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Clifford Johnson
Clifford Johnson is a professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southern California. His research interests include particle physics, quantum gravity and cosmology, which lead him to wonder about things like space-time, black holes, quarks, and the Big Bang. When not working on those (but sometimes while working on them), you can find him doing other things like gardening, cooking, hiking, or just exploring L.A. He also blogs about all that and more at Asymptotia. You can contact Clifford directly by e-mailing him at cvj@asymptotia.com.
More Recent Posts
Don't Be a Stranger
by Well, it's goodbye from me... and maybe hello elsewhere...
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Bucky
Richard Buckminster Fuller was a dreamer. No doubt about it. He had all sorts of ideas about how technology could be employed to solve the ills of our society and species. Most of them never saw the light of day, although his name lives on in a number of areas. There's an excellent opportunity to learn more about him by visiting an excellent new retrospective on him that is in New York's Whitney Museum, and there's a New Yorker article that you can read online.
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Take a Tour of a Detector!
Ever wanted to look inside a particle accelerator's detector and see how it works? Want to know what sort of work goes on at these huge facilities? There's a new website for the CDF experiment at Fermilab that'll interest you. There's also some fun movies about the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider.
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When We Left Earth
Do you know about the Discovery Channel show called "When We Left Earth" ? It celebrates 50 years of NASA missions, and looks like a fun and informative series. Somethign for Sunday nights. Also, tonight there's a live chat with one of the show's creators.
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Pluto's a Plutoid!
Ever wonder what Pluto is since it stopped being a planet? A dwarf planet, you say. Well, as of Tuesday, there's a new classification. It is a Plutoid.
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Ray Ray Ray
In other gamma-ray related news, the movie "The Incredible Hulk" is released this week. What was it with gamma rays (and other rays) playing such a prominent role in so many origins stories in the old classic comic books?
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At Last - GLAST!
The GLAST observatory has been launched today. It is designed to study gamma rays coming from space. There's an exciting time ahead, with this new window on a range of highly energetic phenomena happening in the universe. We may learn a great deal about astrophysics and cosmology. Stay tuned.
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World Science Festival!
The World Science Festival is on in New York over the next few days. It looks like fun!
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Will She Stick the Landing!?
It is almost time. The Phoenix craft (launched last year) is approaching Mars, and later today it is due to land. The landing is going to be scary since the craft has to slow down from 12500 miles per hour to make a soft landing using the atmosphere (friction of entry, then a parachute) and then blast rockets to slow itself down at the very end. All this in a matter of minutes! With any of these steps going wrong, the craft goes splat on the surface of Mars. Needless to say, everyone is nervous.
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Jupiter's New Visitor
Jupiter has a new red spot! There's a lot to learn about planetary climate change here on earth, and so other examples are worth studying. Why are there new spots appearing on Jupiter of late?
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Oh My God, It's Full of Stars!
Here's a video of some of the millions of starfish found forming a community on an underwater mountain at Macquarie Ridge, near New Zealand.
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Video Contest!
Don't forget to view the 20 semi-finalists in the WIRED Science Video Contest!
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Super-Genius, Hard Work, and Science
Ziya's been discussing some of the celebrated "super-genius" types who are regarded as thinking about deep problems about the universe on behalf of the rest of us. Yes, we should celebrate these people, and I'm very pleased to see Ziya's posts highlighting that sort of work, but I'm a bit worried...
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Open House at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Ever wanted to see where those wonderful spaceships we send out there are designed and assembled? Wanted to talk to the scientists and engineers who do that? Well, this weekend you can do it quite easily. Go to JPL!
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No, Not A Doomsday Device
When the LHC in Geneva switches on later this year, is the earth going to be destroyed? Fear not - The odds are hugely in our favour.
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Carolyn Porco on Titan
Carolyn Porco gave an excellent talk at TED last year. I recommend it. You'll learn about some of the wonderful things that were learned about the Saturn system using Cassini and Huygens. She focuses on the moon Titan, which can teach us a lot about ourselves.
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Darwin Online!
Want to have a place where you can find all things Darwin? Notebooks, diaries, books, even recipes - to download and to view? Well, the Darwin Online Collection is the place you've been waiting for. Share it with your friends and your students!
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Galaxy Bumper Cars
Galaxies are, quite often, far from the safe places that they are usually portrayed as. They're not just the places where the universe keeps its stars. Among other things they've been seen getting up to, they can collide and merge with each other. NASA recently released some images of some of these events...
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Book Awards - Summer Reading
What are you reading this Summer? Time to start planning. The LA Times Book Festival is this weekend. Maybe their lists of notable books, prepared for their awards ceremony, might give lots of ideas. We can start with the Science and Technology category, but don't stop there...
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A Cosmic Salute to Arthur C. Clarke?
As Damon pointed out earlier, the great writer Arthur C. Clarke died on Wednesday of last week. Did you know that on that same day, there was a huge celestial event? Coincidence, or the universe's way of paying tribute?
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Sand, Man
Sometimes, if you look at things the right way, there are patterns all around to be spotted. Much of physics begins (and sometimes ends) with the business of looking at things the right way and asking the right questions in order to find important features of even the most complicated systems. Take sand, for example...
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Relativistic Art
It's time for some art. Featured here is Tamsin Van Essen, who works in ceramics on a variety of themes. Here, I point to some of her work that has a spacetime theme or two.
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Rings around Rhea
The Cassini probe has found evidence of a new ring system! Not about another planet (Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune all have rings, by the way), but about a moon of another planet, Rhea, which orbits Saturn. This opens up yet another new avenue in the exciting field of planetary science.
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DIY Arithmetic
In my final DIY-themed post for the month, I thought I'd simply point to an extreme example of DIY - Doing fast and accurate mental arithmetic instead of using a calculator. Arthur Benjamin has an amazing show, showing off his talents as a "mathemagician".
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DIY - Care For Your Microorganisms
A compost pile is a living, breathing community of microorganisms at work converting the organic matter you supply it with into various nutritional compounds. Knowing this is key to producing and using it correctly. Taking care of your compost pile well as it is being made for you by your microscopic friends (such as not letting it get waterlogged and turn into a pile of rotting stuff) is easy if you remember a few things.
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DIY - Fun with Microorganisms
There's a lot of science to be found all around us, without the need for expensive equipment to uncover much of it. Two favourite places of mine for this are the kitchen and the garden, and in this and the next post I'll talk a bit more about the latter. The topic is not plants per se, as it was last time, but an important link in the chain of which plants are part. I'm talking about making compost, one of those often-overlooked processes in nature that are crucial for the life-cycles on which we here on earth depend.
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Teleportation Friday!
So I've two timely snippets on teleportation in my newly minted Teleportation Friday! series...
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DIY that turns into DII
Some of the most pleasing forms of DIY are the simplest. When the DIY turns to DII, it's a good old-fashioned win-win situation.
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Space Exploration's Beginning In the USA
Today is the 50th anniversary of the day the US replied to the world-changing Sputnik launch by the USSR almost four months earlier. In some sense, the space race began in earnest with this launch of the craft called Explorer. It also marked the beginning of spacecraft-driven scientific discoveries about the world beyond and our own planet earth.
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Planck Meets Fleming
So yesterday at Pinewood Studios they announced the name of the upcoming second James Bond film in the new series that (excellently, in my opinion) re-envisions the Bond movie universe. Last year's first one was "Casino Royale", you may recall. Did you hear what the next one will be called?
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Not Science Fiction
Anti-matter. Seeing the previous word, you immediately glance back at the title, right? Strangely, it has been 80 years since the discovery of anti-matter, and we use it routinely in our technology. Nevertheless, anti-matter is still thought of as something from science fiction (and mostly bad science fiction at that).
It all goes back to one of my favourite theoretical physicists, Paul Dirac, and you might like how he found it [...]
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Images from Mercury
NASA's website for the MESSENGER spacecraft has a growing bank of lovely images of Mercury, recently sent. There are more on the way. So go and have a good look at the solar system's closest body to the sun.
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A Cloud Called Smith
There's quite a substantial cosmic collision due to happen. It is between our very own galaxy and a cloud of gas called the Smith Cloud. It's due to happen soon, by cosmological standards, but rather a while away by human standards. There are all sorts of collisions happening in our universe, near and far, fast and slow, always interesting, and often with a lot to teach us. More locally, there's also been an update on the collision of an asteroid with mars that was possible at the end of this month.
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Correlations Correlation
The Correlations bloggers have now (almost) all met! We hung out and brainstormed on Friday in Los Angeles. Also, appropriately, there was a surprising correlation...
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Comets and Meteors for the New Year
The year starts out with the return of some familiar objects in the sky. Comet Tuttle returns, comet Holmes is still putting on a show,and the Quadrantid meteor shower had quite a peak this morning.
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Reflection
It's time to do that other thing that people do at this time of year: Reflect upon the year that is coming to an end. People start doing highlight programs on the radio and tv, surveying the year of blog posts on blogs, and so forth. Also, various science editors start doing their lists of "top science stories" of the year. What does it all mean? What stories caught your eye?
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A Big Bang for 2008?
There's an asteroid on its way to a close approach to the planet Mars. New data on its trajectory have helped scientists announce today that the chances of a collision have increased from 1 in 75 to 1 in 25. Happily, there's quite a bit of Earth-originated traffic in the Mars area these days, and so if the collision does happen, we're bound to learn a lot of exciting new science.
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Essence
Both Science and Art are part of our everyday culture. Or at least they should be. Do you think of them as related, sharing some common goals, or quite different? Do you go to one as relief from the other, or for inspiration for the other? It is interesting to explore some common themes in art and science.
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Earth as Alien Planet
The field of astronomy and planetary science devoted to the study of planets in other star systems is a young and exciting one. Soon, it is hoped, we will be able to learn about planets not so different from ours, but orbiting about other stars. Will there be life on those other planets? Will there be intelligent life? To learn that will require detection tools currently unavailable, but currently being developed. In preparing for such remarkable telescopes, some scientists have been wondering about what an alien species (perhaps on one of those very planets we might find one day) might see if looking back at our very own planet earth? What can they learn about our planet using telescopes of the sort we might build soon?
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A Black Hole Death Ray?
Another supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy makes the news. This time, this sort of violent activity affects a neighbouring galaxy. And it's been caught on film. While a great story in itself, showing the immense power of black holes, another interesting story that lurks is how we went from black holes being exotic solutions to exotic equations to the commonplace objects that they are in today's astrophysics.
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The Universe, on TV
WIRED Science is not the only science show that launched on television this year. A number of channels are making new science-themed TV shows, with others under discussion. This is good news for everyone! The second season of the History Channel's new show "The Universe" has begun airing, and there's some fun stuff coming up.
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Antarctic Pioneers, Old and New
I've been fascinated by Tamsin's posts about her activities in Antarctica. I hope you've been reading them. Scientists from several disciplines now visit that remote part of the world, and are modern antarctic pioneers. It is sobering to recall just how recently the classic pioneering expeditions to that continent were made, and to hear the remarkable stories about what happened. One the big names from that era is that of Sir Ernest Shackleton, in connection with the heroic 1914 expedition that was intent on crossing the continent.
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An Easy Cell
There's been a breakthrough in stem cell research that could have profound implications for how research on the science and medicine is done, especially in the USA. This research touches on issues that continue to spark lively debate, and that changed the research landscape in the USA, compromising some competitiveness. How these new results will change things will be interesting to watch.
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Warped Ambitions?
I noticed recently that there was a conference, hosted by the British Interplanetary Society, about research on things like warp drive. You know, the means by which they zip around space in Star Trek. Is this crazy stuff? Where does the science begin and the science fiction end? Current research shows that there are certain important obstacles in the way of building a warp engine, even in principle. Can we get around them?
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Reflecting on the Quantum
Do you think of quantum physics as something weird? Irrelevant? It is not weird, really, and your life depends on it in so many ways. The problem is more to do with the way the subject is presented.
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What is the Big Round Thing?
You may have seen Ziya interview Jim Gates on last week's show. If you did not, you can check it out on the show's video archive. Somewhere in there, he mentioned the new experiment called the "Large Hadron Collider", or LHC, which several physicists are all excited about. It will turn on next year, we hope. It will allow us to test several important ideas in physics, and so we're all sitting on the edge of our seats to find out what it will tell us. So what ideas will it be testing for us?
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New Possibilities for Black Holes
There's been a recent discovery of an unusual black hole. It is about 16 times the mass of our sun. Such large black holes resulting from the collapse of ordinary stars have hitherto been unknown. It doesn't fit well with current theories about how these processes work. This presents an important and exciting puzzle for Astrophysicists. There's evidently more going on than previously thought.
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Giant Magnetoresistance Recognized
Magnetoresistance has nothing to do with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants or its charismatic leader. It's to do with your ipod, your laptop, and pretty much any device that uses hard drives to store a ton of vital information (you know, those valuable pictures of you at that party the other night) in a small place. Magnetoresistance is a material's ability to change its electrical resistance in response to an applied magnetic field.
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It's Nobel Week!
It's that time of year everyone! Every year there's a period of about a week during which all the Nobel prizes in the various categories are announced. This is the week. Rather than wait for the press to announce, you can keep an eye on the Nobel site here, and find out who won, what for, and get as much detail as you like about the significance of the contribution the prize is