Blogs / Cosmic Variance

The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 23rd April. 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:

Really?

Look around you. Is the scene you see “real”? Or a story made up inside your head? What about atoms? Are they real? What about love? Physics tells us that familiar space and time are illusions (while black holes and quantum weirdness are real). Artists reveal deep truths by pretending. What does it mean to say something is “real,” anyway? Physicist Steven Weinberg says it means we are granting it a measure of respect.

For this month’s Categorically Not! we are delighted to have Bay Area artist Bob Miller, whose explorations into the nature of light, seeing and believing are embodied in museum exhibits through-out the world. Bob will TALK A LITTLE about, and SHOW A LOT (capitals his) about what we’re REALLY seeing when we open our eyes. It really has a LOT to do with “The Wholeness of Seeing and Being,” he says.

From a scientific perspective, neuroscientist Richard Brown will demonstrate several engaging and powerful illusions currently being studied by scientists, present current views of why our brains evolved to produce illusions, and discuss the significance of illusions in our and understanding of “reality.” Richard studied neuroscience at Caltech and UCSF, and researched human color vision at UCSD’s Center for Brain and Cognition before moving to the Exploratorium in 1998, where he continues to develop interactive exhibits about perception, behavior and minds.

For a literary trip behind the looking glass, Pushcart prize winner Aimee Bender will lead us in a group writing exercise, as well as read and talk about her reality redefining fiction. Aimee is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, and Willful Creatures, which feature a girl with a fire hand, a character obsessed with numbers, and pumpkinheads who give birth to children with the recessive gene that produces a head made of an iron. Aimee has published in Harper’s, Granta, The Paris Review and is heard on This American Life. She teaches creative writing at USC.

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

Ok. You are probably tired of me enthusing about how so many things in LA are just great. (Well, those things I say are true, it is great, blah, blah, blah). However, sometimes things are just annoying in that “if we all agreed to fix this it would easily not be this way” sort of way. Here’s one such example:

Tuesday night. I went with two friends, Carol and Ilaria, to see an excellent group called Brazilliando play at Vitello’s in Studio City. It was a reminder of one of the frustrating aspects of LA nightlife. Basically, it was raining a bit outside, and combined with the fact that it was after 9:30pm, this just wiped out the audience. People don’t stay out very late much here especially during the work week (there are several nightspots, some of which I’ve mentioned in previous posts, which are exceptions to this rule, but not nearly as many as you would imagine for a city this size) even when the weather is fine, and when you combine that with a slight chill in the air, or a bit of moisture on the road, people just scamper off to their homes. So we turned up there to catch the second set and maybe hang out for maybe an hour and a half. The people at the font desk looked at us like we were nuts as we came in so “late” (9:30pm), and were not even sure if there was anything going on upstairs (the performance space is above the main restaurant floor).

They let us go up anyway…. The band was beginning to pack up, and there was nobody -absolutely nobody- in the room (upstairs at the back). Just lots of empty tables with solitary candles. It was 9:35pm. Carol knew the percussionist (Ami Molinelli), and so after fond greetings and introductions all around, they agreed to play a bit more. Just for us. We sat at a table and tried to order food. Nope, kitchen closed early. At 9:45pm!!? (After Ilaria pressed a bit, they agreed to go and see if they could find a salad and some bread, which did materialize.) The bar was eventually convinced to produce me a gin and tonic, and we settled down for a personal performance. I tried to put out of my mind my memories of struggling through the snow to get to various Jazz clubs in New York and finding it pleasantly packed with other intrepid music-seekers willing to brave the weather. (Wonderful freezing cold snowbound trips up from Princeton to the Village Vanguard spring to mind….) I tried to put out of my mind memories of listening to excellent performances into the wee hours of the morning in any number of jazz clubs….. What on earth is wrong with these soft Los Angelenos? Sigh.

They ended up playing for us for at least 45 minutes, and they were really great! If you’re in town looking for a sweet, understated, swinging, small (Samba, Bossa Nova…. Brazillian flavoured) Jazz group, look out for Brazilliando, with Robert Kyle (Saxophones, flute), Kleber Jorge, (vocals, guitar) and Amy Molinelli (percussion…really making the whole thing swing). See Kyle’s website for dates. [Update: That night we had Mitchell Long on guitar and vocals, by the way, (see photo) and you can look at his website here.]

-cvj

I was at a particularly good dinner party on Saturday night over on the West Side. It had a little under a dozen people, from professionals in academia and surrounds (such as relativist Kip Thorne of Caltech, or Legal scholar and writer/broadcaster Jonathan Kirsch) to professionals in entertainment (such as writer/performer Julia Sweeney), and journalism (such as South African Journalist and Activist Zubeida Jaffer) and several other fields…. and a good time was had by all. I only had to explain string theory and the whole of particle physics three times (to three separate groups; and I was glad for the opportunity to do so) so I managed to get some food and wine down. I’m not sure if my biggest moment was convincing the razor-sharp Julia Sweeney that maybe she does not hate string theory quite so much any more, or whether it was just finding ourselves enthusiastically in agreement over public transport issues in LA (i.e., it exists, if only people would use it more! Well, you’ve heard me on this topic a lot…..)…this is a big deal to me since a lot of people never want to talk about this matter. We also spoke a lot about getting more science into the entertainment/media realm as well (you’ve heard me on that topic a lot too) a subject we agreed was worth pursuing…

It turned out that a couple at the party could not use their tickets for the Sunday afternoon concert at the Disney Hall, and they gave them to me. This was rather nice since I’d been thinking that it would have been nice to go to the concert. All I had to do was find someone in the short time available (Sunday morning; concert was at 2:00pm) to take with me to use the extra ticket. This was a challenge (combination of it being a sleep-in day with the time change, and me not being terribly flush with contacts who I can call on for that purpose at short notice…..people my age often come in bound states, and/or they’ve planned to do stuff on the precious Sunday afternoons that you only get once a week) but I succeeded. At 2:00pm, we were in our seats, waiting for the first half:

The concert was the last in the Los Angeles Philharmoic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” series. It was excellent, (although I beg to differ with the “minimalist” moniker for those particular pieces). The whole concert was conducted by John Adams, and the first part was a Phillip Glass piece (or set of pieces; selected scenes from his opera Akhnaten, in fact), while the part after the intermission was John Adams’ own Harmonielehre. It was an afternoon of wonderful music, overall. I particularly loved the opera (even with the rather silly words in places), which was beautifully orchestrated with a small configuration of the orchestra (it was in fuller configuration later for the second piece).

There was a great dramatic effect that the layout of the hall lends itself to very well. A person can stand right in the center of the wonderful explosion of wood that is the Organ (see above photo) and look out onto the assembled audience, and they look rather commanding from up there. Well, they had the actress Holland Taylor go up there, splendidly dressed and dramatically lit, to read the parts of the Narrator. She has a quite commanding voice, and so it worked very well indeed.

Ok, I admit that I did have a silly moment when I could not help but distract myself a bit when I heard things like this:
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So I told several people that I would probably blog about the most recent Categorically Not! event that took place on Sunday night as soon as I got home. It did not happen because somehow I ended up late night dancing at a salsa club in Culver City, and did not get home until well after midnight. (You’ll be pleased to know that I will not show you any pictures of that event.) I had to then get up in time to give a coherent 9:00am class on advanced and retarded potentials in electromagnetism.

So sorry about the delay. Here’s my report on the proceedings. Please come in and comment, adding bits that I did not mention, telling us whether you liked the event, and discussing the ideas, if you like.

The topic was “Intuition”. We had one of the most well-attended events in terms of audience numbers, and three really great presenters! Everybody was really engaged in the material and there were so many wonderful questions (and answers).

We kicked off with Joe Polchinski (KITP-UCSB) talking about the creative process in science, particulalry theoretical physics.

It was done as a sort of Question and Answer session with our host KC Cole setting the stage first with some introductory remarks about that area of research, and then asking Joe some questions to which he gave answers in general terms and specific terms. The specific terms involved him talking about thought experiments (he mentioned for example Einstein’s reasoning about the Equivalence Principle by imaginig freely falling in a elevator….). He explained why thought experiments are useful guides to new insights. (He talked about his own thought experiment that led to his discovery of D-branes. He imagined what happened when you start with a higher dimensional string theory and curl up one of those dimensions and shrink it. He referred to this process as putting open and closed strings into a box and then shrinking the box away…… I won’t go into the details here. - For the string theorist readers: It is his famous T-duality argument I like to use in my lectures on the topic. Several of you will know it.) Here’s Joe and KC in conversation:

For those of you who are not aware of the Awesome power of the String Theory Masters, for it is seldom on display, check out Joe demonstrating -with careful concentration- the existence of extra dimensions. He’s reaching with both arms into the dimension we call “the M-direction” while KC and the audience look on, astonished, as the arms disappear temporarily. Here’s a closeup:

On the issue of intuition, I was pleased to hear Joe (and the other two speakers later) appropriately demystify aspects of the term by emphasising the importance of good ol’ plain hard work which is needed to develop a huge library of “things you’ve seen before” which help form a bedrock from which intuition can spring. This is true in any field. The most important asset is experience to draw on. So much familiarity with a set of practices or techniques that you internalise them completely. That comes with hard work. There’s no getting away from it, folks!

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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.

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

Yesterday after returning home from Dublin, I dumped off my luggage, freshened up and went out to the first public reading of the play I told you about in an earlier post (link here). The one I wrote with playwright Oliver Mayer, from the USC School of Theatre.

You’ll recall that it has scientists as characters, and aspects of scientist’s lives are on display. There’s particle physics and cosmology (the areas within which the scientists work)….. the non-scientist is in the music industry, and there are lots of intermeshings of the approaches to life to be found in those career choices. There’s laughter, jealousy, love, hatred, suspicion, all that good stuff…. Oh, and there’s Disco…which probably has something to do with an earlier party I told you about.

The reading was at the Senior Common Room at Parkside International Residential College, one of the splendid halls of residence on the USC campus, and so we had a very interesting audience of students and faculty (including Michael Waterman, one of the heroes of modern Computational Biology, who (I think) invited us to do the reading at Parkside), from various disciplines in the Arts, Humanities and Sciences. In addition we had some theatre people, including some local theatre directors, writers and actors from around Los Angeles…. Here’s a quick shot of the audience:

And a reminder of the cast of players (see that earlier post for more on them): Gary Perez, Geraint Wyn Davies, and Marlene Forte:

It was good to see that Ger was ok, since the last time I saw him, two weeks ago, he was shot to death on a rooftop in downtown LA, too late to be saved by Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer. (Ok, just kidding…..that was in the current season of the TV series “24″ - for more, see the last couple of paragraphs of my earlier post.)

Here are some more shots of them in various scenes:
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My friend and colleague Paul Verhaeghen is a truly talented individual indeed. Paul is a renowned psychologist, specializing in cognitive aging: what happens to older peoples’ working memory and long term memory as they age (OK, I copied this straight from his web site). This is all well and good, and I would normally be delighted to have talented colleagues, and not at all threatened by their accomplishments. Paul also plays a crucial role as co-organizer of Cafe Scientifique Syracuse, which is wonderful and also unthreatening, since I’m also involved in that.

But there’s this other thing. Something that just eats away at me, particularly given my love of contemporary literature and my secret writings that will never see the light of day. You see, Paul is an author. And not just any old author; Paul is an award winning author who critics have compared to David Foster Wallace - a favorite of mine (when I can get past the footnotes). Damn you Verhaeghen!!!! At least he’s not a nice guy with cool glasses, or this could really start to bother me.

In January, Paul accepted the Flemish Culture Award (Cultuurprijs) for Fiction - roughly the equivalent of the National Book Award in America, but given out once every three years. His winning novel, Omega Minor, was therefore considered to be the best work of Flemish fiction published between 2003 and 2005.

Unfortunately, my own linguistic limitations mean that I’m going to have to wait for the English translation, which Paul is doing himself and is due in 2007. This also means I can’t tell you much about the novel here, although you can read about it in this Syracuse University News article.

But there’s another aspect of Paul winning the Cultuurprijs that’s worth telling you about, and that’s his extraordinary acceptance speech. I won’t provide commentary, but here it is

Ladies and Gentlemen,

At the end of the nineties, when I started working on this book, I thought I was writing historical fiction. A story about the rise of fascism, a story about the totalitarian regime in the German Democratic Republic, a story about the horrors of war. A historical novel. It all happened a long time ago.

This is 2006.

When I was writing Omega Minor, I would never have guessed that the country I live in, the United States of America, would ever resemble Germany in the 1930s. Now there are concentration camps for presumed enemies of the regime — more than 83,000 people have been detained since 9/11, and 14,000 are still ‘in custody’ –, and just like the Nazis, who exported the horror to Poland, the American government detains these people in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Egypt, on Cuba, and in countless other places. There are again torture rooms, and eager torturers, and the architect of the legal underpinnings of torture is now attorney general.

In Omega Minor, I wrote: “What if the terrorist networks and the political reality overlap? What if the violence of the new state is the same as the violence of the vanquished Reich? What if those who liberated the camps fill them up again with ideological adversaries?” We have seen pictures of shiny happy torturers in Abu Ghraib, and hazy photographs of cages in Guantánamo Bay. We have heard the persistent rumors of secret CIA prisons in Romania and Poland, and with a signing statement the president of the United States of America has kept the door wide open for the use of torture against non-citizens — pushing aside both the Geneva convention and the laws of his own country.

The invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq was unnecessary, senseless, barbaric, and immoral. However one looks at it, the 28,293 Iraqi civilians — men, women, children — who died in war and the 2,247 American soldiers who gave their loves for a political lie that only served to keep a political dynasty in power are not a worthy monument for the three-thousand civilian victims of 9/11. Bring this up and you will be denounced as un-American.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have made the calculation. If I would accept the 12,500 euros associated with this award, about five-thousand dollars would flow into the American Treasury. I could pretend that this money will be used to finance public schools or medical care, or will help to alleviate the suffering of the forty million Americans who live below the poverty line. But who would I be kidding? The president just asked Congress for an extra 120 billion in emergency funds for the war. I gladly accept the award, but the money — no, that I cannot accept. This money would be paid for in human blood.

Omega Minor, very last sentences: “The world ever ends. It never ever ends.” When I wrote those words, they were meant to inspire hope. Now I am not so certain that the eternal recurrence of the same leaves any room for hope.

Friends. This world belongs to us; to all of us. Be vigilant. Do the right thing.

May you fare well.

– Paul Verhaeghen, Brussels, February 6, 2006 –

Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction writer, died on Saturday in Seattle. She had a fall at her home and hit her head, which is extremely sad, especially when, at age 58, she had so much more to do. (Photo right by Joshua Trujillo for the Seattle PI.) She is an excellent example of someone who was tremendously successful (she won the Hugo twice, and the Nebula twice) in a field where her race, sex and background suggested to most that she “wasn’t supposed to be”.

Actually, I’d prefer to think of her as more than just a science fiction writer. The term (having been corrupted somewhat by various prominent examples) does not do her work justice. In this, I think of her writing as akin to another excellent writer, and favourite of mine, Margaret Atwood. “Speculative Fiction” is a term which they have both used to describe their work, and while it is not a perfect term either, I think that they get to define what it means by their excellent work.

There were several excellent tributes and obituaries for her this week. Here is a link to the one by John Marshall in the Seattle Post Intelligencer (link).

Here’s an extract which really hits home:

The reclusive writer, who moved to Seattle in 1999 from her native Southern California, was a giant in stature (she was 6 feet tall by age 15) and in accomplishment. She remains the only science fiction writer to receive one of the vaunted “genius grants” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a hard-earned $295,000 windfall in 1995 that followed years of poverty and personal struggles with shyness and self-doubt.

“People may call these ‘genius grants,’ ” Butler said in a 2004 interview with the Seattle P-I, “but nobody made me take an IQ test before I got mine. I knew I’m no genius.”

Butler’s most popular work is “Kindred,” a time-travel novel in which a black woman from 1976 Southern California is transported back to the violent days of slavery before the Civil War. The 1979 novel became a popular staple of school and college courses and now has more than a quarter million copies in print, but its birth was agonizing, like so much in Butler’s solitary life.

“Kindred” was repeatedly rejected by publishers, many of whom could not understand how a science fiction novel could be set on a plantation in the antebellum South.

Sigh.

There’s also an obituary here by Marcia Davis in the Washington Post (link).
Margalit Fox wrote one for the New York Times, linked here.

Today’s Fresh Air on NPR also has a tribute to her, and plays part of an interview with her recorded from a previous program. (Here is a link.) NPR’s Day to Day also has a tribute, and you can listen to it at this link, where there are other links to related NPR stories.

You can also go to the Octavia E. Butler homepage, with much more information. (link).

She was a trailblazer. We owe her a huge amount of gratitude, and her influence will continue for a very long time.

-cvj

Here’s another reason that I love working at a University with a broad spectrum of activity, in an exciting and diverse city. You get the most wonderful connections between different segments of your life:

After an extraordinarily exhausting week, Friday evening came and I jumped on the Brompton and cycled up Figueroa the 37 blocks to the heart of downtown, where you can find the music centre, and the wonderful Disney Hall. My errand was to somehow obtain tickets for an extremely popular concert. The box office, once I got there, had only a few returned ones, at $120 and $90 each. I could not bring myself to pay that much without exploring other avenues (I’ve several expenditures to worry about) and so I thought I would wait in case anyone turned in orchestra seats (those are more like $35), or to see if the price would drop nearer the concert start, or (my main hope) to see if someone showed up with an extra ticket (maybe a friend could not make it) and would just sell it to me right there near the box office. So I stood there for over an hour, watching the world go by, most of it looking curiously at my bike in half-fold position. It dawned on me at some point that I’d no really reliable way of discovering who might have tickets to sell or not. This became especially clear after a group of people who came well after me and were hanging around managed to get a ticket in this manner. So after a while I began to learn who had “the look” of maybe having a ticket to sell, and with about ten minutes to go before the concert (and after a long conversation about the bike which made me miss at least one more sale) I managed to negotiate an $82 ticket down to $50 (I could have done better, but it seemed fair), folded up and popped my bike off in the coat check area and emerged (appropriately attired) for an evening of a bit of relaxing to some Mozart.

I came because I had three students (Joesph Benson, Kyle Patterson and David Reese) in my Physics 151 tell me that they had to miss some parts of a few Thursday lectures because they had to go and rehearse for a concert. Of course, I asked what concert it was, and it turned out that they (as part of the USC Thornton Choral Artists) would be performing Mozart’s Requiem with the LA Philharmoic at Disney Hall over three nights! Of course I had to find a way to go!

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