Prize Watch

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Don’t forget to be looking out for the other Nobel Prizes announced this week. Monday saw the Physiology or Medicine Prize go to Harald zur Hausen for work on the human papilloma viruses (which cause cervical cancer), and to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for work on the human immunodeficiency virus. Announcement and more details here. Meanwhile, today’s Chemistry Prize was to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP. Details here.

No, no, no. The Chemistry prize was not for the discovery of a substance that’s just pretty and sparkly-glowy. (Although, you know… maybe that is a good reason on its Click to continue reading this post →

The 2008 Physics Nobel Prize

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The announcement has been made. It’s for spontaneously broken symmetry in particle physics and it is to Nambu (1/2 – “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics”) and Kobayashi (1/4) and Maskawa (1/4) (- “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature”). It’s all about what might be better termed “hidden symmetries” in Nature, showing that the world (the structure of fundamental particle physics, specifically) is in fact much simpler if looked at in the right way. It is a powerful technique that does not just propose what the hidden patterns (symmetries) are, but tells you what the consequences of those patterns are in the form of predictions such that physicists can go out and measure those predictions and verify the existence of those symmetries. In some sense, this type of approach is the driving force behind a lot of fundamental particle physics these days – finding the hidden, simpler structure that lurks under the surface.

Here’s the announcement:

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An Accurate Summary

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I am, as you have noticed, somewhat averse to writing the political rants you find on a number of the science-oriented blogs you might frequent. As I’ve said before, I try to maintain a place you can visit to get away from the shouty nonsense (or the naive I-drunk-the-KoolAid hero-varnishing for that matter)… but this is hard to resist. Basically, I find myself a bit depressed that things have fallen so far in terms of presidential level politics in this country that a candidate for vice-president, in maybe the most watched debate of the season, can (a) avoid answering questions, (b) explicitly tell the moderator that they are not going to answer the questions, (c) dissolve into obviously prepared talking points when faced with difficult questions, (d) wink repulsively at the TV camera in an obvious attempt to appear likeable, and (e) make up random stuff so as to get their opponent to waste time denying it, and be declared by everyone as having done well in the debate. I did not think that we could sink lower than Bush the Younger in terms of appallingly bad candidates (who nevertheless do well in this climate), but I think I was wrong. Ok. That’s all I’m saying. I was pleased to see* a precise summary of my thoughts on Sarah Palin’s performance and so I’ll leave you with it, for your amusement (see a post accompanying it here):

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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 →

The Beet Goes On…

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Tomorrow I’ll be doing something a bit unusual, I’ve heard. I’ll be writing lots of equations (so far so normal), but I’ll be doing it on a stage and will be filmed doing it. Should be fun. It’s for an educational TV show that’ll be out some time soon. Will tell you more when I know more. My task later on is to figure out which equations they’d like on camera. It’s been a long day, so I thought I’d sit here with some camomile tea and blog a bit first.

It’s been a while since we’ve been to the kitchen together, hasn’t it? Let me tell you about Monday’s special dish. I was invited by a friend to go to their house and join some others for a Rosh Hashanah gathering. The instruction was to “bring a side dish of your choosing”. Excellent. Well, I’m out of figs now (the main tree has run out of them after a remarkable season), and so could not rely on that. The big problem was really that on Monday I teach until 7:00pm (ugh), and I’d have to go home first to get the food. I certainly could not rely on being able to cook a meal and take it immediately since I’d have about 15 minutes to make everything and get it to my friend’s place. So I needed something good, but something simple and fast.

For some reason I decided on oranges. I don’t really know why. I thought I might do something with oranges, sliced, and then maybe some fresh mint from my garden 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:

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Late Night Drinking

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In the early hours of Sunday morning, before sunrise, I could hear a dripping noise – or rather lots of dripping noises – from outside. It was familiar, as I’ve been hearing it from time to time over the last four or five weeks. It is one of the very lovely features of the the climate here at this time of year. After a hot sunny daytime, late at night (or early in the morning) a mist or fog rolls in all the way from the ocean twelve or more miles away. It is the result of marine layer, a term that is often -although not really accurately- used for the fog itself.

foggy los angeles

The fog condenses on everything, and while not being actual rain (we haven’t had any in the main part of the Los Angeles basin in a long while), results in a great deal of moisture on the ground and the trees and bushes, keeping lots of vegetation green through this otherwise dry period of the year. That’s the dripping I could hear. This is presumably how this wonderful natural desert sustained a variety of flora and fauna long before the city, with its Click to continue reading this post →

Stuff to do with your hands while driving

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Aha… now text messaging while driving is going to be illegal in California. (See e.g., here.) Very good. (Wait, not even at traffic light stops…? How are you supposed to constantly update people on how late you are?) I have not seen much in the way of enforcement for the mobile phone law from earlier in the year, have you? I wonder how much change has come about… other than more and more people wandering around on foot with shiny blinking earpieces looking like extras from a bad SF TV show… Concerned cyclists would like to know…

Well, here’s a little fun video to remind you of many of the fun things for you to do (that are not banned explicitly) now that you’ve got all that free time for your hands (sorry about annoying commercial at beginning):

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Laugh While Seeing

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vista theater on sunset boulevardYes, that’s indeed why it is called Sunset Boulevard. Beautiful, isn’t it? And I wonder whether this is why the Vista Theatre is called the Vista. I saw this lovely warm evening light as I came around the corner on Tuesday, on my way to meet a friend to see a movie I’ve been waiting for for some time now – Burn After Reading. It’s a Coen Brothers movie, and for me, it is an event when one of theirs comes out.

As has been the case a number of times in the past, when people hear I am interested in seeing a Coen film, they tell me things like “oh, the reviews weren’t good”, or “it hasn’t been doing so well”, or “the reviews are mixed”. My response is to thank them but politely ignore them. Especially for films I’ve made up my mind to see, I ignore all reviews.

In fact, as a rule, I read film reviews only after seeing the film, and then mostly 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 →

Little Bang

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Well, they aired it. Gosh. It’s a pared-down version of what we shot (there were three questions for The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons in all… one asking him to explain the Big Bang Theory, the entropy one you see in the clip, and finally “Newton Vs Einstein – Who’s funnier?”), but amazingly they actually aired it on Monday in the Click to continue reading this post →

Bubbles Galore!

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sterling_johnson_bubblesThere were three excellent presentations under the theme Bubbles at the most recent Categorically Not! at the Santa Monica Art Studios. See here. The final one was a visual treat which got everyone on their feet applauding at the end. It was Sterling Johnson, lawyer by day, bubble superhero by night, showing us some of his superpowers. I captured some clips of it, and edited them together for you. (Sorry about my laughing into the microphone at one point. I couldn’t help it.)

My two favourite moments are at 5:28 when he does his “Invisible Bubble Trick” -it is Click to continue reading this post →