Twelve Days of Physics

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This morning I received an email from someone called “Grrrl Einstein” today which read:

I am creating a Physics Calendar for the Holiday season, and I am including twelve entities. So far I have:

  1. Newton’s Laws
  2. The Dirac equation/Schrodinger equation
  3. The Clifford Algebra defining the Dirac gamma matrices
  4. E=mc2/Einstein’s equations/postulates and/or some solution of them, such as the Schwarzschild solution
  5. The principle of least action
  6. Maxwell’s equations
  7. E=hv
  8. The Yang-Mills Lagrangian
  9. The Schwinger-Dyson equations or something else related to functional methods
  10. Stokes’ Theorem
  11. Entropy

What would be a good String Theory equation to round it out? Any things I should include/exclude?

She also says:

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Copernican Reality

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Well, you’re sitting there at the desk, so might as well put on the radio to keep yourself company. Do in on the web, and I suggest that you listen to:

Radio Lab episode #205

This one was about Space. It has a lot of good stuff in it: excellent speakers, very good clips, and playful (rather successfully, surprisingly often) presenters. My favourite bit? Neil DeGrasse Tyson being interviewed about our place in the universe. If you’re not an expert on the anatomy of the idea, please have a listen, since this is one of the best (and quite funny) layperson’s quick descriptions I’ve heard on the subject.

Tim Ferris (on the unlikelihood or likelihood of travelling vast distances for expeditions in space) and Brian Greene (on the geometry of our universe – another good layperson’s level chat) are also in this segment, just before. Direct mp3 file link to that particular piece here. Main link here for all the other really good segments.

-cvj

Some Observations at Griffith Observatory

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So I must apologize. I went to the preview of the Griffith Observatory so long ago now and did promise to blog about it with more than just one nice picture, but it did not happen. Partly because I had to go back across the Atlantic to do some work, and then got ill over the weekend I was planning to do it, and then..

Griffith Observatory

Anyway, here are some of my thoughts. First note that my two week delay means that this is no longer a scoop, since even the LA Times had a spread on the whole thing on Thursday. A rather nice one as well. I urge you to consult it for a lovely pull-out graphic of the whole site. There is also a special website with picture tours, nifty 360 degree interactive shots of the spaces, and other information. The Griffith opened yesterday.

What they’ve done over the last four or five years is simply shut down the entire building and rethink and redo a great deal of it. How to preserve the lovely 70 year old landmark, while making it even better? Simple question – simple answer: Get $93 million for your project (I find this number, the earth-sun distance in miles, suspicious), and then go underneath the existing building and hollow out about the same amount of space that is has, but underground. Fill it with lots of goodies. And I mean lots and lots. What goodies? We’ll see.

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Memories, Physics, and Celebration

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It’s a pleasantly foggy morning here on the USC campus. It is 7:00am now (at least at start of writing), and it will all burn off in a few hours, I imagine, to reveal the sunny sky waiting for us. But right now it reminds me of the Cambridge morning of a couple of weeks ago. A foggy Saturday morning in fact. I took that photo of the spider web I used on Halloween with that mist in the background.

That Saturday of celebration of Andrew’s work (The Andrew Chamblin Memorial Conference) at Cambridge was a remarkable experience. (See here for my first post on Andrew, with tributes.) I was exhausted through a good deal of it, since I had eight hour jetlag, but I’m so glad I went, and that I could contribute a talk. I met many old friends and colleagues, drawn mostly from the UK and European side of Andrew’s collection of friends, collaborators, and admirers in the field.

andrew chamblin memorial conferenceThere were talks by former collaborators of Andrew’s: Gary Gibbons, myself, Roberto Emparan, Robert Caldwell, Raphael Bousso, and Stephen Hawking (who also guided some of Andrew’s thesis work). Gary, in “Discrete Symmetries and Gravity”, talked about Andrew’s early Oxford and Cambridge work on various discrete symmetries in physics, particularly those of a geometrical origin. He’d played with various ideas in this context, including some applications to problems in cosmology and other areas of physics. Gary described some of this Click to continue reading this post →

Promises, Promises

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Due to travel, work, and illness, I’m very behind in a number of posts I was hoping to have brought to you by now. I’m planning a big session of playing catch-up tomorrow, and so please accept my apologies for the lateness of some things I promised.

Until then, I’ll leave you with another lovely Peter Goin “Narrative Photogram”, part of the series that I showed you before at the Metro/7th Subway stop on the Red Line.

Peter Goin

They’ve put a lot of effort into those subway stations. Not nearly enough people use them or even know about them, even though they live and work in the city. Consider Click to continue reading this post →

God’s Final Message?

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“According to So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, God‘s Final Message To His Creation is written in fire in letters thirty feet high on the far side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet of Preliumtarn, which orbits the star Zarss, which is located in the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine. The long path to the message is lined with souvenir stands at spaced-out intervals.

When Marvin reads the message, it says, “We apologise for the inconvenience.” However, Fenchurch‘s reaction suggests that the message she saw was the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (and that presumably, therefore, the Message is personalized to each viewer).”

–Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Or perhaps this* is God’s Final Message:

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Tales From The Industry, VIII

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“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“So are you the Talent?”
“Uh… Yes… Maybe.”
“You’re the Physicist?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a real Physicist? Not just playing one?”
“I’m… real.”

Snippet of conversation between myself and a woman from the art department at the studio, while we stood waiting for our green tea to brew. The floor is full of tables all around, mostly occupied with various people sitting at them fiddling with Macs. (Macs everywhere, as I’ve come to expect from the people in the Industry.) There’s a serious-looking table with more senior looking people discussing something in earnest, and another serious-looking table with people editing video on more Macs. All the tables are serious, of course, but overall there is a fun atmosphere. There’s also a big situation board that is consulted regularly by groups of people. It is covered in bright yellow stick-notes covered in writing that are being moved around. There are people coming in and out with a sense of purpose, and some of the crew I am with tv shootare milling around with bits of equipment. All very exciting-looking. It is all made a bit comical by this totally out of place and thoroughly splendid trio of bright red chandeliers that are hanging down from the ceiling over what looks like the head table for the senior folk. Strange but well-appreciated quirk of decoration, for what is otherwise a high-ceilinged warehouse-type space.

***

The situation? Shooting some fun things about physics for a TV show. It will air on a station near you (in the USA) next year some time. Details then. We converted a corner of one of our teaching labs at USC into a mini-studio:

tv shoot

Joe Vandiver, the director of our teaching labs, got to bring out some nice little demos Click to continue reading this post →

String Theory Goes A Little Bit Country?

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In these hard times for basic science research, scientists look elsewhere for supplementary financial support. It seems that the monolithic entity simply known as “String Theory” is trying to diversify its funding sources even more creatively than before! Some recently spotted* evidence in the Nashua Telegraph in New Hampshire:

“String Theory plays at barn dance”
WINDHAM – The Windham Recreation Committee will host a Family Barn Dance at the Town Hall from 8-11 p.m. on Friday.

Live fiddle music will be provided by String Theory. Frank Woodward will be the caller. All dances are taught. Beginners, singles, families and children are welcome.

Donations will be accepted at the door.

-cvj

(*Thanks Michelle!)

Government Gets Stern

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Well, as you can tell by looking in the “environment” category here, I’m likely to be pleased to hear about the Stern report, released yesterday (Guardian article and links to report here) and also pleased to hear that the UK government is taking the report seriously…. more or less.

I’d have a lot more to say, but I’ve said so much about this already, and I’m not really up to a long post on this right now. But I could not let this excellent (and hopefully landmark) event go unmarked. The point, as has been said before:- Nobody is going to get going on this because it is “the right thing to do”, since it is difficult for individuals and businesses to act in a way that makes things less than convenient for yourself for a cause that seems so abstract. Pure market forces will not do it either. We need actual leadership from the scientists -which has more or less happened for a while now (see my earlier reports on the UCS here and here for example)- and action and structure put in place by the people who will really get things going: economists and then governments (because they follow the money).

Well, Stern is a major figure in the “economists” group, and so this is good news. I must admit though that it really did make me cringe every time I heard the announcers on BBC Radio 4, while trying to emphasise how significant the report’s findings were, saying things like “this is not a report from an environmentalist, it is a Click to continue reading this post →

A Promising Sign?

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Hopeful sign of the future*?

two higgs

There could be other store names of this sort breaking out depending upon what is found at the LHC and the ILC. You could have the “Superpartners” dating agency, for one, and perhaps “Dark Matter” chocolate bars (made by same company that brought you “Milky Way”, of course), as another… the possibilities are endless.

-cvj

(*For the uninitiated, the Higgs particle is one of the things physicists will search for at Click to continue reading this post →

Spotted. Round. Dublin.

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Well, I’m not getting any sleep at all tonight, so might as well blog a bit. I’ve got to wake up in two and a half hours to catch a flight, so might as well give up gracefully, and usefully, by sharing with you:

Two spheres caught my eye around Dublin today, one familiar, one not. Both great.

  "Tree of Gold" (Crainn an Oir), by Eamonn O'Doherty. Arnaldo Pomodoro's Sphere with Sphere

(Click for larger.) The first is the “Tree of Gold (Crainn an Oir)”, by Eamonn Click to continue reading this post →