Retreated

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!

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

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

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!

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

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

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…

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

Take Your Pick

I’ll at two festivals this weekend, which I admit seems a bit over-ambitious! Let me tell you a little about both.

One event is the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which you’ve read me talking about many times over the years (that’s a photo from 2015 above). It’s the largest such festival in the USA, and is a wonderful celebration of books and related things. It is on Saturday and Sunday.

The other event is the San Diego Comic Fest, which also runs through the weekend (although it starts Friday). Don’t mix this up with ComicCon (although there are connections between the two if you care to dig a little to find out).

As I write this post I’m actually basking in the sun as I ride on the train (the Pacific Surfliner) from Los Angeles to San Diego, as tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk at the comics fest. Here are the details:

Click to continue reading this post

North Carolina Science Fair!

Tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk at the North Carolina Science Festival! The talk will be about black holes, time, space, movies, and books, held inside the historic Morehead planetarium. I’ll sign the book for you after if you want.
Here is a link to the event.

(On the plane over, rather than doing my usual sketch-a-face-from-a-magazine exercise you might be familiar with from earlier posts, e.g. here, I made some new sketches for use in the talk. One of those is above.)

-cvj

An Exhibit!

There’s actually an exhibit of process art for my book in the Fine Arts library at USC! Maybe of interest. There will be a companion exhibit about graphic novels over in the science and engineering library. Opening shortly.

A Chat with Henry Jenkins!

Yesterday Henry Jenkins and I had a great chat as a Facebook Live event. The video is here. The conversation started with the movie Black Panther, but wandered into many topics related to culture, media, science, representation, and beyond. Among other things, we talked about what we enjoyed about the movie, what graphic novels and comics we’re reading now, and what comics source material we’d love to see given a film treatment. Oh, yes, we also mentioned The Dialogues!

Enjoy!

-cvj