Lighting Up Your Quantum Class

By | | ,
2 Comments

I forgot to tell you about this last week, so here goes. The colloquium last week was given by John O’Brien. One of the perks of the job of having to organize the department’s colloquium series is that you can use it (on rare occassions) as a blunt tool to find things out. I’ve always been curious about connecting the name I saw on one of the labs downstairs to a face. John’s lab, primarily part of the Engineering department, uses a little of the space in our building, you see, but I’ve never really made the connection between the face and the name. It certainly seemed that the USC Center for Photonics, of which he is part, was certainly up to some interesting and fun stuff, and so, egged on by another curious colleague, I sent him an invitation to give us a colloquium. He generously accepted, and here he is:

john o'brien

The talk -see the abstract here– was excellent. As you can see from the website listing the faculty in the centre, they are concerned with all sorts of fun things to do with very small scale devices which do rather clever things with light, such as nanoscale semiconductor lasers. The reason that the talk was excellent, in my opinion, was because it was not a standard device+engineering talk that you can often get from very good engineers who nevertheless don’t neccessarily appreciate what aspects the physicists care about. Those talks can often be pretty pictures and so forth of… well… lots of cool toys, without a sense of the physics that is going on. John took a different tack and grabbed our attention by starting out with the phsysics problems right at the outset…. reminding us of those condensed matter physics courses we all took as students, and then pushing us along to appreciate what he was doing with that physics, building up the complexity of the devices as he went. This is the way to do it.

Another reason I liked it was one of nostalgia. I think I might have been one of the last generations of undergraduates where, in your quantum mechanics class, the whole Click to continue reading this post →

Jammin’

By | | ,
15 Comments

fig emergencyYou’ll recall that I had a fig emergency not too long ago. Too many figs from my tree and (despite commenter Moshe’s suggestion to just eat them all) no inclination to eat them all in one sitting. Recipe ideas were considered (and thanks all of you!), and I made a decision. I was looking for a way to preserve them, not how to immediately eat them, and so sadly I did not take up all the lovely suggestions of things to do. By a day or two later I had several more, and so it became urgent. As hinted at by the post entitled “Jam Tomorrow” (which I took a while to deliver on – sorry) you can guess what I decided to do: Fig Jam, of course!

So I bring you the first of what I expect to be several trips to the kitchen on Asymptotia, where we go through all the steps together (remember the Taiwan-inspired Beef Lo Mein that I did on CV?). So the thing to do is chop up those figs into smaller chunks -roughly eighths (keep halving three times):

jam making

I looked at various sources for an idea of the proportions of ingredients, and eventually settled on a few that I decided to hybridize. I’ll leave it to you to google on “fig jam” and find your own ideas, I found that there is a popular Epicurious recipe, which first appeared in Gourmet magazine some years back, that uses roughly the following (I did not do the rum and sesame seeds mentioned elsewhere):

1 cup sugar
3/4 cup water
2 lb firm-ripe fresh figs
2 strips fresh lemon zest
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

… proportions that I rescaled (see below).

This meant that I needed an idea of the actual weight of the figs. I don’t actually have any scales in the kitchen or anywhere in the house. (I usually use volume measurements in my cooking.) So this meant that I would have to rush out to the shops to get a scale. This did not appeal to me, and after a short while I remembered that I’m actually a physicist, and so can use other means to get an estimate, fashioning some scales from Click to continue reading this post →

More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, IV

By | | , ,
174 Comments

Finally we get to some real substance in the program! (See earlier notes, and thoughts.) Jeff actually mentions all the effort going on string theory and experiments at Brookhaven, and asks that question I keep asking everyone… “why oh why is this never mentioned by the press in these discussions?” I’ve asked this of Peter Woit on his blog a lot too, for example, and have never got much of an answer. Peter and Lee want the world to believe -by reading their books- that the entire field of string theory is just people sitting around discussing the Anthropic Principle and lots of different universes, and blah blah blah… It serves the purpose of the books in question to completely distort the view of what is actually going on in the field. They claim that there is no experimental support (true) or hope for experimental support (how can they know that?) for string theory… but they ignore the fact –they intentionally don’t tell you, dear reader– about the interesting work going on by a huge percentage of the field to use string theory to study the structure of nuclear matter. It is still in its early stages, and may not work, but it is rather interesting. As Jeff put it, about the new form of matter that is constructed in these experiments, string theory is “the only approach that I know of” that currently seems to be able to explain the observed properties….

Lee, about the omission of this huge effort in string theory research from his book: “At least it is alluded to…”

That’s just lame.

He then proceeds to rather poorly attempt to claim that such contact with experiment Click to continue reading this post →

More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, III

By | | , ,
12 Comments

Poor Jeff!

I’m listening to the program now, and 40 minutes into it, there’s been long sections of completely pointless waffle by Lee and the presenter (the latter keeps reading long and largely peripherally relevant quotes from philosophers), broken up by breaks to shout the name of the station at you…. then long musical ditties… then back to more waffle…. and then the few times Jeff gets to come in, he is interrupted again by the presenter with more irrelevant stuff about philosophy. Jeff managed to say at one point “I’d rather talk about what can be measured, what we can calculate…”, but this seems to have been ignored. (Here and later I am not giving the exact words of what was said… you should listen to the archive.) He is given a little time to start to explain what strings is about….

A bit later…. Lee is just going on and on and on and on about…. uh…. crap and utter irrelevance. The battle between Liebniz and Newton. Relational vs absolute. Sigh. I just don’t get it. Why is this happening? Another music/station reminder break…

A bit later…. Jeff finally manages to get a bit of a word in. He has to jump in at one point when Lee starts actually redefining on the spot what his book is about… Click to continue reading this post →

More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, II

By | | , ,
24 Comments

I just heard* that at 9:00pm Chicago time, there will be a discussion between Lee Smolin and Jeff Harvey, presumably about string theory, and you can listen to it live on radio station WGN, here.

Thinks:

  • I wonder if it will be as utterly content-free and pointless as the one that took place between Lee Smolin and Brian Greene on Science Friday some weeks back? That one was so annoying in places that I never finished the blog post I was writing about it. It was mostly of the following structure (I paraphrase):

    Lee says wise and learned things like “there should be a diversity of effort in approaching problems in fundamental physics”.

    The host, Ira Flatow, turns to Brian (on telephone link) and says “what do you think of that, Brian Greene?”

    Brian says, “Yes, I agree. I have several students working on things outside of string theory.”

    …thus blowing a bit of a hole in the claim that string theory is this cult/monolith that somehow blinds us all to other great ideas.

  • I wonder if Lee will bring out what I consider to be one of the most ridiculous Click to continue reading this post →

Update on the Giant-Killers

By | | ,
16 Comments

navier-stokes flowGood News Everyone! I learned just now from Good Math, Bad Math there may well be a successful proof of yet another of the great Millennium problems. This one pertains to solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations which are of central importance in fluid dynamics, for example. (The figure to the left -click for larger- is from a computer simulation, by Greg Ashford, of the airflow around an aircraft wing (in cross section) and the foil that it uses to change the overall shape of the wing for maneouvering. I got it from a site linked here.)

Penelope Smith, at Lehigh University has presented a preprint with her proof, which Click to continue reading this post →

Griffith Announces Opening

By | | , , , ,
3 Comments

Griffith ObservatoryYesterday, I forgot to point you to the press release from the observatory itself. There, you will find more information about the opening, on November 3rd, and about how to actually get there. They are forbidding access to the parking lot, and so you either take a shuttle bus, or you walk or cycle. It is depressing to me that people are already complaining about having to walk up a small hill from the picnic sites below (people who walk up are generically referred to as “hikers”, in the press release, which would give someone the impression that you need special equipment or something just to walk up the hill. Sigh.).

Anyway, some chatter from the press release. Let’s start out with 4th District Councilmember, Tom LaBonge, a veritable Paul Dirac of understatement and wall-flower-hood:

“Griffith Observatory is one of the best public spaces in the world if not the universe…”

Oh yes. Good ol’ Tom. He makes statements like this all the time. How can you not Click to continue reading this post →

Irrational Memories

By | | , , , , , ,
16 Comments

Back when I was young enough to care to try to list such things, I had a favourite number. Really, really faourite. I lived and breathed that number for a while. Today’s session in the freshman seminar “The Art and Science of Seeing and the Seeing and Science of Art”, about which I have blogged here and here, was all about it. Rather than do chapter and verse about it (don’t get me started!), I will instead leave you with the image that I ended with…

penrose tiling

… and let you tell me and other readers – if you like – what you think the number is, what it means to you, and perhaps share whatever you like (or hate) about it.

-cvj

Observing the Observatory

By | | , , , ,
4 Comments

griffith observatoryWell, here’s a bit of news. For one reason or another, I have been invited to a preview, later this month, of the soon-to-be-reopened Griffith Observatory, and so will get to see it before it opens to the very general public. (Library photos, by E. C. Krupp, by the way.)

griffith observatoryI will try my best to bring you a full report on the splendiforous contents… assuming they have not all been replaced by movie memorabilia, or some other desecration. (I’ll try very hard to not play the role of the obnoxious scientist, and so won’t yell “where the hell is the science!?” at awkward moments – I hope. I’ll try not to ask awkward questions at all. In fact I will just try to say very little in the way of contrarian remarks, since I’m an invited guest and should be polite. Actually, it’s best I don’t say anything at all.)

I am an optimist, and so despite recent news, I remain excited.

[Update: The post on the visit is here.]

-cvj

Physics Nobel Prize 2006

By | | , ,
21 Comments

cmb flucts from COBE

From the press release:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 jointly to

John C. Mather
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA,

and

George F. Smoot
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

“for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation”.

COBE is the experiment that really blazed the trail for all the wonderful physics that was to come from WMAP, and various other experiments such as Boomerang. And Planck is about to fly as well, giving even more precise information about our universe

COBE black body spectrumI was an undergraduate when this was announced. [Update: Oops…not quite: I had just started graduate school. Thanks Chad!] It was a wonderful feeling that all of us students had, partly gleaned from the feelings of our lecturers, I suspect. The thing that struck us as most appealing (I think) was the idea that the black body radiation spectrum (click on the image on the right for larger) that we’d been learning about in the abstract, during lectures, was sort of “out there”, writ large…. as large as can be in fact, on the whole universe! It’s always good to learn that physics -or any field- is still alive, especially when you’re still on the cusp of making a career in it.

Some more imformative background information (forgive the pun) from the press release: Click to continue reading this post →