Category Archives: work

Tales From The Industry XXIV – Equation Wrangler

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I’m sitting in one of my favourite cafes (Groundwork at Cahuenga) after a couple of hours work with some filmmakers. I’ve mentioned them to you before, you may recall. Eric Salat and Philip Shane are making what is gearing up to be a really fantastic documentary. I’m still not sure whether I’m supposed to talk about the content just yet, and so I won’t be to specific. As I mentioned before they are really trying to tell the science story in some depth. They’re illustrating the development of an idea, the wrong turns, the frustrations, the moments of elation, depression, and everything that goes into the process of doing the sort of work we do. And here, “everything” includes the confrontation of the ideas with the elation of seeing the success of a long struggle to understand Nature. I’ve spent some time chatting with Eric and Phil about the physics ideas, as have other scientists, and I have a good sense that they are so keen to tell the story well, and give the science and the scientific process a chance to shine – something that can often get neglected in some of these shows.

What was I doing today? […] Click to continue reading this post →

Disentanglement

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nice cold beerTime for a cold beer. It’s only 5:30pm, I know, but there are extenuating circumstances. The first is that there’s a sudden heatwave. It is above ninety degrees outside. Will be doing this pattern for the whole week. Huh. The second is that I just cycled my bike really hard in that heat, coming back from an afternoon sitting in the Casbah writing a progress report on the year’s research. Happily there’s a lot to include, but it is still quite the task pulling it together, especially when it is so hot. For me, when it is very warm, concentration problems circle around trying to not falling asleep.

The third reason is that I’m clearly going a bit nuts, with several, uh, senior moments descending on me recently. I need to take a nice break and unwind before typing in all these scribbled note. Here are three of the senior moments, so you know what I mean: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Will Explain Physics For Food…?

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It’s been super-busy here in my universe, coupled with turmoil of various sorts. This has kept me away from doing some of the sorts of posts I’ve wanted to do. I hope to tell you a bit about what I’ve been up to when I get a chance. I managed to squeeze in some time for a movie last night, and I’ll do a post on that shortly, since I thought it was wonderful. In the meantime, I thought that while I do a quick breakfast before diving into the day, I’d mention the following.

Alternative Title: A Physics Blind Date

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email out of the blue from a lawyer from out of town. He explained a bit about the type of law work he does, and then went on to say that this was nothing to do with what he was emailing me about. He was emailing me about physics. Turns out that in their spare time, he and his law partner spend time discussing and arguing about physics concepts such as General and Special Relativity, and Cosmology. They’d got to a point where they were confused about various details. The popular level books that they were reading did not really do it for them in terms of getting them past certain concepts and they thought that they’d just contact a physicist and ask.

Hence the email. He wondered if I’d be able to take some time to answer questions. He was terribly apologetic for bothering me, and knew that I might decline since I’m probably very busy.

Well, my response you can guess. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXIII – Big Bang Theory

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Thursday is my first day I can take a breath this week. The last few have been crazy and so I’ve not found time to edit that bubble video I promised, but it is coming. I hope I can get to it tomorrow.

Today is still full of stuff here and there, including a referee report, another report, some administrative things for my class, and then another attempt to think through a thorny puzzle on a research project. The class admin should have been done last night since Thursday and Friday are supposed to be free of undergraduate teaching issues, according to my agreement with myself. However, we had a seminar visitor – Rene Meyer – and so after my class ended at 7:00pm, instead of doing the administration I went to get a bus to downtown to meet with him and my student Arnab for dinner, at the excellent Blossom, one of my favourites down there. There was a bit of walking around to show them some of downtown’s lovely hidden treasures in the form of so many elegant buildings that are ignored by most. (Yes, people, there are restaurants and cafes and things open downtown at night. And of course bars. Go see.)

Now on to the other thing:

still from the show big bang theory

As a result of a phone call that came through while I was hosting Rene yesterday, it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXII – Live LHC Chats

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Just the other day, while coordinating some work being done on my house, I was thinking that it is time I learned Spanish. Most of the people working in the construction industry here in Los Angeles have Spanish as their first language, and besides the usefulness it would give in communicating difficult ideas about a piece of work to be carried out, I really don’t like the feeling that I’m disconnected from them. I’d like to be able at least to, in Spanish, offer a cup of coffee, or a glass of iced water, and have a little small talk – treat them like fellow human beings as opposed to “the help” as is done so much in this city, to my disgust. I interact a lot with the Spanish-speaking parts of the city through my use of public transport, places I go to grab tasty food from time to time, and so on, but there is still a sense that there is an entire alternative Los Angeles out there that I am only barely touching upon by not knowing the language.

Then yesterday this whole Spanish language issue came up again in a big way. There was a phone call to the department from Univision, the Spanish-language TV network. Probably most of you are wondering what that is. You know those several channels that you never watch and when you flick by them, all clustered together, they’re always speaking Spanish and discussing issues or people that you seldom (if ever) have heard of? Yes. This is one of those channels. There’s a huge part of America (and elsewhere) that tune to those channels primarily.

Well, the people at Univision had heard about the excitement about the Large Hadron Collider (see, e.g. last post) and wanted to do a piece on it, and have someone in the studio to talk about it live on their breakfast show. They were looking for a […] Click to continue reading this post →

It Works!!!

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Well, it seems that the largest and most complicated experiment in the history of humankind is…. working so far. They circulated the first beams at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) earlier today! Even Google is excited. Check out their front page:

google\'s LHC graphic!

Fun live blogging reports from the scene of events over at Resonaances, US/LHC Blogs (several posts), and Superweak, for example. I got the ATLAS readout/image below from the latter. (Presumably this is the shower of particles produced when they did the “dumping” described in Resonaances? Or just stuff produced by the edges of the beam as it passes through?) Press release from CERN here.

first event at ATLAS
Update: NPR’s Morning Edition had a nice report this morning in the form of a chat between Rene Montagne and reporter David Kestenbaum. Fun to hear the audio clip of the control room. Link here.

Oh, right. The silliness. Click on that useful site I mentioned earlier to see if the earth Click to continue reading this post →

One in the eye for Big Textbook?

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Well, back to teaching issues. Textbooks. I know the following is illegal, but I will admit to being hopeful that this will supply a much needed kick in the rear end for the “textbook industry”. (The very term makes me a bit ill sometimes.) In teaching the big courses at freshman or sophomore level to classes that have a couple of hundred students (broken into sections – we don’t like super huge classes here at USC) enrolled, it is hard not to notice that there’s something slightly insidious about aspects of the textbook game. Despite the fact that we are teaching subjects (Newtonian physics, thermodynamics and a brief bit of “modern physics” that is mostly from no later than 1905) at levels that have not significantly changed for over a century (in some parts, several centuries), the Industry (shall we call it “Big Textbook”?) keeps finding new excuses to come up with new editions. These editions get more and more expensive, and heavier and heavier to carry around. I don’t know why this is necessary, except to force new students to buy the books all over again.

Additionally, the new hook is to combine the book with an access code for further […] Click to continue reading this post →

Thoughts During Break Time

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Ah. I see that it’s been three days since my last confession. Gosh.

Well, it’s been a quiet weekend here in, er, my part of the universe. Good time for reflection and rest. I had a couple of posts I was going to do but in the end decided to break the pattern and change up my Saturday and Sunday, and the “change up” did not include the blog. So sorry about that.

I’m taking a break between an interesting meeting (that I will tell you about) and my office hour. The sun’s shining outside and it is not oppressively hot, surprisingly, so I’ll keep this short and poke my head out there again before my Physics 151 visitors arrive.

Some of the things on my mind: […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Farewell To Arms

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cut off arms from shirts

When I look at this, it sort of scares me a touch. Just a touch. There’s a memory of the arms – flesh and blood ones – inside them, and there goes a shiver down my spine. But it’s all fine, really. There’s nothing sinister going on, and no horrible subtext lurking at all. What I was doing with my Labour Day holiday was all perfectly innocent. Nobody’s arms – not mine or anyone else’s – were or will be hurt! (I’m rather pleased with the title of the post, I have to say.)

What was I doing?
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Big?

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On campus yesterday, I ran into a colleague I had not seen in a long time. She was with her daughter. She introduced us, saying, among other things, that Professor Johnson is “Big in Cosmology”.

I’ll admit that I giggled like a naughty schoolgirl for a longish, unprofessorial moment. It was sort of hard to explain, and would have derailed the conversation, so I did not try. Why was I giggling? Well, it is just that the field of cosmology (which, for the record, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Reconfiguring

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usc campusWell, it is the first day of the new semester here at USC, and of the new academic year. Whether I like it or not, everything changes today, in terms of my work patterns. I have to squeeze the sprawl of my research (recent posts about that here, here, here, and here) back into a more confined space to make room for other things. Chief among those is my Physics 151 class, where I teach about 90 freshmen (science and engineering majors) the ins and outs (but mostly the ins) of mechanics and thermodynamics. I’ll also be dealing with a number of service and outreach projects that I’ve had on hold for a few months, and, of course, I’ll be serving on a number of committees doing various things in the department and the university at large.

Am I ready? Not entirely. I’m not fully in the right frame of mind, it has to be said. The various research projects I was working on did not get as far as I would have liked, and I could benefit from more of the full-immersion mode that Summer affords in order to follow up lots of ideas and computations. Also, there are entire projects I did not even get to.

But you do what you can, and that’s all there is. I’ve been dumped into a weird time […] Click to continue reading this post →

Summary Strings

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I don’t know if you saw it, but I happened to catch the last two talks of the Strings 2008 conference, via live webcast. They were summary talks. Hirosi Ooguri did an excellent job of summarizing all the main themes in various talks during the conference, and the David Gross summed it all up, took stock of where we are, and where we aren’t, and looked forward. A sort of “state of the union” speech if you like. And the state is good. Very good indeed.

I found these two talks to be excellent, informative, and very interesting. I recommend them to people interested in research in strings and related topics. I can’t see a link to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Bit Like Watching The Olympics…

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(…but without the relentless parade of bikinis, happily.) What am I talking about? You can watch live over the web the proceedings of the Strings 2008 conference taking place at CERN. The official site is here, with links to the webcast, schedule, talk titles, and so forth. (Sorry I’m a … Click to continue reading this post →

Draw

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game of naughts and crosses, spotted in the bar/lobby of an Aspen hotel.I’ve been quiet here recently, I know. Was mostly working, thinking and reading on the weekend. Did not even go on a huge hike (although I did do a nice walk or two). Sometimes, on an evening, I go and read a novel in a bar. (I’m weird that way, I know.) I’ve not been going to the noisy bars full of yelling and the party crowd, but instead like to find a nice sofa in one of the bar/lobby areas of the nicer hotels. Great for reading, and the drink prices are merely extortionate, as opposed to just plain offensive in the more popular places. (Photo: a naughts and crosses game I spotted on a table in one such lobby.)

Well, it’s a draw so far in the battle with my equations and ideas, but I think I’m developing a stronger position. (From this you can deduce that I decided to stick with the same project and hold my ground and struggle on some more.) Perhaps the next […] Click to continue reading this post →

Humps

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Now playing: I’m Confessin’ (That I love You), Thelonious Monk [Solo Monk]

Well, I’m now beyond the halfway mark of my retreat and I’ve been on the one project all this time. I’ve made progress here and there, had some setbacks, and have got very stuck at times. It’s just one of those things with this sort of work. Par for the course.

humps in road warning sign, UKThere are times when you think that if you do just a bit more on the project, it’ll get over the hump, as it were, and then coast along. So far I worry that there may be simply an infinite set of equally spaced humps of similar height all the way down the road**, in that every now and again I discover a rather pretty little gem of a result that’s quite encouraging, but these gems don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. So it’s a little scattered gravel pit of gems as opposed to a lovely… Ok, cvj, enough with the gem metaphor.

Now playing: Totem Pole (Alt. take), Lee Morgan [The Sidewinder]

The issue here is whether I should jump ship and use the last of my quality time here […] Click to continue reading this post →