Blogs / Cosmic Variance

So for the first time ever, I stepped into our fancy new Molecular Biology building (it’s been finished for a year or so now….). I was expecting to be accosted by security the moment I walked in, because, I don’t really expect that they’d let us poor theoretical physicists walk around in such splendid surroundings! Luckily, the first person I saw as I walked in was Mike Waterman (he who helped host the reading of our play last month), whose Computational Biology group is now also in this building. So all was ok.

Why was I there? Well, it’s been an incredibly long day (all day committee meeting retreat in a hotel boardroom in downtown LA) and now it’s Friday night…. and so that means fun, of course! Seriously, I went back to campus for a short while and ran into my colleagues Gene Bickers (condensed matter physics) and Leonard Adleman (biology, see below), carrying a blue cask. They turned out to be on their way back to Leonard’s lab (he’s both a Computational Biologist and a Molecular Biologist) to make ice-cream using liquid nitrogen! Better yet, they invited me along to have a look and try some! (Above is Leonard and his daughter Stephanie.)

So, remember our last cooking time together when I made beef lo mien? Well, it’s time for desert…. So, pour in the ice-cream mix, which one of the experimenters (Pablo) had prepared earlier (his secret recipe, perhaps):

Pour out some liquid nitrogen (boiling point is 77 K = -196 °C = -321 °F) into a handy container for accurate pouring….

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So by now you’ve done all your planning, right? Placed all the orders, sent off the invitations, decorated the house, maybe even decorated a space at your workplace. The more devout among you have even managed to get the day off work, for religious reasons. The just plain weirdly fanatical among you will be setting off to the local park, beach, mountaintop, or desert to do those (possibly) naked rituals involving various baked goods.

Several TV channels may well have specials, hosted by world reknown, er…. celebrities, like Keith Devlin, Simon Singh, and, yes - Carol Vorderman.

Others will host retrospectives of all of the fun things people did in the past in celebration of the Big Day.

What am I talking about?
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The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 26th March. You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them.

Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

To know without knowing how you know; to have a feeling as clear and sharp as a thought; to sense with uncanny confidence—without any obvious reason or prompt. Intuition is a kind of stealth insight, sneaking up on you when you least expect it, telling you what ingredient to add to a recipe—or a painting; it can sniff out dangers or opportunities, distinguish liars from friends, help scientists uncover deep laws of nature. But what does it really mean to understand something “in your bones” or “in your gut”?

Physicists rely on intuition to a surprising extent, and so for our next Categorically Not!, we’re delighted to have physicist Joe Polchinski of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, a new member of the National academy of Sciences. Joe will engage in a conversation with K.C. Cole about how he intuits meaning from math—which was, in essence, how he “discovered” higher dimensional membrane-like objects that may well be the building blocks of the universe. Just how the brain does this is a subject for neuroscience, of course, and so USC neurologist Antonio Damasio (see here and here) will tell us something about what goes on inside our heads when we “intuit” things. Antonio is the author of several wonderful books on the relationship between cognition and emotion, including “The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness” and “Decarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain”. From an arts perspective, USC filmmaker Jed Dannenbaum will talk about how, in artful movies, the communication between filmmakers behind the camera, actors in front of it, and audiences in the theatre relies primarily on an intuitive sensing of subtle visual and aural cues that we process at the nonconscious level. Jed is the co-author of Creative Filmmaking From the Inside Out, and will teach a new course next fall for non-filmmakers on the creative mind.

As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.

Hope to see some of you there!

-cvj

So on the walk back from the Cat and Fiddle that night (the night described in the previous post), as a result of a question from someone (I forgot who) about it, I got to thinking about the naming patterns for pubs in the UK. There’s an awful lot of pairs of things. In fact there are two of them in the previous post…. “The Cock and Bull”, “The Cat and Fiddle”, and there are several other well known ones like “The Dog and Duck”, “Rose and Crown”, “Fox and Hounds”, “Swan and Three Signets” (ok, that’s four). It’s also in newly made up names for chains, like “The Slug and Lettuce”, “The Hedgehog and Hogshead” (I love that one….) Notice that there’s often a sort of adversarial character to the pairing, which is rather nice…… There’s also possessive-type names like “The King’s Arms”, “The Nag’s Head”, etc. Those can be good too.

So on the way back from a cancelled concert just now (see previous post), I got to thinking….. In that topsy-turvy universe about which I plan to write a book or a screenplay one day, where the everyday popular culture is all based around science and scientists, the pub names might also reflect that. So what would be some good names for pubs, coming from science? I thought of a few really lame ones, but did not get any truly good ones. Then, I thought it might be a game you’d like to join in! Let’s try to make it challenging by having the names be in the traditional pub-type formats, such as those above.

Here are a few, off the top of my head:

The Particle and Wave
The Action and Reaction

Those fit the adversarial idea ok, but I just don’t like ‘em very much, frankly. I’m surprised how hard it is to think of good ones, but that might be because I’ve not had any dinner. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to put concepts together. How about some scientific instruments?

The Astrolabe and Compass.

Ooo! I like that… not quite adversaries, but a nice pairing with lots of history and the smell of damp leather. Always a good thing. Let me try another….

The Microscope and Spyglass.

Less good. Swapped Telescope out for the latter. Seemed better. But not a real success.

The Crucible and Calipers

Ha! That’s better on a second reading than I first thought.

The Mortar and Pestle

Of course! That’s nice. So nice there must be a pub named that already, no? If not, remember me what you steal the name….

Moving away from instruments for a moment, I just thought of:

The Glass and Crystal

Hmmm, interesting name. That takes a bit of explaining. Those are actually adversaries in a sense. One is disordered at the microscopic level and is in some senses is rather more like a liquid than a solid (there’s a long discussion to be had here….. second vs first order phase transition upon forming,….. etc etc…), while the other’s molecules are highly ordered.

The Cryostat and Furnace

That could be a fun one….

Ok, I’d better do some work now. I’m pretty sure that you can do better with this theme than I have. Have a go.

-cvj

I am supposed to be at a recital (here on campus) of songs by Purcell, Haydn, Beethoven, Vaughan Williams, and others, sung by the baritone Peter Lightfoot, a colleague from USC’s Thornton School of Music faculty, who I met when we were both new here. He was a neighbour in the excellent faculty residence complex in which you can rent a house when you’re new to the city. The TAs are working hard on grading the midterm we set earlier today (see here) and so as I have to stay on campus until they’re done (we try to get everything done immediately after the exam has been taken, and finish it all and announce the grades the same night) it was an opportunity to relax for a while and listen to some wonderful singing, before coming back to work on entering and analyzing the grades, etc. Well, I went to the recital hall and found that it was cancelled. Drat. So I’ve come back here and thought I would blog for a bit instead, since it is so much more attractive than having to write my Annual Activity Report, which is due tomorrow….

So last Friday I seriously needed cheering up, and so decided to go and see the newly released film by the often excellent director/writer Michael Winterbottom, “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story”. I was excited about this film when I saw the trailer, because many years ago I started reading the book “Tristram Shandy”, by Lauwrence Sterne (I never finished…I will one day). A dear friend, Richard Lee, who is the father of Zoe, who I tutored in Physics when I was a graduate student, insisted that I have his copy and that I should read it. It was around the time of writing my thesis, and focussing on that (among other things) meant that I never finished….

The book is well known in England, although not many people have read it. It is just well known, for some reason. It is quite bizarre, and pretty much unfilmable, which is why I wanted to see the film, especially when I heard who had made it. From the trailer, it was clear that they decided to build in the unfilmability of the book into the film itself, and the cast was so excellent (Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon), it was bound to be a treat.

Where was I? Oh, yes, so went to see the movie. It was clearly going to be a better “performance” of the film if one went along to a place that had a good audience (the Arclight, of course) and maybe with some like-minded friends, so I took some students along on a sort of “field trip”, like I did for Proof last semester (see post here). Admittedly, the connection to mathematics and physics is a bit harder to argue for in this case, but what the hey…. So there was Arnab and Rama from Team cvj, (that’s a sort of in-joke…see Wes Anderson’s wonderful “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”) , and Amy Cassidy from the Condensed Matter Theory group, and she brought along her friend Sam, who is not a student, but a web page architect. (Yes, she did use the word “architect”…. not a mere “designer”, I gather.) Anyway, Sam is probably way hipper than any of us, but she didn’t seem to mind being seen with us for an evening, bless her.

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The next Categorically Not! is next Sunday (26th Feb.). You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them.

This one is about “Attraction”. I suppose that it is appropriate to do this announcement today, as it’s Valentine’s day. (I remembered this not because anyone sent me a Valentine’s day card (sigh… sniff), but because today almost every street corner I passed in the city has someone standing there with a sea of supposedly cute white bears with pink/red hearts, balloons with hearts, and other weird things with hearts on. What’s wrong with just selling some nice flowers, I wonder?)

Anyway, here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

Birds do it; bees do it; so do molecules, magnets and stars. The force of attraction is one of the most complex and mysterious influences in the universe. Why do people fall in love? Why is electromagnetism trillions upon trillions of times stronger than gravity? For that matter, why does peanut butter stick to the roof of your mouth? Poetry, theater, and music all are moved (and move us) by the force of attraction one way or another.

For this month’s Categorically Not! Robert Winter—the first Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts at UCLA—will tell (and show) how Western music developed “rules” governed by principles of attraction (whether voice leading, harmonic motion, rhythmic design, or overall structure)—and how this “language of attraction” has come to express its core values. An accomplished pianist in several styles, Robert is equally renowned as an author of scholarly works on Beethoven, a multimedia performer, the creator of digital outreach programs for Carnegie Hall, and the force behind music festivals from Malibu to Aspen (where he serves on the faculty of the Aspen Festival).

Getting physical, chemists Robin Garrell and Kendall Houk—whose labs at UCLA investigate how molecules recognize and attract each other, stick or slip, grab or let go—will use a PowerPoint “tag team” approach to describe the physical origins of attractive phenomena—including gravity, magnetism and electrostatics. They’ll draw from their own studies to explain how mussels adhere to ship hulls and also how computational studies allow chemists to “see” molecules reacting—revealing, for example, how pharmaceuticals are attracted to biological receptors.

For drama, Nancy Linehan Charles will explore manifestations of attraction to God, goats and even people as seen through the eyes of poets and playwrights. A two-time winner of the L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Ovation Award for Toys in the Attic, Nancy’s TV appearances include 24, The West Wing, E.R., Joey and recurring roles on Huff and Six Feet Under; she played the bad guy’s wife in Spielberg’s Minority Report, and has adapted four Shakespeare plays for middle schoolers. Nancy’s currently performing in Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind at the Pacific Resident Theatre (until 2/26).

As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.

Hope to see some of you there!

-cvj

Found at Majikthise, Lawyers Guns and Money, and Lance Mannion, and apparently originating here: choose ten movies that you would show to someone to explain America to them. Here’s my list, off the top of my head, making some effort not to duplicate the others.

1. The Player (1992)
2. Cool Hand Luke (1967)
3. Training Day (2001)
4. Metropolitan (1990)
5. Easy Rider (1969)
6. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
7. Hoop Dreams (1994)
8. The Sting (1973)
9. Glory (1989)
10. Dr. Strangelove (1964)

I thought at first it would be hard to think of ten good ones, but I ended up having to leave out Fargo, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Thelma and Louise, The Conversation, The Untouchables, Blue Velvet, and a bunch more. I’m not providing any explanations for my choices — figuring it out should be half the fun.

Well, the result is in for The Greatest Physics Paper!

The vote counts, at close of play (9:00pm PST, 16th January), are:

25 votes: I. Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. 1687. (This counted as a paper.) Link here for the votes.

18 votes: P. A. M. Dirac, The quantum theory of the electron, Proc. R. Soc. London A 117 610-612 (1928); The quantum theory of the electron Part II Proc. R. Soc. London A 118 351-361 (1928). (These two papers counted as one.) Link here for the votes.

14 votes: E. Noether, “Invariante Variationsprobleme,” Nachr. v. d. Ges. d. Wiss. zu Göttingen 1918, pp235-257. Link here for the votes.

11 votes: A. Einstein, Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitaetstheorie, Annalen der Physik 49 (1916), 769-822. Link here for the votes.

7 votes: A. Einstein, B. Podolsky and N. Rosen, Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete? Phys Rev 47, 777 (1935). Link here for the votes.

So Newton does it again!

But we all know that it’s not really the “winner” that’s the most interesting thing. Have a look at the links to the voting threads, and to the original nominations thread for some very interesting and informative comments from several readers. You see, this high quality discussion is what counted here: Not what I think is the greatest physics paper (a meaningless -or at least unquantifiable- concept anyway) but your opinions and thoughts about what makes a great paper, what the great papers are, and why you chose your candidates…..

Thanks to all for contributing, and let’s all promise that very soon we’ll each go out and read at least one classic paper in the original.

-cvj

This is a reminder that today is the last day of voting for The Greatest Physics Paper!

The five papers are by Newton, Noether, Einstein, EPR, and Dirac. You just make a comment on the thread of the post that you get to by clicking a name, and that’s your vote. You have one vote. In voting, you may, if you wish, tell us about why you made that choice.

Voting ends 9:00pm, Jan 16th Pacific Standard Time.

-cvj

[Update: I always meant Monday….but had written the 15th instead of the 16th. Sorry.]

So I was contacted by Robert Silvey to join in this game. His entry is here. Well, truth be told, Sean was contacted, he declined, and so I was picked next. (No doubt this reminds some of us those days in the playground when they were picking teams…. or dates for the school dance….)

Anyway. I’m supposed to do lists of four. This will take me a while, but I need a break after my first two hour class of the season, explaining the procedures of how the course will run (and why we have three separate websites for different course components, and that I have nothing to do with the labs, so please don’t ask, as I can’t help……), and the 6 hours of preparing all the new course material that went before it….. So here goes:

Four Jobs You’ve Had

1. Newpaper delivery boy
2. Janitor/Porter/Dogsbody for BHS
3. Researcher in network design for HP
4. Staff Physicist for Institute for Cancer Research

Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over

(This is just not fair to ask me for only four….. ok…at random:)

1. Brazil
2. Bladerunner
3. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
4. Whisky Galore!

Four Places You’ve Lived

1. Montserrat (West Indies)
2. London, UK
3. Lexington, KY
4. Santa Barbara, CA

Four TV Shows You Love to Watch

(Random old favourites that jump to mind first)

1. The Office (The UK original)
2. Babylon 5
3. Fawlty Towers
4. Samurai Jack

Four Places You’ve Been on Vacation

(You mean a real vacation? Where I don’t take physics or other work with me? We have a problem then….)

1. One of my hideout islands off the coast of Scotland.
2. Dominica, West Indies
3. ?
4. ?

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