Come In, Sit Down, Join In!

by Clifford Johnson     Department: Correlations

I'm a physicist, and you'll find me in Los Angeles most of the time. I work at the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of Southern California. I'm a theorist and so I don't have a laboratory of my own that I go to every day. When in research mode, I'm to be found in my office or elsewhere, working at a white or black board (like the one on the left), or in a notebook, or even on napkins and (paper) tablecloths supplied by various cafes.

In my work, I'm concerned with questions such as what everything in the universe is made of, how it all fits together, and how it behaves. I construct theories and tools that help address some of these questions. This leads me to ponder things like space-time, quarks, black holes, the Big Bang, and neutron stars, to name just a bit more than a few.

Currently, most of my work centers around a collection of ideas and tools called string theory. Ultimately, I hope that such theories will be informed by (and tested against) experiments and observations one day. One such experiment my field is all excited about is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Europe, pictured below (click for larger view), which is due to begin gathering data in the next year or two.

I'll blog about lots of aspects of physics and related fields (anything from astronomy to mathematics), but I'm fascinated by all areas of science, so I'll sometimes discuss a wider range of topics, hoping that if I happen to wander into their domain of expertise, my colleagues won't be too polite to jump in and fill in the gaps that I don't (or can't) fill - I hope to learn something from all of this too!

I love making connections between things - finding correlations, if you like - and I enjoy finding science in every day life, and in other areas, from the arts to popular culture, so there'll be posts about things like that too. Also, I think that our society suffers when science is not part of everyone's everyday conversation, right alongside other aspects of our culture like music, literature, art, sport, movies, theatre and so forth. So I try to get involved with helping such conversations happen and make their way to where they belong - into the mainstream of our culture. Watch out for posts of that nature too. If you're looking for more, I blog about lots of these things and more over on my home blog, Asymptotia, as well.

I hope that you'll enjoy what you find and even join in the conversations from time to time!

-cvj

Tags: astronomy, Asymptotia, Large Hadron Collider, physics, USC

+ Add Comment