And So it Begins…

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It’s that time of year again! The new academic year’s classes begin here at USC today. I’m already snowed under with tasks I must get done, several with hard deadlines, and so am feeling a bit bogged down already, I must admit. Usually I wander around the campus a bit and soak up the buzz of the new year that you can pick up in all the campus activity swarming around. But instead I sit at my desk, prepping my syllabus, planning important dates, adjusting my calendar, exchanging emails, (updating my blog), and so forth. I hope that after class I can do the wander.

What will I be teaching this semester? The second part of graduate electromagnetism, as I often do. Yes, in a couple of hours, I’ll be again (following Maxwell) pointing out a flaw in one of the equations of electromagnetism (Ampere’s), introducing the displacement current term, and then presenting the full completed set of the equations – Maxwell’s equations, one of the most beautiful sets of equations ever to have been written down. (And if you wonder about the use of the word beautiful here, I can happily refer you to look at The Dialogues, starting at page 15, for a conversation about that very issue…!)

Speaking of books, if you’ve been part of the Science Friday Summer reading adventure, reading Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, you should know that I’ll be back on the show on Friday talking with Priyamvada Natarajan, producer Christie Taylor, and presenter Ira flatow about the book one more time. There may also be an opportunity to Click to continue reading this post →

Science Friday Book Club Q&A

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Between 3 and 4 pm Eastern time today (very shortly, as I type!) I’ll be answering questions about Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” as part of a Live twitter event for Science Friday’s Book Club. See below. Come join in!

-cvj

DC Moments…

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I’m in Washington DC for a very short time. 16 hours or so. I’d have come for longer, but I’ve got some parenting to get back to. It feels a bit rude to come to the American Association of Physics Teachers annual meeting for such a short time, especially because the whole mission of teaching physics in all the myriad ways is very dear to my heart, and here is a massive group of people devoted to gathering about it.

It also feels a bit rude because I’m here to pick up an award. (Here’s the announcement that I forgot to post some months back.)

I meant what I said in the press release: It certainly is an honour to be recognised with the Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award (for my work in science outreach/engagemnet), and it’ll be a delight to speak to the assembled audience tomorrow and accept the award.

Speaking in an unvarnished way for a moment, I and many others who do a lot of work to engage the public with science have, over the years, had to deal with not being taken seriously by many of our colleagues. Indeed, suffering being dismissed as not being “serious enough” about our other Click to continue reading this post →

Radio Radio Summer Reading!

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Friday will see me busy in the Radio world! Two things:

(1) On the WNPR Connecticut morning show “Where We Live” they’ll be doing Summer reading recommendations. I’ll be on there live talking about my graphic non-fiction book The Dialogues: Conversations about the Nature of the Universe. Tune in either live (between about 9:30 and 10:00 am ET) or via podcast/rebroadcast. I’m honoured that they think it’s a good book for Summer reading and I happen to agree (I’m slightly biased). I designed it as an engaging treat for both the eye and the mind and what more do you want for a Summer read? – Do pick up a copy and take it to the beach with you!

(2) Then a bit later I appear live on Science Friday (on all good NPR affiliates nationally), for a piece about… guess what? Summer reading suggestions! This time though, I’ll be discussing (with presenter Ira Flatow and physicist Priyamvada Natarajan) a classic: Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. We’ll also talk about Hawking’s legacy in science and science communication. Tune in either live (between about 2:30 and 3:00pm ET) or via podcast/rebroadcast. (By the way, do go over to their twitter account and answer the poll about whether you’ve read it.) It’s a landmark book, chock full of ideas, well arranged into an interesting narrative about our universe. While it is a bit out-dated on some topics here and there, it is still well worth reading, so put it on your beach list too!

In the coming weeks, I may post a bit more here about the book and some of the concepts discussed, and/or take part in some twitter or other activity to help readers who are going to try reading the book nationwide. Stay tuned!

-cvj

Splashes

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In case you’re wondering, after yesterday’s post… Yes I did find some time to do a bit of sketching. Here’s one that did not get finished but was fun for working the rust off…

The caption from instagram says:

Quick Sunday watercolour pencil dabbling … been a long time. This is the other use those notebooks see.

-cvj

Retreated

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Sorry I’ve been quiet on the blog for a few weeks. An unusually long gap, I think (although those of you following on instagram, twitter, Facebook and so forth have not noticed a gap). I’ve been hiding out at the Aspen Center for Physics for a while.

You’ve probably read things I’ve written about it here many times in past years, but if not, here’s a movie that I produced/directed/designed/etc about it some time back. (You can use the search bar upper right to find earlier posts mentioning Aspen, or click here.)

Anyway, I arrived and pretty much immediately got stuck into an interesting project, as I had an idea that I just had to pursue. I filled up a whole notebook with computations and mumblings about ideas, and eventually a narrative (and a nice set of results) has emerged. So I’ve been putting those into some shape. I hope to tell you about it all soon. You’ll be happy to know it involves black holes, entropy, thermodynamics, and quantum information Click to continue reading this post →

Google Talk!

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I think that I forgot to post this link when it came out some time ago. I gave a talk at Google when I passed though London last Spring. There was a great Q & A session too – the Google employees were really interested and asked great questions. I talked in some detail about the book (The Dialogues), why I made it, how I made it, and what I was trying to do with the whole project. For a field that is supposed to be quite innovative (and usually is), I think that, although there are many really great non-fiction science books by Theoretical Physicists, we offer a rather narrow range of books to the general public, and I’m trying to broaden the spectrum with The Dialogues. In the months since the book has come out, people have been responding really positively to the book, so that’s very encouraging (and thank you!). It’s notable that it is a wide range of people, from habitual science book readers to people who say they’ve never picked up a science book before… That’s a really great sign!

Here’s the talk on YouTube:

Direct link here. Embed below: Click to continue reading this post →

News from the Front, XV: Nicely Entangled

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This is one of my more technical posts about research activity. It is not written with wide readability in mind, but you may still get a lot out of it since the first part especially talks about about research life.

Some years ago (you’ll perhaps recall), I came up with an interesting construction that I called a “Holographic Heat Engine”. Basically, it arises as a natural concept when you work in what I call “extended” gravitational thermodynamics where you allow the spacetime heat_enginecosmological constant to be dynamical. It is natural to associate the cosmological constant with a dynamical pressure (in the usual way it appears as a pressure in Einstein’s equations) and if you work it though it turns out that there’s a natural conjugate quantity playing the role of volume, etc. Black hole thermodynamics (that you get when you turn on quantum effects, giving entropy and temperature) then get enhanced to include pressure and volume, something that was not present for most of the history of the subject. It was all worked out nicely in a paper by Kastor et. al. in 2009. So…anyway, once you have black holes in that setup it seemed to me (when I encountered this extended framework in 2014) that it would be wilful neglect to not define heat engines: closed cycles in the p-V plane that take in heat, output heat, and do mechanical work. So I defined them. See three old posts of mine, here, here, and here, and there are others if you search.

Well, one of the things that has been a major quest of mine since 2014 is to see if I can make sense of the extended thermodynamics for quantum field theory, and then go further and translate the heat engines and their properties into field theory terms. This seemed possible to me all the way back then since for positive pressure, the cosmological constant is negative, and when you have gravity with negative cosmological constant you’ve got duality to strongly coupled field theories. So those heat engines must be some kind of special tour in the field theories. the efficiency of an engine must mean something about the tour. Moreover, since the efficiency of the engine is bounded by the Carnot efficiency, it seems we have a naturally defined dimensionless number that has a fundamental bound… Alarm bells ringing! – Opportunity knocking to learn something new and powerful! Maybe even important!

So I chipped away at this for some time, over years, doing various projects that Click to continue reading this post →

Resolution

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Today is the release of the short story anthology Twelve Tomorrows from MIT Press with a wonderful roster of authors. (It is an annual project of the MIT Technology Review.) I’m in there too, with a graphic novella called “Resolution”. It’s the first graphic novella in this anthology’s five year history, and it is the first time MIT Press is publishing it. Physicists and Mathematicians will appreciate the title choice upon reading. Order! Share!

-cvj

Make with Me!

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Bay Area! You’re up next! The Maker Faire is a wonderful event/movement that I’ve heard about for years and which always struck me as very much in line with my own way of being (making, tinkering, building, creating, as time permits…) On Sunday I’ll have the honour of being on one of the centre stages (3:45pm) talking with Kishore Hari (of the podcast Inquiring Minds) about how I made The Dialogues, and why. I might go into some extra detail about my research into making graphic books, and the techniques I used, given the audience. Why yes, I’ll sign books for you afterwards, of course. Thanks for asking.

I recommend getting a day pass and see a ton of interesting events that day! Here’s a link to the Sunday schedule and amor there you can see links to the whole faire and tickets!

-cvj

Wild

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Here’s a little montage of some of the wildflowers beginning to emerge in the garden this season. Some months ago I sprinkled the seeds in a fee patches, raked the beds and remembered to keep things moist over the days and weeks that followed. These are some of the results… (Click for a larger view.)

-cvj

Feynman Centenary

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Turns out that 100 years ago today, Richard Feynman was born. His contributions to physics – science in general – are huge, and if you dig a little you’ll find lots of discussion about him. His beautiful “Lectures on Physics…” books are deservedly legendary, and I wish that my old Imperial College lecturers had spent more time impressing upon us young impressionable undergraduate minds (c1986) to read those instead of urging us at every opportunity to read the famous “Surely You’re Joking…” book, which even back then in my naivety, I began to recognise as partly a physicist’s user manual for how to be a jerk to those around you. (I know I’m in the minority on this point…)

But anyway, in honour of the occasion, I give you a full page from my book containing a chat about the Feynman diagram. It’s an example of how something that’s essentially a cartoon can play a central role in understanding our world (something that’s of course, not unknown in cartoons…) Click the image above for an enlarged view.

-cvj

Frank Buckley Interviews…

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Turns out that Frank Buckley, the news anchor at KTLA 5, is not just a really great guy (evident from his manner on TV), but also a really excellent interviewer with a sharp curiosity that gives me hope that great journalism is still alive, well, and in good hands. I showed up at the station expecting to just have a pleasant chat around the book and be done with it, but I walked into the room and he’d done all his research and was sitting with extensive notes and so forth about lots of physics ideas he’d read in the book that he wanted to talk about! So we have a blast talking about the physics of our universe and the world around us in some in-depth detail. It was fantastic, and just the kind f conversation I hope that the book celebrates and inspires people to have!

Check out our interview here (embed below), and be sure to tune in to his Click to continue reading this post →