Well, the garden is still rather dormant in several places, but it seems that the camelia tree/bush by the side of the house can be relied upon to put on a show in Winter and early Spring:

Must start work on several aspects of the garden next weekend to get ready for Spring!

-cvj

Several people are off to various parts of the world (particularly North Africa) to get into position for a good view of Wednesday’s total solar eclipse. Here’s a shot of that ol’ devil moon getting in the way of the sun back in 1999. (I got it from Wikipedia):

It should be fun! I saw my first such event in the South of England on August 11th, 1999 and it was fantastic. The path of totality just grazed the tip of Portland Bill, in Devon Dorset, where we were, which was a better bet (traffic-wise) than going into Cornwall (see picture I got from Nasa’s site showing the European trajectory from that event). I’ll never forget the two most dramatic things about it for me. One was the silence. All the birds stopped chirping (maybe they thought it was time to sleep?) and it was very peaceful all of a sudden. The other was the astonishing sight of the shadow of the moon rushing toward you over the ocean with a sort of terrifying speed. (”And darkeness fell across the earth”, you almost hear a booming voice say in your head.) Nobody seems to describe that latter effect when you hear about eclipses, but to me that was a most wonderful aspect.

Two of our regular readers, Amara Graps (I think) and also the person who goes by the identifier “chimpanzee” have gone off on trips for this purpose. Amara to Turkey and chimpanzee to the Egypt/Libya border. Very intrepid.

Chimpanzee seems to have taken some impressive optical equipment with him, not to mention a wisely chosen robust laptop (rather like mine) from which to
blog about his eclipse-chasing endeavours, involving fun-looking off-road vehicles and the like. You can check in to his two blogs on his adventures here and here, the latter being primarily a photo gallery. (Last time I looked there were interesting mechanical challenges to be surmounted……)

I’m hoping that chimpanzee and Amara might check back here later and tell us about their travels and the event.

Here’s Nasa’s website on the various solar eclipses coming up this year.

-cvj

Well, as the really sharp ones among you may have gleaned from a careful reading of my posts on this blog, I like to make sure that there’s a bit of fun mixed in with the work whenever I can. Makes the work better, overall. For example, today I got up early, dashed to the top of neighbourhood geographic highlight, Mount Hollywood (ok, I used one of the upper trailheads), and back down, did some shopping at Trader Joe’s, and then from 10:15am to 1:00pm brainstormed with three of my students (Arnab, Tameem and Veselin) on campus. (We think we have discovered a new phase transition! Hurrah! More later.) Then in the afternoon, I seem to have done nothing but laundry and floor-sweeping….

Ok, wait. Stop. That last bit’s not so fun….. Day not ending well. Hmmm. It’s Saturday night, so I think I’m off to either see a movie or go contemplate life (and maybe a bit of physics) in a local bar (probably scaring the clientele). Decisions, decisions.

Well, while I figure that out, why don’t you verify that I’m not the only one who likes to mix work and play. Happens all the time, you know. Here are hilarious pictures of Alice Shapley (Princeton Prof. of Astrophysics), Chung-Pei Ma (Berkeley Prof. of Astrophysics), and Alison Coil (Arizona Astro postdoc) showing how it’s done, during a long night of a Keck observing run. (I found the link by accident while preparing an earlier post.) The Paris Hilton impressions are uncanny!

Perhaps we can get them to come and tell us what they were up to, physics-wise? Looks like fun too!

[Update: Alice, in the comments, says, “I should mention that in addition to wearing such “fashionable” observing clothes and napping on the sofa in the Keck Observatory Remote Operations room, we were trying to learn about the physical conditions in star-forming regions in galaxies 8-9 billion light years away. The galaxies we targeted were drawn from the DEEP2 redshift survey (a project led by University of California astronomers), which has mapped out a chunk of the Universe at z~1 and is telling us about galaxy properties at that earlier epoch. We were attempting to measure the relative strengths of rest-frame optical emission lines from Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen, which are produced in the regions of ionized gas in which stars form. In such high-redshift galaxies, the lines which have been targeted by traditional optical astronomy for decades get shifted to the near-IR region of the spectrum, and we then use the KeckII near-IR spectrograph (NIRSPEC) to measure them. The relative strengths of these lines can be used to infer the degree of chemical enrichment in the gas from which the stars are forming. But, in turns out that the line strengths we measure actually follow a significantly different pattern from those of galaxies in the nearby universe, which may tell us something very interesting about star formation in the early universe (we’re still working on exactly what…)”]

-cvj

P.S. Looking at the dialogue (who writes that stuff? - It’s great!) in the captions to the Astrophysics party Continue reading ‘Physicists at Work and Play’

Oh. So you thought I’d stopped thinking and talking about Taiwan, right? Sorry… no! (See the archives, say under “food and drink“, if you don’t know to what I’m referring.)

Another great thing I enjoyed while there is the fruit. There’s great fruit everywhere. Reminds me a lot of part of my childhood for lots of reasons.

Here’s an arrangement of some type of very fragrant citrus fruit that was in a reastuarant in Hsinchu. They had several of these arrangements around the place, and it smelled divine!

(I went there with my dear friends and colleagues Chong-Sun Chu (Durham), Keh-Fei Liu (Kentucky) and Tu-Nan Chang (USC), who are all based in non-Taiwan institutions (although Tu-Nan is directing the National Center for Theoretical Sciences I told you about earlier.)

Here’s an arrangement of fire-dragon fruit brought to the table at the end of a banquet-style meal at an excellent tradiational-style restaurant (see below) in Hsinchu. Just a wonderful fruit, with gorgeous patterning and colouring, don’t you think? And delicious!

(It was quite a splendid restaurant (as was the other one). It is particularly famous for its traditional layout as well as the food. The layout (shot of entrance below right) includes full-blown streams of water running through the restaurant, with Continue reading ‘Delicious Fruit and Excellent Company’

Yesterday afternoon, I arrived home from my 22 day trek through India. The trip was great! But I must admit it’s good to be home. The trip home took exactly 47 hours!

The start: The journey began when my alarm clock rang at 5 AM on Thursday 23 March in Jaisalmer, India. That was 3:30 PM, Wednesday afternoon, in California. Jaisalmer is a fascinating town - it’s in the Thar desert and has an enormous sandstone fort founded in 1156 which is perched high on a desert butte. The fort is still inhabited (a rare thing) and is a living history museum, with winding cobbled lanes chock full of people, cows, wild boar, goats, flies, and buildings and temples with intricate sandstone carvings.

First leg of the journey: Jaisalmer is as far west in India as I was allowed to travel, as sanctioned by the good old US Department of Energy. It is located on Indian National Highway 15, 120 km east of the Pakastani border. DOE explicitly forbade travel west of Highway 15. (Guess I won’t mention the camel safari in the Sam sand dunes, 40 km west of Jaisalmer, in my trip report!) The town is 300 km from the nearest airport in Jodhpur, and we set off by car (with driver) at 6 AM. It took 5 hours to reach Jodhpur - traffic (meaning the number of cows, camels, flocks of sheep, auto rickshaws, and people walking to villages for their daily water supply) was light and we reached Jodhpur 3 hours before our flight. To make good use of the time, we toured the Mehrangarh fort in Jodhpur while waiting for the plane.

Leg 2: My flight departed Jodhpur at 2:15 PM, only 15 minutes late, and arrived in Mumbai at 4:30.

Leg 3: 8.5 hour layover in Mumbai until the scheduled departure of my international flight. The facilities at the Mumbai airport are rather spartan, so I transfered to an airport hotel to eat dinner, take a shower, and catch a couple of winks.

Leg 4: Not long before I was back at the Mumbai airport, checking in for the flight which was scheduled to depart at 1:10 AM on Friday 24 March. (It’s Thursday by now in California.) I was pleased that British Midlands did not take notice that my bag was overweight and that they had no problem with the Tibetian ritual dagger (a sharp, pointed, metal object) in my bag. The flight finally took off for Heathrow at 2:15 AM, delayed by an hour. I can say that I spent more time in the Mumbai airport lounge than I needed to. The flight took 9.5 hours and we landed at Heathrow roughly on schedule. I didn’t eat the food (it was full of fruit and salads and dairy products, loaded in Mumbai) but I drank most of the plane’s allotment of Tropicana orange juice. It was a wise decision not to eat - one of the passengers was sick while waiting in line for the lavatory….

Leg 5: 4 hour layover in Heathrow. First thing I did was eat FOOD! I ordered a large creamy latte. It disappeared in about 30 seconds, so I had to order a second one while my breakfast was being prepared. Toasted Brioche with ham and poached eggs and a cheddar cheese sauce. It disappeared in about 45 seconds and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Next, I toured the shops and bought a chocolate Easter bunny at Harrods, and 4 boxes of my favorite brand of English biscuits. Not that food was on my mind or anything.

Leg 6: My United flight to San Francisco left Heathrow on time at 10:05 AM (it’s Friday by now in California) and we were in the air for 10.5 hours. I was blissfully upgraded to business class and consumed every single morsel of anything and everything they put in front of me. The flight landed on time and having cleared customs with the above mentioned ritual dagger I was home at 2:30 PM - exactly 47 hours from when I awoke in Jaisalmer.

India is an amazing place, the conference was good, and you all can expect plenty of blogging about the trip in the near future. Once I take a couple of days to rest and recover from the experience! I won’t even mention that I have to travel to DC tomorrow for a 2 day committee meeting…

Today was a pretty exhausting but fun day. My afternoon was taken up with the usual parts of my job - attending meetings, squeezing in some calculations, attending a seminar and meeting with students from my undergraduate class - PHY312 - Relativity and Cosmology: Einstein and Beyond - to discuss their end of semester projects.

But my morning was taken up with a less traditional activity. A high school teacher who comes to all of the Saturday Morning Physics lectures I run, is teaching a talented class of seniors in his school. They have been peppering him with questions about cosmology and particle physics over the last few months and, since these aren’t things he’s trained in, he decided to ask me if I’d come in to chat with them.

So this morning, two of my graduate students and I went out to the school and spent a couple of hours describing what we do, talking about cosmology, and taking great questions from about twenty students.

We had a blast! The students were tremendous fun and also very sweet. One of them (and her Mom I think) had even baked a cake for our visit that had “Thanks Dr. Trodden” and a couple of black holes iced on the top!

We talked about the physics of black holes, the expansion of the universe, dark energy, time travel, teleportation, and a host of other ideas. Perhaps best of all, they got to meet my students - who don’t at all resemble stereotypical physicists - and hopefully widen their idea of what scientists are like. If they enjoyed it anywhere near as much as I did, then I’ll be delighted.

Greetings from Toronto, where I’m visiting UofT to talk about dark energy, the arrow of time, and other obsessions of mine. Which has prevented me from as yet writing the long-awaited second installment of “Unsolicited Advice,” the one that will tell you how to choose a graduate school. It is that time of year, after all.

In the meantime, check out this nice post at Anthonares on Lunar laser ranging. The Apollo astronauts, during missions 11, 14, and 15, were sufficiently foresighted to bring along reflecting corner mirrors and leave them behind on the Moon’s surface. Why would they do that? So that, from down here on Earth, we can shoot lasers at the lunar surface and time how long it takes for them to come back. Using this data we can map the Moon’s orbit to ridiculous precision; right now we know where the Moon is to better than a centimeter. This experiment, called Lunar laser ranging, teaches us a lot about the Moon, but it also teaches us about gravity. The fact that we can pinpoint the location of the Earth’s biggest satellite and keep track of it over the course of years provides us with a uniquely precise test of Einstein’s general relativity.

You might think that general relativity is already pretty well tested, and it is, but clever folks are constantly inventing alternatives that haven’t yet been ruled out. One example is DGP gravity, invented by Gia Dvali, Gregory Gabadadze, and Massimo Porrati. This is a model in which the observable particles of the Standard Model are confined to a brane embedded in an infinitely large extra dimension of space. Unlike usual models with compact extra dimensions, the extra dimension of the DGP model is hidden because gravity is much stronger in the bulk; hence, the gravitational lines of force from an object on the brane like to stay on the brane for a while before eventually leaking out into the bulk.

The good news about the DGP model is that it makes the universe accelerate, even without dark energy! This is one of the things that I talked about at my colloquium yesterday, and I hope to post about in more detail some day. The better news is that it is potentially testable using Lunar laser ranging! The claim is that the DGP model predicts a tiny perturbation of the Moon’s orbit, too small to have yet been detected, but large enough to be within our reach if we improve the precision of existing laser ranging experiments. People are hot on the trail of doing just that, so we may hear results before too long.

Not to get too giddy, the bad news about DGP is that it may be a non-starter on purely theoretical grounds. There are claims that the model has ghosts (negative-energy particles), and also that it can’t be derived from any sensible high-energy theory (see Jacques’s post). I haven’t examined either of these issues very closely, although I hope to dig into them soon. Maybe if I could quite traveling and sit down and read some papers.

So the story of my travels over the last however many hours (lost track).

10:00pm, Tuesday:- Jump into car, dash for airport (LAX).
11:55pm, Get on plane to Chicago (ORD).
12:30am, Wednesday, flight actually leaves. Delay due to “waiting for all the luggage”. They hope to make up some delay in-flight.
06:05am, Land at Chicago. Of course, this is really 04:05am, and what with getting settled, working a bit on my talk, with talking with acrobats (see earlier) and the like, I think I only actually had a bit over two hours sleep. Hmmm. They let the passengers concerned about making connections to get off plane first. Hurrah.
06:10am Walk at high speed across the airport to completely different concourse, to find my flight to Louisville at gate F4, due to leave at 06:55am.
06:30am Get to gate, ask about flight in slight panic. Lady calmly tells me that they’re not calling that flight yet. Several other flights are being called at that time. I go to restroom nearby, and begin transformation into more formal attire.
06:40am Return to gate, go to desk. Different lady tells me that flight has closed. Huh?! I digest this unexpected and confusing fact for five minutes, and begin to rummage in bag for phone number of organizers of the day’s events. How could this have happened? There were no announcements for the flight. Not that I heard, and I was listening out for them.
06:45am I hear (from another lady at actual boarding-pass-taking gate) that the flight is now closed, the traditional (apparently) ten minutes before flight time. Oh. So other lady had got it wrong, jumped the gun by five minutes, and I could have made the flight, in fact. I was standing there all the time, and they made no calls about this flight.
06:50am I, and a bunch of other similarly incredulous people get in line to get booked onto next flight. Next flight is not until three hours later, and because of the Louisville truck show, all flights that day are booked and I can only go on standby. In any case, I’m going to miss the entire morning of talks, and the only talk in the afternoon will in fact be the one I’m going to give. Sigh.
07:00am With priority standy status (I’m told) in pocket, I find myself back at the transition between concourse B and C, in line at Starbucks? Why? (1) I’m hungry, and (2) I always go to precisely this place and order precisely the same thing (tall coffee of the day and a cinnamon scone) every time I come through Chicago airport, for getting on for a decade now. I love that.
07:10am Note -for no particular reason- that price of my standard Chicago order has gone up by $0.80. Since my flight is at 10:50am, I have quite a bit of time on my hands. Call number of organisers and leave message about the scheduling disaster, and then decide to pay -reluctantly- the $6.95 for 24 hours of wireless web access on the Chicago airport system to allow me to send an email to the organisers. This would also allow me to write a post about the amusing encounter on the flight, check the rest of my mail, etc. Continue reading ‘Sleepless in Louisville’

So I was on a flight from LA to Chicago a short while ago. The usual thing happened, at first: I was on the plane early, and watching my fellow passengers get on the plane and go by, finding their seats. There’s that situation that happens on all forms of public transport that you’ll all recognize: You’re secretly hoping that you’ll sit next to a beautiful and interesting woman (or man, depending upon your preferences), but instead, she never shows up. Instead, that guy (and it’s always that same guy isn’t it!!?) who’s a bit too large for the seat, and who leaks into yours even though he’s supposed to be in the seat next to you. (This happens on buses, trains, planes, whereever. Always that same guy.)

So, yes, this happened. Fine, I was used to it. But then something unexpected happened. The guy next to him (on the other side) asked him if he’d mind swapping seats with his friend in another seat so that they could sit together, and he agreed. And guess what? The friend turned out to be a striking young French woman with cute almost elfin features. This turn around was quite a shock to me.

Anyway, not being one for harrassing people just because they’re attractive, I carried on with my business of getting ready for the flight, and then started reading some sheets of paper, which happened to be covered in equations and diagrams. My usual airplane reading, I must report. (Often it is the best place to think about research… no distractions…. no phones, email, blog, students, colleagues…etc. They’re going to spoil that all soon by the way.)

Well, anyway, a while into reading, my striking neighbour spoke up with -of course- the perfect French accent to match, and said “Er, excuse me, are you a teacher of Mathematics?”. I explained that indeed I teach and Mathematics is part of what I teach, alongside Physics….etc. “Er, at a University or School?”. University.

She brightened up considerably, and explained that she loved Mathematics and Physics and studied them for a while at University.

So at that point I was thinking that the Law of Averages had spectacularly broken down today on two counts……. One: Beautiful and interesting women never end up sitting next to me in such situations; Two: People who learn what I do never say that they love it and have studied it, but usually trot out the “I was never good at physics/maths at school” line…..

So having been given license to ask at least two questions in return, I asked where she studied these things. Paris VI. And then I asked what her line of work is now.

She wanted to do something different, and so even though she loves physics and mathematics, she decided to leave France and…..join the circus.

Yes, you read that right. She is a circus performer. She is in fact an acrobat.

So….Law of Averages breakdown number three: How many times do you actually meet someone who ran away to join the circus?!

-cvj

P.S. Nope, I did not propose marriage on the spot. Look, can you imagine the employment two-body problem involved with one person a theoretical physicist and the other a trapeze artist? Oh, and yes, another reason was her boyfriend sitting on the other side of her. It was a red-eye flight, so I gave her my cough sweets (she had a cold) and I turned over and went to sleep.

This famous 1958 photo by Art Kane, A Great Day in Harlem, brought together 57 jazz musicians for a group portrait. Luminaries range from Count Basie and Coleman Hawkins to Charles Mingus and Dizzie Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. Norbizness points to a helpful web page: harlem.org, which provides a clickable version of the photo! Point to any musician, and it will tell you who they are and provide a brief biography.

Years ago I saw a documentary by Jean Bach about the making of the portrait, which included many interviews with the surviving musicians (now available on DVD). My favorite part was seeing Thelonious Monk get ready for the shoot. You see him strategizing about how to stand out among all the other luminaries. First he decides to wear black, to look cool. Then he figures that everyone else will be wearing black, so he’s going to wear white. (As it turns out, everyone else had the same thought, so there’s a lot of white jackets in the photo.) Finally he realizes that the best thing to do will be to grab a spot next to the ladies, where everyone will be looking first. And lo and behold there he is, next to fellow pianists Mary Lou Williams and Marian McPartland (still going strong as host of NPR’s Piano Jazz). Monk needn’t have worried; he didn’t have any trouble standing out.