Category Archives: work

Hawking Talking, and More

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Gosh, time flies!

I almost did not get to announce this before it was upon us. Tomorrow and the day after combine into a notable event in the College Commons series here at USC. Some of us have been working on this for quite a while. On Tuesday we have Stephen Hawking giving a big public lecture entitled “Out of a Black Hole”. Here’s the announcement. Note that general tickets for seats in Bovard Auditorium all went within hours of us releasing the tickets several weeks ago, but there is room in the two spill rooms that we have set up where there will be screens relaying the talk. Make a bit of an event of it and go with friends! [Update: I forgot to mention that we had a competition in local high schools and also at USC where the prize was to ask Stephen Hawking a question. People submitted questions over the last few weeks and we selected some of the best. There will be three undergraduates and three high school students coming up from the audience (we’ve a lot of high school students visiting us for the talk) to ask him a question each at the end. Should be fun.]

The day after, there will be a related event. Some of us from the physics department […] Click to continue reading this post →

Expensive

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One of the things I am most appallingly tardy about is filing expense claims. I’m really bad about this. Not just in terms of the amount of time it takes me to get to it, but in the actual amounts that need to be claimed. People who are smart about this take less time to file their largest expenses… it is usually the opposite with me. I know people who are essentially doing their expenses as the trip they are on proceeds, and by time they’ve landed back at their home city they are putting the completed forms and bundled receipts into the mail (internal or external) with one hand while still holding their luggage in the other. I on the other hand, find myself forgetting to do it again and again, losing track of what I actually spent and can claim back, and so on and so forth as the trip fades from memory. Yes, I have forgotten to claim for entire trips, in the past, remembering years later that I was supposed to (happily that has not happened too many times). I’m not sure why this is, but it is partly as a result of the immediate re-immersion back into local life after the trip. The trip is done and now I’m back to the everyday routine. Figuring out the expenses becomes a sort of distraction from moving forward. Or it just keeps slipping my mind.

It’s pretty stupid of me, and I acknowledge it every time, but I still end up doing it. Sometimes at great cost. Right now, I have four big trips I have not claimed my […] Click to continue reading this post →

Twirling, Twirling, Twirling…

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Oh, yes, the midterm. Well, apparently the students don’t hate me as a result of it. (Actually I have not seen any of them since before the midterm (I was away during the actual midterm itself), so I’m not entirely sure about that…)

notebook and coffeeI stayed up until 2:00am or so on Wednesday writing and typesetting the thing, and in the end I think I set a relatively straightforward exam. Furthermore, after I finished writing it, I realized that a good chunk of the computation I’d prepared for them had already been done in a previous midterm. I’d completely forgotten. You can see a (bit blurry, sorry – in a cafe trying not too look too conspicuous taking photos) snap of my notebook with the computations that I did in preparation for the midterm in the little photo to the right.

Since Elliot asked (thanks!), I’ll say a bit more about what they had to do. I decided to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Midterm One

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electrodynamics midterm preparationWell, it is that time again. The first midterm exam for my electrodynamics course is scheduled for Thursday and I have to decide today what to put on it.

A key factor is that it is an open book exam. Last week I explained to the class (I have another excellent group this year) that an open book exam is in fact more challenging than a closed book one, since some of them seemed to be under the opposite impression.

The point is that since we all know that if they have the textbook and their class notes and so can look things up, I certainly can’t ask them anything that they can lift from those sources without thinking. Therefore I will be able to focus on testing their ability to think and apply the techniques that they have been (I hope) studying. This is, after all, the point of the exercise, isn’t it? More so than remembering equations, in any case. (Although one hopes that all physics students can remember Maxwell’s equations…)

The drawback to all of this is that I myself have to think harder in preparing the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Some Articles

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Well, as I mentioned in the last post, Sunday’s symposium at the AAAS meeting in Chicago went very well, and we successfully communicated a lot of the physics results, ideas, and excitement to the audience. One of the team, Peter Steinberg, did a blog post, and he’s also got some more pictures that you’d perhaps like to see.

Some of the journalists who were there have already produced some pieces reporting on the physics. It is actually interesting to see all their different takes on the same presentation and discussion event. So far, I’ve seen the one by Glennda Chui at Symmetry Breaking, which had the mixed blessing of being tagged by Digg (the server was down for hours as a result!), one at Physics World by Margaret Harris (this one sort of missed the key physics point a bit – see below), one at the Discovery Space Blog by Dave Mosher, and one by John Timmer at Ars Technica (He misquotes me a little here and there, but I do like the “String Theory Officially Useful” phrase in the title!). [Update: There’s also an AAAS publication here.]

Anyway, as I said, I think that the Physics Today one sort of got sidetracked a touch and so I placed a comment there to clarify some points. I realized that they might be useful to some reading here, and so I reproduce it here. Enjoy: […] Click to continue reading this post →

24 – Physics Edition (Day Two)

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February 14th 2009: Valentine's Day.

9:00pm – 10:00pm

…Must be here somewhere. Maybe inside the monolith? No. Seems it is not inside the jumbo suitcase, which I have not used since Aspen last year anyway, and I’m pretty sure that I did not use it on that trip. Where can it be? That box over there? No. (But I found that bag of plastic book covers that I’ve been using sparingly since I left Preston for London in 1986. Excellent. The things I don’t throw away…) Well, never mind, would be silly to make myself miss a flight over an inflatable pillow that I have not seen in over a year. If I play my cards right, I won’t need it anyway….

9:10pm Now to put all those things I set aside earlier into my trusty little day trip bag. Change of clothes, electric shaver, toothbrush and so forth. I suppose I will bring the laptop. And some bits of equipment that might be useful as backup for Peter’s plan. Or whatever. You never know. Yes, I throw in my copy of Accordion Crimes. Almost finished it, and if I do, would be good to get another Annie Proulx to continue enjoying her wonderful writing…

9:17pm Will someone tell me how I managed to be perfectly on time, and then fritter away some of it to make sure I’m slightly panicky late again? Sigh. I was more or less ready at 9:00, when I should have left. Despite all the events of the previous 24 hours ((Day One) – Valentine’s Day Diary – Available on DVD) I got everything together on time, and wouldn’t it be rich if I missed the flight?

9:23pm I leave finally, using the batcave, slowing to check that entrance closes, then vanish into the night toward the airport. Saturday night late in LA. Surely everyone is out having awkward dates? The roads will be clear this late on a Saturday night, right? I can make my 10:07 check-in cutoff, I’m sure.

9:33pm. 101 Freeway. Full of traffic. Don’t you people have dates you’re supposed to be on!!?? This is my road! My! Road! […] Click to continue reading this post →

Sketching

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sketching for an articleThe things I do for a living. Or whatever.

You see me at the end of a two hour process of watching some YouTube videos of a sport, thinking, reflecting, doing some analysis, and then (pictured) working up some sketches of some of the physics going on.

This is for a magazine doing a piece on various techniques in this sport (which I won’t mention since I don’t know if they want their thunder stolen). I’ve no idea whether they’ll use it in the end, but they needed the help pretty fast, and how could I say no? […] Click to continue reading this post →

So What Is String Theory, Anyway?

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The usual answer you’ll get from the person on the street (as it were) includes lots of nice words about wiggling strings that look like particles, and so forth, and that’s fine. However, the [informed] next level answer, when you’ve worked enough in the field, is that we don’t know. I’ve told you why (at least in part) in previous posts and so I’ll let you read them. We’re still working on it.

While we work, we’ve learned that it is a quite marvellous thing (from the bits of it we’ve come to grips with) that is teaching us a lot about all kinds of physics, and mathematics too. Some of this may be good for describing things about Nature, and we’re still working out lots of that (although see some of the exciting things I’ve been talking about in my previous post and the links therein).

So what do we put on the T-shirt? (You know, the analogue of Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism – light, etc – that every physics undergrad likes to have on their T-shirt). Well, we don’t know yet.

polchinski what is string theory

But that’s all my opinion. Every now and again it is good to hear from one of the masters about what they think of string theory*, and what it is and so forth. Happily, Joe Polchinski has been known to agree to stand up and give an exposition on this […] Click to continue reading this post →

Brainstorming

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presentation preparation in the sunI had quite a marvellous brainstorming session today. You’ll recall I was preparing a presentation for the February 15th symposium at the AAAS meeting the other day. Well, all of us concerned (the four of us presenting as well as various Brookhaven staff who will take part in the symposium discussion as well) got together over the phone for a teleconference today. It took almost three hours (but happily I was sitting in the sunshine while doing it, as you can see). We wanted to chat about the distribution of ideas and results that will be presented.

There are four of us presenting at the event, with only a short time each to get across some of the key ideas and so we need to make sure that we don’t do too much […] Click to continue reading this post →

Uncommon Conversations

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college commons logo smallI almost forgot to mention that tonight marks the launch of the series of events called the College Commons here at USC. Here’s a news story about the programme. This academic year, I’ve been working on the committee working on shaping the ideas that have come up from the faculty (I had promised to tell you more about this), and we’ve announced the short Spring programme, which you can see here.

There is a featured part celebrating 1859:

Where do ideas come from, and how far do they travel? One hundred and fifty years ago, the astonishing year of 1859 saw not only the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, but such pioneering works as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, and Richard Wagner’s first version of Tristan and Isolde. This year also marked amazing advances in travel and communications, the first battles prefiguring the Civil War and the first trapeze act performed in Paris. Can we imagine the world 150 years from now, and imagine the place our ideas will have in it? Scholars from biology, anthropology, physics, literature, history, and gender studies, as well as poets and artists, will explore these questions together this spring.

I hope there’ll be a lot of participation in the events (I’ll say more on this later). Tonight has a free movie, Master and Commander (so there’s a reason to go, right […] Click to continue reading this post →

Preparation

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Yes, I’ve been a bit quiet of late, I know. I’ve so many things on, both professional and personal that it sometimes keeps me occupied from when I wake up just before sunrise right through to falling asleep a bit after midnight. And yes I know that means I’ve been not getting the traditional full nights of sleep, but if my body insists on getting up at 5:30am, who am I to resist? I thought it was due to jetlag from the trip a couple of weeks ago, but it seems to have taken. I don’t mind too much since watching the light change as the sun rises is a marvellous way to start the day.

clifford johnson preparing slides at the boardAmong the things I’m up to (yesterday and today so far) is a strip-down-and-redesign of a short talk for an exciting symposium that is coming up in a few weeks in Chicago. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is having their big annual shindig there (apparently the biggest science conference in the world) and there will be a number of addresses, plenary talks, and keynote speakers and the like (including Al Gore, by the way), and also several sessions of symposia and other presentations on various topics.

While slightly annoyed at the fact that one major day of the conference is on Valentine’s day (which means I’ll have to be out of town on just the day that maybe, just maybe, on the off-chance, you know – if the universe sneezes or something, somebody might want me to be their Valentine…*), I was looking at that day’s schedule and it caught my eye that there’ll be a session (with several presenters) entitled “The Science of Kissing”, and three hours long, no less:

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Complex

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So where am I and what am I doing? I’m in chilly Cambridge. The one in the UK. It is super cold over here. When we landed in Heathrow at lunchtime yesterday it was below freezing, and the thick cloud of the London sky was right down to the tops of the airport terminals. Everybody seemed to be talking about how cold it was. My wandering in central London for a few hours dragging my suitcase (before heading to Kings Cross and the train to Cambridge) was quite a bit uncomfortable – at least until I realized that a key mission should be to find on Oxford Street a branch of Marks and Spencer’s (now called M&S it seems… interestingly across the street from an H&M, and not so far from where the doomed C&A store used to be…) and buy some long thermal underwear. A bit elderly, perhaps, but very snug and warm against the icy winds and snow flurries, so I don’t care. (Yes, that probably falls under the category of “oversharing”, one of the words of the year 2008….)

icam board of governers meeting

One of the various governance boards I managed to accept to be on last year (despite trying hard to try to say “no” more last year) was that of ICAM, the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter. For the first time in ICAM’s ten year history, its […] Click to continue reading this post →

Thermodynamics and Gravity

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ads_ballI noticed that Robert Helling shared some thoughts about thermodynamics and gravity today on his blog. He is understandably confused about several aspects of the issue, especially when applied to cosmological issues. (What is the entropy of our universe? Does the Second Law really apply? Does equilibrium thermodynamics even apply here?)

I’ve nothing remarkable to add to the discussion at this time except to note that a blanket statement that thermodynamics and gravity don’t seem to go together (which I don’t think he’s strongly saying) is not one I’d make, since we have a major class of working counterexamples.

The context is the gauge/gravity duals I’ve talked about here a lot, starting with AdS/CFT and beyond. There we know that the gravitational systems are essentially able to display the more garden variety thermodynamics by being immersed in the (regulating-box-like) anti-De Sitter type backgrounds. Then we see that black holes […] Click to continue reading this post →

Remembering Uncertainty

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Gosh, look what I found on YouTube, quite by accident. It is video of the first Uncertainty event I did with science writer KC Cole way back in 2006, and was one of the first Visions and Voices events at USC.

It has as features (about 20 minutes each) Jonathan Kirsch on Monotheism (and how it actually isn’t, really), some opening thoughts by moderator KC Cole, her interview […] Click to continue reading this post →