Please accept my apologies for the lack of updates. I have been very busy.
There are so many things I’ve wanted to write about. The LHC started working again and there have been collisions. Mercedes Sosa and Lev Kofman passed away. There was a Thanksgiving holiday where a lot of food was eaten.
I’m teaching General relativity and I have given up on keeping my notes online. I’m in a committee that takes away whatever little time I have. My capacity to do research this quarter has been slowed tremendously, in great part because I have to grade and do more work, even though supposedly I should be taking furlough days off. The University I work for is having trouble and the prospects for the near future are quite bleak. I’m also one of the people with the charge of finding ways to get donor support for the UCSB physics department. I’ll extend my begging hand in your general direction: can you spare some change for poor physics students?
On quite another note, I am troubled by the recent developments in Latin American foreign politics. I’m aghast at the recent decision by the Swiss to ban minarets by popular vote, and I just remembered that when I was a teenager in a land far away, one of my high school professors got fired for being gay. At least that was the rumor going on at the time in my high school.
Finally, to leave on a cute note, I read this comic of Xkcd on how physicists cope with being in vacuum on a frictionless surface. I can sympathize with the poor professor. At least the sound stops when the air goes out, unlike many other science fiction loud explosions in vacuum.
Hey David,
thanks for the tx dinner, it was awesome, best turkey I ever had! ;p
I’m equally troubled by what’s going on back south, especially in Honduras, really disappointing coming from the Obama admin…
It’s also amusing to read in the NYT about our new president, and our previous one, a ‘marxist oncologist’
Oh well, on a better note, at least they aren’t organizing the coups this time…
Here’s my black hole orbit simulator for Schwarzschild and Gullstrand-Painleve coordinates. A student might find it useful in understanding concepts like “inner edge of accretion disk” or the like.
The math behind it is supposed to be published in IJMPD this month but they haven’t sent me the final proofs and I’m wondering, just how long do they wait???
Well I suppose seeing minarets is not part of every day experience in USA either. Come to think of it I don’t think there are any minarets in US or there are very few. But I really don’t know maybe I’m wrong.
I offer the following idea.
Physics needs to look at its roots in order to solve its funding problems. There was a time where it was the physicists themselves that people paid to see. I recall that in his final years, Boltzmann began giving lectures on philosophy to standing room only crowds.
Here’s the basic idea. Take your best professors and have them give two hour live online lectures on a topic of the professor’s choosing, and charge people for it.
I would charge $5-10 dollars per person (price of a movie ticket), and place a 100-200 person minimum for the lecture to occur (minimum would have to be reached 3-7 days prior to lecture, lecture would be cancelled with 12-24 hr notice, money will be refunded in the event of a cancellation).
Included in the fee would be the right to submit one question via email that will be answered by the staff of the university physics dept (not necessarily the professor, and not in the course of lecture.)
Also included will be access to on active chat room monitored by a grad student, which would be projected in the lecture room live.
The lecture would be recorded in its entirety and made available free of charge to those who paid for the lecture.
I would host them on Friday nights, or over the weekend. Students at the university could attend for free, but questions could not be asked by the students during the lecture.
Although ideally this would all be done on volunteer time, it would probably be economically viable to pay $50 per undergrad per lecture for help (2 each at a min to run and setup the site out of a pool of undergrads, etc), $75 per grad student (1 each min, to monitor chat rooms and supervise the undergrads), $100-150 for the lecturing professor…the remainder of the proceeds would go to the physics dept. (Although that is just my thoughts, the particulars would depend on the university).
I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar is already being done, but I still think its a good idea.
The idea is not bad, but the scale of revenues would be entirely insufficient for what we currently need.
Right now, I’m just learning how this process works.
Thanks for the tip.
The following link lays a lot of the standard techniques
http://www.snpo.org/funding/index.php
Just got the SciAmBook mailing – it had an item for Cooperstock’s General Relativistic Mechanics – saying that DarkMatter is not needed to explain the galactic light curve or cluster motions – that GR is sufficient to explain it. Geometry rules. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Dear jr:
I’m not an expert, but as far as I know the evidence for dark matter is overwhelming and `incontrovertible’. Particularly impressive are the analysis of the bullet cluster. Alternative theories have not panned out. Also, WMAP measurements seem to predict an abundance of dark matter.
If you read on the arxiv preprint server, these alternative ideas have not had a lot of traction. I think Cooperstock is promoting his own pet theory about this in a popular book. I wouldn’t trust that the theory is correct, but I think it might be worthwhile for someone else who is an expert to look into it.