Glad you liked the theme. Yes…. contact wiht people in touch with the observations and experiments is ultimately *vital* to the kind of work I do.

Cheers,

-cvj

Manny Delbruck, Bacher, Delbruck, Bethe, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Dorothy Walker ; outdoors ; San Gabriel Mountains, California

Gell-Mann, Lisa; Gell-Mann, Murray; Gell-Mann, Margaret; Delbr?ck, Manny; Bethe, Hans; Bethe, Rose. L-R, front: Bacher, Robert; Walker, Dorothy; Delbr?ck, Max; Feynman, Richard; Feynman, Carl. Outdoors; picnic in the San Gabriel Mountains, California, spring.

I heard that a Berkeley Nobel physicist (Charles Townes?) spends a week every year in the “monastery” @Mt. Wilson. I took the Mt. Wilson tour back in ‘93, I highly recommend it. I connected wtih Robert Gardner (started up Analog Computing @JPL, & contemporary/friend of Feynman) thru our interest in meteor-observation, who is involved with Table Mountain Observatory (near Mt. Wilson). There is an amateur-astronomy group (incl some Caltech & JPL people, I sometimes go), which observes from Mt. Vetter (near Mt. Wilson).

some inside info:
Robert Leighton (Caltech physicist, of “Feynman Lectures on Physics” fame) used to take his sons Alan & Ralph (Feynman’s buddy, of to the San Gabriel mtns. Like for Comet Ikeya-Seki, as related to me by Alan Leighton.

[ how it happened: I chase solar eclipses (CVJ recently made a reference to the 1919 solar-eclipse expedition which was a test for Einstein's GR), & someone named Alan Leighton emailed me about my amateur-astronomy pics from Mt. Wilson

http://www.comet-track.com/eclipse/secl02a/secl02a.html
http://www.comet-track.com/hb/hb.html
[ comet against mtn/desert foreground ]

http://www.comet-track.com/hb/hb315.html
[ comet, from Mt. Wilson road ]
http://www.comet-track.com/hb/hb325.html
[ solar towers (the ones in CVJ's post), with comet in background ]

http://www.comet-track.com/hb/hb411.html
[ I had my astrophotography rig at the Caltech Comet Chasers meeting, see here ]

..which triggered a sentimental longing of past times. Funny thing, he never mentioned Caltech, just that his dad was a physicist & wrote a text on “Modern Physics”. Only did a geologist friend of mine fill me in. ]

I was JUST checking on Paul Grayson’s (Caltech physics grad sutdent) hike up the San Gabriel’s:

http://paul.graysonfamily.org/album/?query=viewset&set=17
http://paul.graysonfamily.org/album/?query=viewset&set=1
[ his dad is a UIUC math prof, who was involved with the startup of "Wolfram Research" w/Stephen Wolfram. My dad was a prof/dept head, who was on the search commitee which lured Wolfram from Princeton with the triple appt (Math, Physics, Computer Science) to UIUC, to start the CCSR ]

I myself mountain-bike up those trails starting from the JPL parking lot in North Altadena (where many Caltech physics profs live, incl Feynman). Last year’s rains have created some some “debris flows”, so you have to use some caution for hiking/biking.

cvj:

Thanks Garrett. Sounds great , but probably not for me, to be honest. I’m not one for big hiking groups, generally. Several reasons: People feel the urge to chatter all the time, for example, and hiking -or any sort of long walk- is usually my way of getting away from that, allowing me to listen to my own thoughts, and Nature. Also I get to go at my own pace, change my mind about how far I want to go, etc.

I noticed you hiked alone (as did Paul), as I do mountain-biking. Risky. The general-rule is to go in a group, in case something happens. If one is alone & something happens (go over a cliff, etc), one could get into serious trouble.

[ A couple yrs ago, a group of Caltech profs & students went on an end-of-semester hike, & got lost in the San Gabriels. It made the local news. I thought that was embarassing. ]

However, the feeling of “getting away from everything” (alone in Nature) is therapeutic. My amateur-astronomy jaunts to Joshua Tree National Monument, Anza-Borrego desert, Mt. Pinos, etc to view/photograph comets & meteor showers have given me some memorable alone-in-Nature moments:

- a ghostly greenish 50 degree Leonid fireball
- a huge Geminid fireball which made it almost “daylight”
- the “great” Comet Hyakutake in Arizona here & here
- Comet Hale-Bopp

I’ve managed to view Solar eclipses around the world, *alone* in 3rd world countries (not advisable, in terms of safety):

- Baja ‘91, India ‘95, Curacao/Caribbean ‘98, Turkey ‘99, Zambia ‘01, S. Africa ‘02
[ I was near Montserrat in '98, where that volcano actually erupted during the eclipse ]

I notice you have some public-outreach activities with ASTI in S. Africa. I make it a point to have some cultural-interaction with the locals in my host countries for solar-eclipses. I especially had a good time in Turkey, where some Turkish teen-agers were brought in as English translators for the Harput Science Group (incl Czech & Italian solar astronomers). Zambia was great, I was in a small village near the Angolan border..the villagers saw my telescopes & thought I was an Apollo astronaut!? S. Africa was dangerous, a native told me:

“if you are alone in the city, you will be robbed [ by people ]. If you are alone in the bush, you will be eaten [ by animals ]”
“Violent crime is very common in S. Africa”

I ended up getting “nicked” (equipment theft), & a S. African eclipse-watcher went back home only to be robbed & killed (shot 6 times).

cvj:

Jim: Hi! It’s just a great mountain. What you describe is just a great thing to do. I used to stargaze a lot when I was younger: with binoculars, then a rather terrible telescope that I made, and sometimes accompaneid by star charts…. But I used to do it in a lot warmer climate than a mountaintop in Southern California in the wintertime. But it must be a great thing to do every year….I had a bad habit of just going and seeing that my favourite things were there, so I never really learned the sky very well when I was young, as I should have. Are you one of those people who can identify very many objects by name, constellation, etc…? This is where I end up being rather embarrased at all the amatuer astronomy parties.

You are living in S. California, the “capital of Amateur Astronomy”. The local deserts offer some of the highest % for clear skies in the world. I recall seeing a picture of Feynman’s refractor telescope (in one of his desert camping trips).

With your status, you can certainly find the connections to be a guest for sessions in any of the big-name observatories. I like what Alex Fillipenko (Berkeley astronomer) said from a mountain-top observatory:

“It’s like the Universe has a consciousness”
[ it's "star-stuff descendants" (humans) being able to probe/understand the Physics of the Universe ]”

Going back to the theme of your post: Einstein (theorist) meeting with Hubble (experimentalist), to see the data for himself. Don’t you think it would help your theoretical work, to have a close alliance with an observational astronomer?

It would be interesting to see perspective independant of the five of Cosmic Variance, describe it from their own understanding. I would expect their respective fields would allow them to explain this differently?

FRom that context, I would say the complete cyclical nature of how this universe is formed, should have been more then created in the undertanding of a “geometrical framework ( I understand there is no geometry at certian levels, but it would have to been lead “into” and “out of”)” that would be most satisfying?

Then again, the exercise might be fruitless?

On the same token, outside of this what do you think Quarkstars play in this context, Christian?

The speed/time past is a constant ratio, so it is simply equal to c/(age of universe) = 6 x 10^-10 m/s^2, an aceleration which is similar to that of the Pioneer 10 anomaly. There is a lot of basic physics from an acceleration, like using F=ma to calculate outward force and Newton’s 3rd law to calculate inward force of gauge bosons, allowing a mechanistic quantum field theory…

-cvj

Thanks for asking.

-cvj