ve heard about string theory is often essentially over 20 years out of date and almost always totally skewed to the negative, to the extent that many of them are under the impression that string theory has nothing to do with quantum gravity at all! It is totally bizarre, and I suspect it is largely a result of things that are said and passed around within their research community.. So there […] Click to continue reading this post →

Arrival

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(Anyone remember Mike Oldfield? I recall a lovely piece of music of his with the same title as this post and it has now been playing distantly in my head as I type…very pleasant.)

Well, I’m sitting at an outside table across from the main square with the cathedral and having a simple lunch. It is hot, and so I have a glass of cold pale beer in front of me, and everyone around me is speaking Spanish. This feels like it could be that I am back in Madrid, but in fact I am in Morelia, Mexico. (I can tell because, among other things, I’ve never been offered a shoe shine quite so many times in the space of 15 minutes…) It is quite a lovely place, as far as I’ve seen so far (I’ve not explored much yet). I’m resting after a very early morning travel schedule which saw a slight panic (er…long story) at LAX to catch my flight which left just before 1:00am. The seats were fixed to the bolt upright position the whole flight and so the two and a half hours I’d planned to snooze were not so […] Click to continue reading this post →

Summer School Prep

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So, it is that time of year.

I’ve got to give three introductory lectures on string theory in a Summer school somewhere in Mexico next week. So I must break away from intense work on The Project (which is going well, so maybe you will hear about it sometime soonish(ish)….) and focus on how to cram all the cream into three comprehensible and useful lectures. I hate overdoing the “it can be shown” line that ends up making the whole thing seem like magic (as is so often done), so this is always a challenge. Here’s how my preparation usually goes (and indeed it went this way this week): […] Click to continue reading this post →

Laserfest Videos

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laser_beamI think I mentioned a while back that as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Laser, there was a video competition on Physics Central to make a fun video about the Laser. They were put on YouTube (tag is laserfest, I think) and then there was voting at some point (I imagine), and winners were chosen. You can see them here. Congratulations to the winners!

Actually, I think the whole playlist of Laserfest video entries is here, and you can jump through them by clicking the link to the next one in the top right hand area.

Are you aware of Laserfest, by the way? Go and check out the website and join in the celebrations of the Laser!

I should mention that the competition has all meant good news for my work as well. I […] Click to continue reading this post →

Planck Matters

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You can read a bit about the work of my colleague Elena Pierpaoli and her postdocs and students in this article in one of USC’s in-house publications. It focuses on the Planck observatory (image right from NASA/ESA), which we’ve discussed here before. (Recall the launch?) There’s a lot of exciting physics about the very young universe to be discovered as more data from the mission get gathered and analyzed.

Enjoy the article!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Formal Physicists

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Since (as high energy theorists working on foundational issues for most (but not all) of our effort) we can be called by some “formal” physicists, or physicists who are concerned with only “academic” issues, I thought our outfits in this picture from last month were quite appropriate*. (Now don’t you just want to hire this dream team to swoop in and solve all your problems? Click for larger view. )

faculty_and_students_at_graduation_phd_2010

Backstory: Some of the students in the group did a bit of pomp and ceremony to receive their Ph.Ds, and some of the faculty joined in.

Hilarity ensued.

-cvj

(*Of course for all you know, some of us were wearing sequinned bikinis under our gowns. That’s only formal wear in Vegas, I think…) Click to continue reading this post →

CDF Says No

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Recall the excitement last week about the D0 result? I wrote a post called “An Exciting Asymmetry?”. Well, there’s a rule that says if you write a title as a yes/no question, the answer is often (usually?) “No”.

Sure enough. over at Resonances, Jester reports that the CDF experiment, also at the Tevatron, has looked for a confirmation of the CP violating result that D0 claimed to see, and did not find anything abnormal where it should have. Find further details (on the technical side for the experts) and links at that post, which, as is usual with material from that blog, is well-written and interesting.

This is one reason why we (the particle physics community) build multiple detector/experiments on the same accelerator machine, and this is a prime example […] Click to continue reading this post →

Nostalgia

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aollogoAOL is 25 years old today! Twenty Five! To help you understand that, those of you who where alive then click here for the list of number one songs in the charts at the time… Yes, Wham!, Tears for Fears, Huey Lewis and the News, Phil Collins, Jan Hammer, etc… Do you remember America Online? Dialing up to connect? (Perhaps some of you still dial up, to read this blog?) Ah yes, memories. I was never an AOL subscriber. I was, after all, not in America until the 90s, and only started connecting from home in that decade. By then several companies offered dialup service. Then I was of course, just like everyone else, familiar with the reassuring dialup noises to the point where by ear you could tell if the connection was going to work or not (huh, I just realized that sound is sort of from the same swatch of sounds as the TARDIS noise), and recall the sitting and waiting for files of just a few hundred kilobytes to download, and so on and so forth. (Amazingly, and wonderfully, we are now at the point where people are streaming movies and tv shows directly to their homes on their web connections.) The speed difference became a way of measuring the difference between work and home, in a way. At work, you had tons of storage space and perpetual connectivity, and once got home that went away. So waiting for data to squeeze through the telephone line using dialup was extra frustrating.

Truth be told, there’s a piece of me that does not mind that difference, at times. Being connected all the time at home – fast and conveniently – can bring down the […] Click to continue reading this post →

An Exciting Asymmetry?

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A big mystery in physics is why there is more matter than anti-matter. (Of course, which we call the matter and which we call the “anti-matter” is a… matter of convention. Take your pick.) It is hoped that there is some mechanism in the laws of physics (at a very basic level concerning particle interactions) that will become apparent that explains it. It’s also hoped that the mechanism itself might have some understandable origin too. The mechanism would operate in the first tiny fractions of a second of the universe’s life when the primordial soup of particles and antiparticles (created from, roughly speaking, the energy of the big bang) began to cool down as the universe expanded. Rather than them annihilating all back into energy again, the mechanism would create an imbalance between the two, giving rise to a matter-filled universe, from which we emerged. So what could be the mechanism, can we isolate it in our theories and in our experiments? Build a good model of it? Explain it?

This is all very first and foremost in people’s minds when there’s a new experiment switched on that is probing the unknown – the Large Hadron Collider. Well, actually, it has been recently announced that a suitable mechanism (or, more precisely, its […] Click to continue reading this post →

But is it Real? (Part One)

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After my colloquium at UC Riverside some weeks back, I was asked an important question I’ve been asked before, and no doubt will be asked again. The same question may have occurred to you given things I’ve written here about the subject of my research concerning applications of string theory (particularly, ideas from quantum gravity) to understanding (relatively) recent experimentally measured phenomena. (The technique of “gauge/gravity dualities”: See also the special Physics Today May issue with articles on all of this. I wrote about that here. It tells you some of what we can and can’t do with the computational technology, and prospects for improvement, etc.)

So the question is “Is it real?”. This is particularly referring to the black hole in the discussion. Recall, one computes properties of new novel liquid phases of matter (that seem to be closely related to what shows up in the lab) by using a toolbox that involves the equations of gravity, in a higher dimensional spacetime, and much of the thermal nature of the system is controlled by a black hole solution of those equations. So people want to know if that black hole is real. A version of the conversation is like this: (Imagine I’ve already introduced the technique, the higher dimensional spacetime, and the black hole…)

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

The Search For Perfection…

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…is all very well, but to look for Heaven…is to live here in Hell*.

may 2010 physics today coverOne of the things I worked a lot on in earlier months this year (and late ones of last year) was the lead article in a cluster of articles that has appeared in the last few days in May’s special edition of Physics Today. They are sort of departmental-colloquium-level articles, so for a general physics audience, more or less. It’s about some of the things I’ve told you about here in the past, concerning exciting and interesting applications of string theory to various experiments in nuclear physics, as well as atomic and condensed matter physics (although we do not have an article on the latter in this cluster). I had a fun time working with Peter Steinberg on the article and remain grateful to him for getting us all together in the first place to talk about this topic way back in that AAAS symposium of 2009. It was there that Steven Blau of Physics Today got the idea to approach us all to do an article, which resulted in this special issue.

My article with Peter Steinberg, “What black holes teach about strongly coupled particles “, is here, and the pdf is freely downloadable (update: alternative link here). It is mostly about the theoretical aspects of the whole business and the relevance of the string theory […] Click to continue reading this post →