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I will just mention that this guy doesn’t really look like Brian Greene. And that I’m disappointed the word “heterotic” couldn’t be worked in there somewhere.
And also that ordinary one-dimensional strings don’t form knots in higher dimensions of space, so extra-dimensional bondage requires extended objects. So really the guy in the cartoon should probably be “Dr. Polchinski.”
Samuel Arbesman (who may have a tad too much time on his hands) has developed a transit system for the Milky Way:
It’s a cute idea, but I have some issues. The biggest is differential rotation. In much of the Milky Way, the tangential velocity is constant (i.e. in km/s). However, this means that the inner parts of the galaxy are rotating faster (in degrees per second), such that the whole transit system will be winding up, making more and more unnecessary trips around the center in the inner regions — this is the classic “winding problem” of spiral arm theory. If you fight this by making your transit lines fixed, then they’ll go out of phase with the spiral arms, leaving a transit system that serves the thinly populated rural regions of the galaxy, with no regular service to the dense urban areas. Finally, there are useful, well-populated regions above and below the plane of the Milky Way disk, so there needs to be a three dimensional component to the transit systems, definitely requiring some sort of bus-rail-submarine link plan.
But, we’ve got a infrastructure-based stimulus package coming up, so maybe we’ll get lucky.
Foreign Policy has compiled a list of the Ten Worst Predictions for 2008. You’ll be happy to hear that physics has made the cut!
“There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.” —Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org
Scientist Walter Wagner, the driving force behind Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is making his bid to be the 21st century’s version of Chicken Little for his opposition to the world’s largest particle accelerator. Warning that the experiment might end humanity as we know it, he filed a lawsuit in Hawaii’s U.S. District Court against the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which built the LHC, demanding that researchers not turn the machine on until it was proved safe. The LHC was turned on in September, and it appears that we are still here.
Admittedly, FP didn’t get it quite right — as loyal readers know, it’s something of an exaggeration to say that the LHC was “turned on in September.” Protons circulated around the ring, but there were no collisions, and there won’t be until later this year. Still, they were right about the wrongness. The LHC is perfectly safe.
The other predictions were also amusing. Here’s my favorite:
“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006
Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist William Kristol was hardly alone in thinking that the Democratic primary was Clinton’s to lose, but it takes a special kind of self-confidence to make a declaration this sweeping more than a year before the first Iowa caucus was held. After Iowa, Kristol lurched to the other extreme, declaring that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and that “There will be no Clinton Restoration.” It’s also worth pointing out that this second wildly premature prediction was made in a Times column titled, “President Mike Huckabee?” The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.
Of course, asking Bill Kristol to predict the future is like asking Rod Blagojevich to head a good-government task force. Here’s my prediction: Kristol will continue to say dumb things, next year and far into the future. And get paid handsomely for doing so.
In honor of NASA’s current round of the astronaut selection process:
(from Dinosaur Comics. If you’re interested, there’s also a t-shirt.)
I first came across Second Life at a demonstration session put on by one of Linden Lab’s gurus at SciFoo camp in 2006. Since then I’ve heard about it occasionally, but was recently reminded about the details of how it works by Sean’s post on his talk in Second Life. This is all well and good and, although I’m not currently spending time in Second Life myself, I can see that there is real educational potential there, particularly with people like Rob involved.
But sometimes things get just plain silly! The Guardian is carrying a story of a real life couple who got divorced because the man was carrying on a platonic relationship with another woman in Second Life (I guess I should mention that his avatar also slept with a prostitute avatar also). So, first, while some things, like attending a talk by a cosmologist, may be almost as good in Second Life as in real life, I’m guessing sex isn’t one of them because it lacks the whole, you know, you getting laid part! Second, if you wanted to misbehave with a non-human toy form, put together from basic building blocks, you might as well make yourself a Lego partner – at least you could touch that.
Via Greg Laden, apparently originating at Fark.com: the candidates as trains.
There’s an old chestnut in astronomy — “Galaxies are like people. They’re only normal until you get to know them.” I thought it might be due to Sandy Faber, but decided to execute some google-fu to see if I could track down the provenance of the quote.
It turns out that the internet thinks there are lots of ways that galaxies are like people:
Galaxies are like people: the better you get to know them, the more peculiar they often seem. (from the always awesome Sydney van den Bergh)
Galaxies are like people. Thanks to gravity, they like living in groups.
Spiral galaxies are like people: they fray as they age.
Galaxies are like people. They grow when they’re young and stop growing when they settle into adulthood.
Galaxies are like people: they depend on both genetics and environment. (also from Sydney)
Galaxies are like people: they are born, they live and they die.
These are actually all pretty decent analogies, but I have a feeling we haven’t even begun to tap the potential of this framework. “Spiral galaxies are like people: most have two arms.” “Galaxies are like people. They grow in mass as they age.” “Galaxies are like people. Sometimes they eject gas when they’ve eaten too much.”
However, people are not so much like galaxies, only turning up one hit:
Great people are like galaxies. Their hearts are big black holes pulling everything in.
I can’t figure out if that’s supposed to be a good or bad thing.
So I’m sitting in my office doing physics, with part of me distracted by the LHC, and another part keeping an eye on the Guardian’s live coverage of the football match between Croatia and England. This involves a team of commentators who occasionally bring up the contents of some of the emails they receive during the match. To get quoted, one usually needs to be funny, wacky, or both.
During the first half there was some banter about old computers, such as the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. At half time, the following is reported:
Showing Off About Stuff dept: “All this talk of ZX Spectrums,” begins Steve Carbert, “reminds me of the time I wrote this really advanced basic program modelling the effects of superposed quantum states in a randomly fluctuating Hilbert Space and accidentally saved it on an old Barry Manilow cassette. Or was it the Troggs? But we digress. Can you give me more of a feel for how hostile the crowd is?” Yep, they’re quite quiet. Now can you tell me what the hell you are going on about? Fluctuating what? Eh?
HALF TIME: Croatia 0-1 England. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is that for the half. “Your commentary seems to be lacking any mention of Frank Lampard,” writes Kyle S. Karinen. Yes, it does, doesn’t it.
You can’t escape us – we’re everywhere!
Lonely heterosexual male physicists may wish to try their luck in New York City (via the consistently funny and frequently off-color Overheard in New York).
Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
