All The Sweet, Green Icing

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MacArthur Park Theatre Event

Since, once again, the temperature is knocking on the door of insane outside, I’ll sit here on the sofa indoors for a while and tell you about the really fun thing I was doing earlier today. Back when it was much less hot.

MacArthur Park Theatre EventThe mission: First show up at Mama’s Hot Tamales Cafe. (So since at the very least, ridiculously tasty tamales are involved, clearly anything beyond this is just a bonus.) This is located across 7th Street from the South side of MacArthur Park, just West of Alvarado (map link).

Next, after saying hello to the friendly peopleMacArthur Park Theatre Event who are happy to see that you showed up for the event (a friend of mine and I were the first to show up), you sit at a table for a little while and read six plays. Don’t worry, since the average length of one of the plays is less than a page, so it won’t take long -and they’re all rather good!

MacArthur Park Theatre Event

Next, you go outside, cross the road, and spend some time in MacArthur Park. Why? Well, it is park with a bit of a bad reputation that is seriously underused and under-appreciated by many, so that’s a good reason right there…

MacArthur Park Theatre Event

…but the main reason for this visit at this point in the mission is to wander the park and see if you can spot some of the performances or, as one woman put it, Click to continue reading this post →

Perseids!

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Over the next few nights, you should have a good chance of seeing some of the Perseid meteor shower. They’re going to put on a rather splendid show this year, I hear. From the NASA news site, I’ve grabbed a a diagram of the region of the sky (containing the constellation Perseus, of course – that’s where they’ll seem to be coming from, and so that’s what gives them their name) that you ought to be looking toward. (The red dot is not a star, but the central point of (apparent) origin, and the red lines are some example paths of the streakers that you’ll see):

perseids where to look

Concerned that you don’t know enough astronomy? No idea in any amount of detail Click to continue reading this post →

My Superpowers Revealed

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Ok, I can’t resist. From an earlier post:

…and of course video footage of me effortlessly squashing a star much larger than our own sun down into a tiny space should help out enormously later on with classroom control, and so forth…

Since my cover is now blown, here are some stills** (click for larger) from Tuesday’s (unexpected) episode of the History Channel’s “The Universe”*:
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The Universe On TV

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Something funny happened to me last night. I was reviewing some television programmes that my system had recorded earlier, by fast-forwarding through them. In particular, I was skimming (I’ll admit) through an episode of a series that I was wondering whether to do a quick blog post about, in order to remind you to watch it. It’s the History Channel’s venture into science programming called “The Universe”, which has been running for some time now. Well, I was zipping through the one about stellar evolution called something like “The Life and Death a Star”…. and someone familiar popped on and off the screen. It was me. Took me a few beats to register full recognition, which was amusing.

I’d forgotten that I was to appear in this episode. Or, better put, I was not aware I would be in this one. I thought the ones I contributed to would air later, like next month or something. I thought there was a separate episode on neutron stars, but I see now that they included it all in an episode about the whole life of a star, which makes sense. (I chatted a bit about the filming of it in an earlier post.)

Anyway, as I was going to say (whether or not I was in it) was that it’s a nice series so far, and so consider having a look at it. If you have not been watching it, I imagine Click to continue reading this post →

Supporting the STEM

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Your opinion is needed.

The National Science Board at its August 8, 2007 meeting approved a draft “national action plan” for improving the quality of elementary and secondary education in science, math, technology and engineering and ensuring an adequate supply of teachers in those subjects. The plan, which will be available for public review and comment today on the science board’s Web site, calls for a range of actions by the federal government, states, and school districts, including creating an independent, non-federal National Council for STEM Education, establishing a new assistant secretary position in the Education Department, and developing strategies to pay teachers in those fields at “market rates.”

They are inviting public comments through August 30th, 2007.

Not a lot to say here except that you (as a member of the public who knows the value Click to continue reading this post →

A Bit Jittery

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endeavour at cape canaveral getting ready (AP photo)

Working by remote control, engineers at the Kennedy Space Center began pumping a half-million gallons of super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen rocket fuel into the shuttle Endeavour’s external tank early Wednesday, setting the stage for launch on a space station assembly mission at 6:36:42 p.m., ….

(That’s Eastern time.)

…if all continues to go well, Endeavour’s crew — commander Scott Kelly, pilot Charles Hobaugh, Tracy Caldwell, Rick Mastracchio, Dave Williams, educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan and Al Drew — will begin strapping in around 3:15 p.m.

I always get a bit uneasy when one of these things is about to launch or land. This mission has added significance (re: Challenger), as you may know. There’s more in the story by CBS’ Bill Harwood, from which I quoted above. (See also an AP/Yahoo story by Rasha Madkour…and there’s a slide show.)

As a means of distracting myself (and maybe you) from the whole thing, here’s a bit Click to continue reading this post →

Reading, Writing, and ’Rithmetic

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Yesterday was (depending upon who’s counting) the 16th anniversary of that thing we call the World Wide Web becoming a public entity. The Web is not to be confused with the Internet, which is much older, of course1. I’m talking about Tim Berners-Lee’s idea and implementation thereof. (I should not neglect to mention that this was done at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Europe.) His original posting (on the newsgroup alt.hypertext) proposing the structure can be viewed here, and here’s an extract:

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.

Reader view

The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is another (“virtual”) document containing links to the documents found. A simple protocol (“HTTP”) is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword search by a remote information server.

The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.

To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data.

What am I going to do to celebrate?

letter to anonSince everyday I celebrate the WWW by using it a lot, to commemorate the event I think I’m going to pay a visit to the (real, physical) library, then read a good old-fashioned book for a while, and then hand-write a letter. I used to write so many letters, long ago, and from time to time I try to stop everything and pick up a pen and write one. I got in the mood the other day while in Aspen, and went and found some letter-writing paper and envelopes, curled up on a sofa, and wrote for a Click to continue reading this post →

Return to the Nest

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Sorry about the silence. Odd thing: As a result of my (I think) growing absent-mindedness, it turned out that my flight was on Sunday night and not on Saturday night (as I thought when I did the previous post), so I suddenly had an unplanned 24 hours on my hands in Aspen.

ground dove nestI decided to spend the extra day lying low getting some work done – various things I thought would get undone on this trip suddenly had another chance to get done! Mostly administrative stuff. It is amazing how much one can get done when there’s a whole extra day suddenly appearing in your schedule, and so that’s what I worked on.

One thing I could have done was reminded you that the Phoenix was due to launch Saturday, and indeed it did! Be sure to check out a post about it on the Bad Astronomer with some links to really nice launch videos. The Phoenix mission plans rather wonderful things when the craft gets to Mars (including making the old reverse-thrust landing maneuver vogue again), as you can learn from their site.

phoenix spacecraftToday, Monday, saw me running errands. Boring things, really. Things you do after being away from the nest for three weeks. Anyway, I’m trying to get to used to all the extra oxygen, and the unbelievable dryness. There’s still been no rain. I will miss the daily downpours and thunderstorms of Aspen. This leads me to the garden report. Nothing to say except that there’s Click to continue reading this post →

The Walk Up Mount Wilson

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[A friend of mine in LA told me today that she was planning to go with a group of friends to do some observing up at the big telescope on Mount Wilson. This put me in mind of a post that I did on CV two years ago (how time flies!) about some of the science done up there at the Mount Wilson Observatory, thoughts surrounding, all combined with a hike up to it that I felt compelled to do upon seeing it from the air. I thought I’d bring that old post back for you to read, with enlargeable pictures as a bonus. Enjoy. -cvj]
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sign to mount wilsonAs you know from an earlier post, I left Aspen on Friday and headed home. This involves changing planes at Denver, and then flying over the strange, beautiful, and changing landscape West to Los Angeles. It only takes about a couple of hours. I was thinking hard about our discussion about the Greatest Physics Paper! and trying to think of those forgotten examples of great work. The people who’s songs are seldom sung. The unglamourous “bread and butter” works that seldom get written up in the newspapers near the time that they are produced, if ever. These solid works are examples of what every scientist should do as a matter of course: You look at the evidence you have before you, gather more if necessary, make some assumptions, form a hypothesis, and test it against the data. Next, come to a conclusion, and report your results as clearly and honestly as you can, and so on.

Whether or not you have some vision about what it all means does not necessarily qualify or disqualify the resulting paper as a candidate for being a great paper. It can still take its place in the tapestry that is the sum of efforts of generation after generation of physicist to make sense of our world, and find its meaning there.

Mount Wilson Hike - foliageSo I was thinking about this all, and my mind switched to some recent reading I’d been doing. Simon Singh’s excellent book, “Big Bang” had been on my bedside table recently, and although I’d not had a lot of time to read it, I was curious to dip into it from time to time. This is partly because, while I know several of the stories and the history that he tells, it is always of great value to see how another tells those stories. I always learn something, either in the facts or in the telling.

As we’d been discussing before, Einstein’s papers are modern examples of work that changed our entire view of how the universe that we inhabit is really put together. How can those fail to be top candidates for the best physics papers ever? Same thing for Newton, and for Galileo, etc.

However, it’s easy to forget that for several years after Einstein’s breakthrough with General Relativity [see a later post I did here], the world still thought that the entire universe was just the Milky Way Galaxy. It was not until the year 1923 that Edwin Hubble (in one of his many great contributions) established extremely cleanly that the Andromeda Galaxy was several times further away from the center of the Milky Way than the edge of the Milky Way itself. This was a truly shattering change of perspective Click to continue reading this post →

Showing a Different Way

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danica mckellar Getty imagesDanica McKellar (the actress who played Winnie in that show The Wonder Years that many of you might remember) has been working to try to encourage young girls to go more for “Cute and Smart”, as opposed to “Cute and Dumb”. Bottom line: Less Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton, and more…. well, Danica. (I’m sure there are other Tinseltown examples here… can I have some help?).

Danica sets an excellent example of why the two (being considered attractive on the one hand, and smart on the other) are not mutually exclusive, while not suffering from the “geek” or “nerd” label that is attached by the entertainment industry to certain groups of people who enjoy using their brains a lot. She trained as a mathematician, in fact, doing her undergraduate work at UCLA so well that she did rather good published research work (NPR piece here Update: It is actually more of a theoretical physics problem, it appears.). This is from someone who struggled with the subject in sixth grade. Why is she in the news? She’s written a new book “Math Doesn’t Suck”, the aim being to encourage girls to avoid the (social) barriers to getting into mathematics. Excellent title. (I wonder if they’ll change it to “Maths Doesn’t Suck” if they publish it in Britain? “Suck” British kids have adopted from the USA cultural juggernaut, but “Math”? Not yet.)

danica mckellar math doesn't suckActually, looking at her website, I see that the full title appears to be “Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail”, which is more of a mouthful, a bit less zippy, but oh well. It’s all very Clueless, in a good way. Here’s a link to the book’s site, and it is due out tomorrow.

There’s an article1 on her recent Newsweek quote at CNN, from which I grabbed this:

“When girls see the antics of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, they think that being fun and glamorous also means being dumb and irresponsible,” the 32-year-old McKellar told Newsweek for editions to hit newsstands Monday.

“But I want to show them that being smart is cool,” she said. “Being good at math is cool. And not only that, it can help them get what they want out of life.”

but you should go and read the whole thing, by clicking here. [Update: Better article here by Corey Binns in Good Magazine. Extract:

“The book hones in on middle school’s trickiest points-––like fractions, ratios, and percentages—and presents them in a style that’s appropriate for the cool kids’ lunch table. Figure out your “type” in boys and you’ll understand greatest common factors. All of those iced lattes celebrities drink make multiplying fractions tasty. Plus, savvy shopping requires killer decimal skills.”

]

Go Danica!

In other news, I learned2 that particle physicist Lisa Randall (author of the popular book with the curious title “Warped Passages”) appears in Vogue this month. Lisa Click to continue reading this post →

News From The Front, VI: Simultaneity

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aspen from gondolaI stopped the previous post rather abruptly (I had to do another task and then run some errands) without getting to tell you a little twist at the end of the story. Here it is.

Having chipped away at the thoughts that Strominger’s talk stirred in my head for several days last week, scribbling equations to check that all I was thinking was on the right track (and chatting a couple of times with Nick Halmagyi down the hall), I decided that it was all fitting together so nicely that the framework and my extensions of it just had to be true. There was that feeling that it was too nice to be wrong, and it passed all the obvious checks I could think of. There were two independent consistency checks everything had to pass (using my way of formulating things) and they gave exactly the right results as required by the general setup, with no room for maneuver.

When that happens so nicely, usually at that point in thinking about a physics problem, a thought occurs to me. If I’m playing with a good idea and everything is working so well, then there’s at least 200 other people in the field who probably are also playing with it, and 199 of them have way more time than I do to think it through and write it up before I can. One should not really worry about these things in an ideal world, but I’d be lying to you if I said it did not come up as a concern from time to time. I’ve a history of having my thunder stolen out from under me several times in the field (and not always accidentally), so I’m a bit gun shy.

Anyway, I started writing a draft of the paper on Thursday the way I usually do: I write Click to continue reading this post →

News From The Front, V: Microscopic Weekend Diversions

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I’ve been spending the day so far as an administrator, and not a researcher, since I have to present the results of two committees’ deliberations at one of the big annual organizational meetings tomorrow here at the Aspen Center for Physics. So I’ve been gathering and arranging data in a presentable form. Enough. I will take a break and blog a tiny bit before turning to a truly riveting task – reviewing an introductory physics textbook for a publisher… (Sigh…it is not so easy to escape these things, even out of semester time.)

I had big plans to do a hike each day on the weekend, but physics intervened. I should explain a bit more. Earlier last week I eventually got around to following Nick’s suggestion from an earlier post to take a look at Andy Strominger’s Strings 2007 talk entitled “Search for the Holographic Dual of N Heterotic Strings”. It was the usual nice Strominger talk, where he motivates the physics very well, and presents interesting and clear D-branesthoughts on the problem in hand. I shall try to say a bit more about what it is about later on, but the general gist of it is that it is to do with understanding certain types of four dimensional black hole in string theory. As you may know, one of the extraordinarily successful results in string theory in the last decade (and slightly more) has been that we can understand one of the most central results of semi-classical quantum gravity -that they have an entropy and behave like thermodynamical objects (the work of Bekenstein and of Hawking from the early 70s)- in precise terms in the full theory of quantum gravity that string theory appears to present us with. This started with the work of Strominger and Vafa in 1996, that showed how to describe a large class of black holes as essentially made of extended objects called D-branes (about which I’ve spoken at length earlier1).

Just to fill in the gaps roughly: Hawking’s result that black holes can radiate as thermodynamical objects comes from taking Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and combining it with Quantum Mechanics in a partial way. He could not really do much better since there was no proper quantum theory of gravity at the time, but even in Click to continue reading this post →