Winning Combinations

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Have the “troubles” caused by string theory begun to run so deep so as to affect our high schools? Heavens yes! Well, at least one high school in Oregon anyway. Hurrah!

This from the Siemens Foundation press release about the winners of their annual high school science and technology competition:

Dmitry Vaintrob, a senior at South Eugene High School in Eugene, Oregon, won the $100,000 Grand Prize scholarship in the individual category for exciting research in an abstract new area of math called string topology.

I don’t really know what “string topology” is (as opposed to just topology applied to string theory), so I went to their site to read the synopsis of this prize winner, and I Click to continue reading this post →

Timely Futurama

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futurama globetrottersJust caught a Futurama episode on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. All I can say is: Go and find the episode called “Time Keeps on Slipping”. It is hilarious. It is a brilliant mixture of physics and basketball jokes. Time is slipping uncontrollably due to an interplanetary basketball game…. Earth has been challenged by the planet Globetrotter, for … “No reason – absolutely no stakes beyond the shame of defeat”. (Found a random site here with some information that may or may not be helpful.)

Two random very funny (in context) lines I sort of remember (not accurate):
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Some Radio Science

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I meant to tell you about this on Thursday or Friday, but I had to focus on the Southern California String Seminar, and so did not get to it sooner. So you might not get to listen to it as part of a Sunday afternoon relaxation.

The Royal Society gave an award to Stephen Hawking on Thursday, and the BBC took the opportunity to make a special effort to cover some very good science discussion, as a sort of away mission for the Radio 4 Today program. You can go to the Royal Society’s site with all of the interviews (with Martin Rees, Stephen Hawking, Lewis Wolpert, and John Krebs among others) on various subjects. The last two interviews have comments about ethical implications of scientific research, and about whether the public can trust the information they are given by scientists, respectively. I’ve not listened to those yet, but I bet they’ll be interesting.

You can listen to the whole thing in one continuous block by going to Radio 4’s listen again archive for Radio 4’s Today programme, clicking on the Thursday link (before it gets over-written by the next Thursday programme).

Radio 4’s In Our Time last week also had some interesting material. It was all about the speed of light. This is particularly timely in view of the [sometimes morbidly fascinating] discussion going on about varying the speed of light on another thread. The programme features John Barrow (Cambridge), Iwan Morus (Universirt of Wales, Aberystwyth), and Jocelyn Bell Burns (Oxford). Programme here. (Although you might have to go to the archive page here after Thursday to find this episode.)

Enjoy.

-cvj

(*Thanks Ed Copeland!)


[Update: Andrew Jaffe also talks about these programmes.]

Coiled

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Well, in the fine and tedious tradition of various huge Hollywood movies (perhaps most recently Batman Begins), in showing the following picture I probably should have used the blog post title “I gotta get me one of those”, or some slight variant:

tesla electric car

… but I’ll spare you the cliché. This car is part of a fantasy that I (and some others) Click to continue reading this post →

Grin and Bear It

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illustration by Deanna StaffoWell, it is midnight and I am only on page 12 of the notes I am writing to present as a talk in the Southern California String Seminar tomorrow at 9:15am. Don’t try this at home – prepare talks early, ok?

Where is the seminar being held? UCLA! What University am I from? USC! What event happens tomorrow besides my (hopefully not too terrible) talk? The big USC vs UCLA head to head in College Football. If USC wins, they go to the championship game, apparently. Yay.

So the usual articles about the cross town rivalry between the two institutions have shown up this week in print and on National radio and TV. There are two amusing (and interesting) ones that I looked at – one in LA Weekly (about academic performance, faculty recruitment, student acheivement, and much more – illustration above from it, by Deanna Staffo), and one in the LA Times (mostly about nightlife). Have a look. There are dozens of others -just type USC into the LA Times search engine for example. You learn things about both universities as well from those two, so it is not without some point. For example, our young ones clearly go to cooler bars, for a start, as you can see from the pictures in the LA Times article.

(Strange that the articles do not mention the cooperation and general fun had when their high energy physics groups get together to discuss topics in string theory and other physics. Very odd omission indeed.)

I would say a lot more about the articles, but time is not on my side, so I will instead leave you with a blog post I wrote (“Drag the Bear”) on December 2nd last year, upon encountering something strange on campus:

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The Antikythera Mechanism

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So, I have questions.

the Antikythera mechanismAbout what? Well, by now you’ve heard about this wonderful machine that was found 100 years or so ago, which after a lot of research, has been found to be a remarkably sophisticated mechanical computer designed and built in ancient Greece about 2,100 years ago. There’s a nice LA Times story on it by Thomas H. Maugh II here, and a New York Times story* by John Noble Wilford here and a Reuters article by Patricia Reaney here. (The image to the right (click for larger) is from the University of Cardiff.)

From the articles you can learn that the machine was able to perform computational tasks 1400 years or so before the time when machines of this sort (but less sophisticated) were thought to have appeared. What sort of tasks? Well, using 37 gears or so it can do subtractions, multiplications and divisions to show the cycles of Click to continue reading this post →

Shocked Reaction

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For a refreshingly straightforward point of view from a young person in the field who just wants to get on with doing some good physics with what seems like a promising approach, read Jonathan Shock’s description of his recent attendance of meetings (including the one to which I earlier referred) on heavy ion collisions and related physics. (See also an interesting comment by Xin-Nian Wang on the comment thread of my earlier post.) Jonathan gives some useful links to presentations on some of the attempts to model some of the new physics using string theory models.

The title? Oh, yes, he gets beaten up a bit by those around him for working on strings. Click to continue reading this post →

My Powerpoint Advice

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Chad is giving more “Powerpoint technique” tips over on his blog.

I’d like to give a few tips of my own:

  1. Learn to give a good 55 minute chalkboard (or whiteboard) talk first. Only then learn about how to give a talk with a computera.
  2. Powerpoint?! Don’t use Powerpoint, for goodness sake! Use Keynoteb!!

-cvj

[aRegardless of program you are using to project the talk. And am I the only one who Click to continue reading this post →

Southern California Strings Seminar

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discussion at the scssOn Friday and Saturday of this week (December 1st and 2nd), the next Southern California Strings Seminar will be happening! It’s a regional meeting for people doing research in string theory and related topics, and as I’ve said before, I’d especially like to see more young people come out and take part. We make a special effort to ask the speakers to spend a little time at the beginning of their talk setting the scene (speaking about motivations, what has gone before, etc) so that the series can be of great value to people who are trying to learn what’s going on in a particular topic at research level (this can be students, postdocs, or faculty, in fact).

If you’re doing this kind of physics research anywhere in the Southern California region, and want to take part, please come. See the website for details, and try to let Click to continue reading this post →

Grand Clues All Around

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Today in my Physics 100 class (I’m preparing it right now), we’ll be re-discovering the structure of the atom… It’s nice to consider the clues that are around us in our everyday life. This picture (click for larger… and yes, I was down at Grand Central Market again on Sunday) will start my discussion of one set of important clues…. Any thoughts about what aspect of it I’ll be talking about?

Grand Central Market

-cvj

See Six

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The good people at the US Postal service do produce some splendid sets of stamps on quite a regular basis. Today, to my delight, I was offered this set as one of my choices at the post office:

snowflakes

There’s so much physics behind the microscopic lattice of H2O molecules underlying such a lovely shape, with the pleasant C6 symmetry of the macroscopic result – the snowflake. I found a lovely “morphology diagram” showing the sorts of shapes you get depending upon temperature and supersaturation of the water vapour that condenses Click to continue reading this post →

People of the Corn

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The people of the corn are not the folks in Chiapas, Mexico, who have been known to call themselves that. Or, I should say not just them. Who else? The people of the USA. Maybe much more so than the people in Mexico.

I learned this from listening to Michael Pollan, author of the book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, who was on NPR’s Science Friday two days ago. His book explores the origins of the food that we eat every day, explaining the changes that have occurred in agriculture that moved us away from the traditional model of a farm (that many of us still have in our heads) to the current model: No animals, no pastures, no variety. Just a few specific crops, like corn. Corn grown for all sorts of reasons, and very few of them for the actual corn itself as a food. Instead, it goes into nearly everything that we eat (and more) in huge quantities. The vast majority of the food that we eat has corn at its base in some way or another. Either directly, such as in the sweeteners added to nearly every procesed food, or indirectly – corn is used as feed for producing the animals that we get meat, milk, etc, from. You can use a mass spectrometer to trace Click to continue reading this post →

Tee Time On The Space Station

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ISS image at sunsetBefore I point you to the link about the latest important activity on the International Space Station, I’d like to ask for your help: – This might be a bit impolite, but may I ask what is the actual point of the International Space Station? I spent a bit of time (not a huge amount, I admit) at NASA’s site, for example, and can’t really find an overall scientific or engineering statement of purpose. There’s a bit of chatter about learning about the effects of long spaceflights on the physiology of human beings, and how to meet engineering challenges of various sorts, but that seems to be it. The weekly science reports that you can read on there don’t sound very encouraging either, but I imagine I’m seeing the digest for the media and non-experts.

[Update: – Ok! I found some interesting sites here and here. They do help a bit.]

I’m not being sarcastic here…. I’d really like to know more. I’m sure that there must be a Click to continue reading this post →

Must Go Down

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    Sea Fever

    I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
    And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
    And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
    And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

    I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
    Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
    And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
    And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

    I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
    To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
    And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
    And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

    – John Masefield

Why go down? In a short and light-hearted radio piece on NPR, Robert Krulwich discovers a way to make time run more slowly (an attractive idea over a long holiday Click to continue reading this post →