Given the distressing and depressing news emanating from the US Congress the past couple of days, it’s time for a slightly more upbeat post. A success story, if you will. A serious problem that has been solved. Yes folks, it’s come to this:

CV readers may recall the trauma suffered a few weeks ago due to a roof rat invading my tomato crop. Well, the roof rat (and his friends) were easily dealt with (naturally, they are now all dead rats). But the squirrels turned out to be a rather serious problem. One came and quickly told all his/her friends. Seems they considered my tomatoes to be quite tasty. Not any more….they can find another restaurant!

Ha - foiled them critters! (I must admit it is real fun to watch them try to get into the cages!) And, my tomato yield has drastically improved.

For all you squirrel lovers out there - note that no squirrels were actually harmed in the cage building process.

I woke up this morning to find this:

and it triggered my instinct to kill. I mean, some varmint is eating my food! Can’t get more instinctual than that. Not to mention all the time and investment I have put into nurturing this crop. Not to mention that my very first BIG juicy tomato was just about ripe enough to pick…

After a thorough debate and inspection of the photos, the concensus of the SLAC theory group is squirrels, rats, or birds. Keeping in mind that my tomatoes are in container pots, on my deck, about 30-40 feet off the ground, rabbits were immediately excluded. I have ruled out birds after a detailed investigation of the crime scene this evening. Burton Richter himself (Nobel prize winner and co-discoverer of charm and former director of SLAC) made a point of calling his wife - an expert on such things - in order to determine the origin of the varmit. Mrs. Richter suggested roof rats. Egads!! I certainly hope not - that sounds rather disgusting and I’d rather have squirrels…

Meanwhile, I have put up every defense possible, short of building a cage for the plants. I might do that this weekend, but since the plants are 6 feet tall, it will be a job. I did some web research and devised a fortified multi-strategy defense. I have purchased Shake-Away Critter-Repellent, it is composed mainly of garlic and fox urine so it is organic, and sprinkled it about. I put out boxes of rat poison and traps, as well as one of those ultra-sonic/EM-wave rodent repellent thingies I had in my garage. I also put out 2 bowls of water (several websites said squirrles eat tomatoes for H2O during a drought - which adequately describes summer in California) and a bowl containing the 7 partially eaten tomatoes from the night before, hoping it might be easier for the varmint to finish them off first. I have also left the lights on, on my deck.

Short of building a cage (or sleeping on the deck with a BB gun) it’s the best I can do….we shall see what has transpired in the morning. If my tomatoes are further eaten by the morning, hell will hath no fury….

Update: It is now Friday. Last night around 1 AM I went out to check on the plants. Sure enough a large juicy (but green) tomato was sitting at the base of the pots. Then there was a rustling noise and a reasonably large RAT (Eeuw!) scurried out of the container pots and ran away. I caught the varmint red-handed! I involuntarily jumped back and screamed (wonder what my neighbors think now), but had no weapon on me so just watched the critter scurry away. (Actually, I don’t have weapons save for a baseball bat or two.) So much for the ultra-sound thingie. I unplugged it and turned on a radio instead for the rest of the night. LaRose Richter gets the prize for the correct hypothesis. Today I took action - the rat control people are coming first thing tomorrow morning, the container with my best plants is now sitting in the middle of my kitchen for the night, and I have about 10 zillion traps surrounding the plants left outdoors….

Update^2: 1:30 AM Saturday. No rat like a dead rat. Yep, my tom-cat snapper trap got’em! Gotta have the right tools for the job.

It is one of my favourite times of the year in Los Angeles. It rained a few days ago and so the air is clear, the sky is blue, and the sunlight is now clear and crisp on everything it touches. On days like this I cycle right past the bus stop and go all the way into work on the bike. There are flowers in gardens everywhere. (There are also wild flowers along the sides of the freeways, for drivers who care to look.) There are flowering trees all over the city.

In particular, there are several long stretches of many blocks all over LA that almost convince you that the city was going completely purple. This is because of the spectacular Jacaranda tree:

Learn more about this lovely tree here. I learned that the horticulturalist Kate Sessions (1857-1940) is responsible for importing and popularising the Jacaranda in Southern California. Learn more about her here and here.

-cvj

Today you go outside and find that several of your roses are blooming splendidly, just in time for Mother’s Day. You decide to post a photograph of one of them on the blog, to send good wishes to all mothers everywhere (even where it is not officially Mother’s Day):

Happy Mother’s Day!

-cvj

The Jasmine hedge is in full flower now, and the smell is gorgeous. It is trachelospermum jasminoides (”Star Jasmine”), really. Not a true Jasmine at all, but very reminiscent of Jasmine. I have a true Jasmine vine nearby and there are several similarities. Lots of lovely small scented flowers, looking like stars. See the comparison shot. (On the left is an actual Jasmine. Our friend is on the right.)

Here’s the hedge in full bloom:

You know, I was thinking…

If I ever have a daughter, perhaps I will call her Jasmine. With the agreement of the mother, of course.

Yes…. Jasmine.

Such a lovely name. Such a lovely scent.

Such a lovely flower.

-cvj

Rhipsalidopsis gaertneri or Schlumbergera gaertneri …. Easter Cactus:

Splendid.

-cvj

This lovely crop of white cyclamen flowers is typical of this plant. It faithfully does this every year, with little encourangement:

Quite a pleasure. I think I should plant some directly into the soil one day.

-cvj

Time for a gardening picture, methinks. Well, this is so odd I thought I’d share. A while ago I spotted a weed growing out of the steps out at the front of the house. This happens a lot, which is fine. What does not often happen (in fact, it has never happened before) is that I reached to pull it out and noticed that it is an unusual weed, but familiar-looking. I touched it, and immediately could detect a distincitve smell - it is a tomato plant. A tomato plant!

Well, of course, I could not bear to do anything to it, and left it there thinking it would eventually run its course and die. Well, I had a look the other day and it is getting really big and healthy! Thing is, I’ve no idea how it got there. I’ve never had tomato plants or seeds out at the front. How come it just started growing there spontaneously? Bizarre. You’re welcome to make up your own explanations at this point. I can’t think of a plausible one.

Since it continues to do so well, I decided I would transplant it to the back garden where I actually do have tomato plants, but now it is stuck in the steps, and I cannot pull it up. It is well and truly stuck. Surely it can’t grow any more without damaging its stem…. I’ve no idea what is going to happen.

-cvj

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

I return you to regular physics programming here on CV with a brief summary for our non-experts of some of the [screaming and shouting] passionate, informed debate that usually takes place whenever I do a post on string theory…..

String theory (or whatever it will be called when we figure out what it actually is) is a work in progress. It is an attempt to formulate the physics which will help us understand Nature at a level well beyond that at which we understand it now. Among the things we hope that such a theory will tell us about are:

• The quantum physics of spacetime. Nature is at its heart quantum mechanical, yet we don’t yet know what happens when we combine quantum physics with the physics of spacetime (phenomena such as black holes, vacuum energy, the nature of the very early universe, (and possibly more things we just have not realized yet!) depend on us understanding this);
• The connections between gravity and the other forces of Nature (lots to say here too…..much overlap with the other bullet points’s parenthetical remarks);
• The physical origin of several unexplained patterns and mysteries in our current models of particle physics (the matter/anti-matter imbalance, the origin of mass, the weakness of gravity, why three similar families of matter particles?, Why are “force” particles and “matter” particles so different from each other anyway?);
• The structure and evolution of our universe (Dark Energy and Dark Matter, which make up a whole 96% (or so) of our entire universe!…..what the Dickens are they? See several posts here on CV on these constituents of our universe.)….

….and several other questions that I don’t want to go into here, otherwise it stops being of benefit to non-experts…. (I also won’t go into all of the excellent things string theory has been useful for in our potental understanding other things about Nature, such as the nature of the Strong Nuclear force, why you never see a quark all on its own (”confinement”), etc…..)

Ok. So where are we?

Well, string theory is very complicated. It may well be that all we’ve worked out about it so far, over quite a few years, is just a tiny fraction of the whole story.

Maybe when we have the story worked out, we’ll have a big party in celebration of all that we learn about Nature from it. Or, we’ll see that it’s just the wrong story. Nobody knows whether or not this is the case. We need to work it out in order to know. Another perfectly fine possibility is that string theory tells us about *some* of the list of physics issues above, but not all of it.

In an effort to understand if the theory makes contact (or even has a chance to make contact) with Nature, many have attempted to extract physical scenarios, corresponding to our world, from the theory. Many of these scenarios are difficult to extract. They are often called “solutions” of the theory, in a (partial) analogy to finding solutions to a set of equations in an exercise in high school algebra. (Caveat: The analogy is only partial, because it is not clear if we really have all of the equations yet. This bit is important to remember!)

Workers in the field have found that (keep the above caveat in mind) there are apparently very very many solutions, making up a whole “landscape” of possibilities. (See my earlier, more technical post on this.)

So somewhere in that apparently vast landscape of (possible) string theory solutions, one of them might just correspond to Nature.

The big questions (in this context) for our field right now are:

• Is there a dynamical (or other physical) principle we’re missing that will help us find the One Solution? (In other words, maybe all those solutions aren’t solutions.)
• Must we appeal to other means of selecting the correct solution? (This is where arguments about things like the “Anthropic Principle” begin. See that earlier post and its discussion thread, and several others.)
• Will we just end up choosing a “solution” by hand and see if there’s still interesting science to be done, post-pick? (In other words, use observation/experiment to guide you in determining some parts of the solution (”fitting some parameters to the data”) , and then the theory makes predictions about the rest of the physics.) A perfectly sensible possibility that seems to get forgotten in these discussions, despite the fact that it happens all over the rest of science!)
• Or is it totally random, there’s nothing further to be understood, and string theorists are not doing science any more?

All good questions. Nobody knows the answers, but several people have strong opinions in various directions. Meanwhile, research continues. Excellent.

While we wait for the answers, here’s some hope:

Ok. I’ll come clean now:

Continue reading ‘There’s Gold in the Landscape’