Category Archives: work

A Little Behind…

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Well, here are a few thoughts:

(1) I’m behind on pretty much every deadline. In addition to the externally set ones (article to finish, class material to prepare, etc), I’m behind on those I’ve set myself.

(2) An example of the latter is the fact that I am two weeks late bringing out the film “Laser”, the followup to “Shine a Light”. The semester started, and all the time I thought I’d have to sit and cut a trailer for it and record some music to go on it never materialised….

(3) …Until the last 24 hours. I cut together some images into an interesting (I hope) sequence, and just now finished recording some music onto it. It is more enigmatic than the last trailer, or at least that is the intention. It is being crunched on by YouTube right now and when it is ready I will release it to tease you to return for the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Ten Things That Go Boom!

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the_universeWell, ok… Boom is not quite accurate, but the idea is that there will be ten kinds of blasts/explosions/major_energetic_events discussed tonight on the History Channel’s The Universe:

The Universe is full of explosions that both create and destroy. The Chicxulub impact on the Yucatan peninsula, which may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, was two million times more powerful than the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated on Earth. But guess what? That’s only good enough for the very bottom of the Biggest Blasts top ten list. This episode works its way up through supernova explosions and gamma ray bursts all the way to the blast that started it all–the Big Bang.

Sounds good doesn’t it? There’s a lot of good people contributing again, so I know it’ll have some good material and explanations.

In addition, I’m reasonably confident I play a role in this one…This one was a blast (sorry) to film. You saw some posts earlier reporting on some of the filming. Assuming they used the material I did with them, you’ll get to see why I was at the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Thursday was Monopole Day

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Here’s an odd coincidence. Thursday, just for fun, I declared it Monopole Day in my facebook status. It was largely because I was prepping a class on Dirac’s ideas about magnetic monopoles (roughly: point sources of magnetic fields analogous to point sources of electric fields), why it seems (from looking at Maxwell’s equations – the defining equations of electricity and magnetism) that Nature might very much like the idea of them (using a symmetry argument – roughly: electric and magnetic fields can turn into each other so if there’s one kind of point source, isn’t it strange that there’s not the other?) but chose to hide them away…

monopole_workIt’s a favourite topic of mine (and many physicists – it is one of the first grown-up tastes of modern ways of thinking about physics that you get as an advanced undergraduate, actually), and so I was excited to lecture about it (as I am every year… I find en excuse to bring monopoles into every course I teach… almost). I even handed out one of my class worksheets, which was all about how to build a monopole (on paper – you take a semi-infinite solenoid (a “Dirac String”) and let the magnetic flux lines spill out […] Click to continue reading this post →

Oops!

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Forgot to report on this email exchange from last semester:

From one of the staff in the physics office:

Subject: 499 Syllabus
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:01:38 -0700
From: Beverly
To: Clifford V. Johnson

I was reading the syllabus you sent over for the 499 class. I am not sure if this is a type-o but in the Extra Books section it reads “/Black *_hoes_* and Time Warps: Einstein’s outrageous Legacy/” should it read
“/Black *_holes_* and Time Warps: Einstein’s outrageous Legacy/”.

Thanks,

My response: […] Click to continue reading this post →

It Fell From Space…

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the_universeTonight’s 9:00pm episode of the History Channel’s The Universe ought to be interesting. It is all about objects that fall to earth from space. It’s a good opportunity to learn things about the universe (both near and far) from the perspective of things we glimpse arriving here on earth. You’ll get to learn about the earth as well, and how it (and life on it) has been affected by these things. There’ll be asteroids and planetary science of course, and maybe other things. I know from hearing some chatter of the program makers that there’ll be lots of demos using impacts and collisions and so forth. I know some good people were involved in making it, such as the writer/director Laura Verklan, and my friend and fellow regular on the show, JPL’s Amy Mainzer (who has an excellent blog here). […] Click to continue reading this post →

Head in the Clouds…

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clouds_and_smoke_2Stepping back from the unpleasantness going on at ground level for a moment (see the four previous posts, 1, 2, 3, 4), it seems that there is something else going on that’s actually quite fascinating. I went over to the top of one of the USC campus parking structures to take a look and gather some data and I’ve been chatting to people at random about it*. (This might also be a sign that I’m procrastinating on some other task… 🙂 ) That white part of the cloud is not smoke, is it? It is actually a cloud of vapour. Like a cumulus cloud you’d normally see in various weather conditions. I’ve heard some chatter about these systems “making their own weather”, and I can see that you could get a lot of localized heat dragging air in from other areas and so creating winds and so forth, but is that also generating this cloud? If so, how? Where is it getting all this moisture from? Is it from the water that is being […] Click to continue reading this post →

My Achilles Heel

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Heat. Following is a little bit of a whine. You’ll be even less sympathetic once you read the postscript, but such is life. Once the temperature gets up to a certain point, I can’t think any more. Well, not at the level needed to earn my living, if you see what I mean. Long periods of concentration start out well, but usually just turn into a nap. Not good at all, really. For the second or third day running we’ve had super hot temperatures with little movement of air to ensure a decent amount of throughput. This is not always unworkable, since one can simply nap during the day, do tasks that don’t require much sitting and thinking, and then work in the very early morning hours, but this time around there are two additional effects that ruin that approach.

fires_with_downtown_laThe first is that the heat has been carrying on into the night (as opposed to dropping away rapidly in the evening as is the usual pattern), and the second is that there are two huge fires nearby, making the air a bit… chewy. (Left is a shot I took of downtown Los Angeles from the South showing the huge clouds of smoke from the La Canada and Altadena fires in the San Gabriels’ foothills in the background. From some views it looks like there’s been a small nuke detonated. Anyone remember 24 a few seasons ago? For some maps of the fire’s progress see here, and a view from one of the Mount Wilson observatories is here*.)

Both of these make for less than great sleeping conditions, and the feeling of lack of […] Click to continue reading this post →

New Beginnings

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campus_1Yes, the new semester and new academic year started yesterday, and today saw my first class of a new course for me to teach – Physics 508b: Advanced Electricity and Magnetism. The bad news is that it is a new course for me and so I have to write new material, plan new things entirely, and generally put in a lot of raw preparation from scratch for some things. The good news is that it seems that I have, overall, a good group of students to teach, based upon the willingness to interact that I saw, with good humour, good questions, interjections, and so forth. Further good news is that I’ve an excellent TA for the course (who also does research with me and so we can go back and forth from teaching matters and research matters) and that I’ve taught Physics 408b for a few years. The latter is an undergraduate advanced E&M course (based on Griffith, in case you’re wondering), and while this 508b course (based on Jackson) is heavier in detail and depth on the same material, I can borrow some of the more challenging material from the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Toe Temptation

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So the other day I was sitting chatting with someone I’d just met and at some point I looked down…and jumped a little in surprise at what I saw. Those shoes were a surprise since for a moment there I thought the person is rather unexpectedly barefoot – but the colour is even more unexpected. Then there was maybe a tiny X-Men moment (Oh! It’s Mystique…) but this all happened all in a flash before settling on the correct answer – it is a kind of shoe I have not seen before. I’d seen the cloven hoof type of shoe, which can have a sort of cheeky and slightly electric beguile to them when worn by a woman with the right devil-may-care attitude, but these were new to me. Worn with boldness, these can really work too, and maybe in the same way, but it is a dangerous tightrope to tread (the person I was meeting with pulled it off admirably!).

Upon returning home I looked them up a bit more (they are called Five Fingers shoes) and I oscillate between giggling at the whole idea and being intrigued. I gather that they are hugely comfortable and that grabs me. But yes, they are somewhat singular. They are so utterly unconventional that I find myself amused by the idea of all the “inappropriate” places I could wear them to. Witness some of the levels of amusement:

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

The Universe: Season 4

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the_universeI learned* a short while ago that the fourth season of The Universe on the History Channel starts tonight! As you may have read from a number of posts of mine over the last couple of months (see e.g. here, here and here), there’s been a lot of filming for this new cluster of episodes. I actually thought it was all going to start airing in the Fall, so this is a surprise to me.

There are some fun topics coming up in this season. There’ll be plenty of interesting things to learn, with contributions from a variety of interesting scientists telling you […] Click to continue reading this post →

Scenes from Work

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cvj_at_workThe College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences here at USC has built a new website, and gone quite far in including extra media, and links and portals on YouTube, Facebook and so on. One of the things they did was have a filmmaker make lots of videos. Lots. Things about faculty, research, teaching, learning, etc. All very exciting. Have a look, here, if interested. Mira Zimet, who makes the films, gave me a call and asked me if I’d like to contribute, and I agreed. I chatted on and on for about 45 minutes to an hour and she cut two short films out of it. The shorter one is on the site and has me saying some general things about research, teaching, science, and USC. Mira made the second because she thought it might be a nice extra video for the College’s YouTube portal. It has me talking a bit more about what string theory is and does, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Shine a Light

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It is Friday, so time for a film release. So, get your popcorn, your ice-cold drink, and find your comfy chair! It has been a long time coming (see related posts listed below), but finally the first of the series of films I’ve been talking about is ready for you!

But before I run the projector, let me say a few words. As I said before, this short film is (I hope) fun, engaging, and informative. I hope lots of people take the time to watch it at least a couple of times. A basic scientific knowledge of the world is for everyone. Science is part of our culture and should be more widely circulated. Films such as this is one of the ways the National Science Foundation, who provided the support to make it, is helping to bring science to everyone. For this (and the other ones in the series) to be a success, your help is needed. It needs to be seen. Tell your family and friends, colleagues and students, local teachers, etc., about it. Forward it on to people you know. Blog it, tweet it, facebook share it, etc. Crucially, remember that it is designed to be not just for people who already know they have an interest in science, but others too, so make no assumptions about who might like it… just please send it. Thanks.

Ok, let’s dim the lights! Run the Projector! (Tip: It is a high video quality, so pause it and let it buffer […] Click to continue reading this post →

LHC Update

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04collide_600Dennis Overbye wrote a nice summary article in the New York Times about the current status of the delays to the Large Hadron Colllider’s (LHC’s) re-opening. (Photo left by Valerio Mezzanotti for NYT) The issue is very frustrating, overall, even though one knows that delays like this can happen (and ought to be expected to happen) if you’ve built the largest and most complicated machine ever. I (and many colleagues) have in some sense waited for the LHC almost my entire professional career, and last Summer/Fall it seemed so close to finally starting to give us physics, only to have the failure happen, and set it all back. That’s life, of course. These things happen. I’ve a great deal of faith in the […] Click to continue reading this post →