Daily Archives: May 7, 2021

May 6, 2021

As an undergraduate and later graduate student at the University of Rochester, Philippe Lewalle 14, 21 (PhD) has played piano at the Colleges music and physics department commencement ceremonies.

This year will be different, though: he will also be the one graduatingwith a PhD in physicsduring spring commencement ceremonies, May 14 to 16 and 20 to 23.

Visit the Class of 2021 site for details about this years Commencement ceremonies and for a downloadable toolkit of materials to share your support on social media.

The child of parents who are both violinists and academics, Lewalle began playing piano at age 7 and was drawn to Rochester because the University offered the possibility to combine his love of music and interest in science, earning dual degrees in music and physics at the School of Arts & Sciences.

I came to Rochester in large part because it was feasible to double major in physics and music, he says. Even though I was working a lot of long days as an undergrad, it always felt refreshing having two very different types of homework on my platter. If I got tired of one, I could always switch to the other.

The summer after his sophomore year, Lewalle had the opportunity to work with Joseph Eberly, the Andrew Carnegie Professor of Physics, conducting research on quantum optics. The research would ultimately set the direction of his graduate work and PhD dissertation.

That summer definitely shaped the trajectory I took later, Lewalle says. The research I conducted as an undergrad ended up relating a lot to my PhD work.

As a graduate student, he worked with physics professor Andrew Jordan, where his specific research focus was on tracking quantum systems in real timea process that is intrinsically invasive to changing the system state itself as it is monitoredand the odd things that happen when such systems are disturbed. The research is important not only for better understanding fundamental quantum mechanics, but also for improving quantum technologies such as quantum computers.

Throughout his time at Rochester, Lewalle continued to play music with a variety of musicians at venues in the city and took advantage of the musical opportunities offered by the Rochester community.

The pool of talent that comes through Eastman is really motivating and inspiring, Lewalle says. I have benefited a lot from playing with so many talented musicians throughout my time here, in addition to attending a number of the great performances, whether at Jazz Fest, student recitals, or other concerts that are held on a regular basis at Eastman and venues around the city.

Lewalles own musical interests include contemporary jazz and its intersections with hip-hop and free improvisation. One project he played in, called Claude Benningtons Fever Dream, involved a synthesis of hip-hop and jazz that took a jazz rhythm section and instead of horn players, put rappers out front, he says. We were learning beats and treating them like jazz tunes, improvising on and around them and sometimes venturing freely away from the written material. Recordings from the project are available on Bandcamp and YouTube.

Although many of his music projects have stalled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Lewalle has continued to work on his own compositions and record and play when possible and safe, even while finishing his physics PhD thesis.

Its been difficult during COVID because, especially with jazz improv, you really feed on the energy of the crowds and the immediate interactions between musicians, he says. Its not the same without that.

In July, Lewalle will start a new chapter as he travels across the country to California to begin a postdoctoral research appointment, studying quantum mechanics in the group of K. Birgitta Whaley at the University of California Berkeley.

Tags: Arts Sciences and Engineering, Class of 2021, commencement, COVID-19, Department of Physics and Astronomy, event, Satz Department of Music, School of Arts and Sciences

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Physicist and jazz pianist combines music and science at Rochester - University of Rochester

Clifford Johnson, a theoretical physicist at the University of Southern California, is an accomplished scientist working on ways to describe the origin and fabric of the universe.

He is also a multitalented science communicator and one of the rare scientists that can boast his own IMDb page.

Johnsons efforts to engage the public with science have spanned blogging, giving public lectures, appearing on television and web shows, writing and illustrating a graphic novel, and acting as a science advisor for television shows and blockbuster films including Star Trek: Discovery and Avengers: Endgame.

In the spirit of his 2017 popular science book The Dialogues, I hopped on a Zoom call with Johnson for a dialogue of my own. What follows is an edited version of our conversation about how and why he came to study quantum physics, why he decided to create a graphic novel about science, the ups and downs of Hollywood consulting, and why public engagement with science matters.

From a very early age, I was asking questions about how the world works and trying to figure out how things worked by tinkering with old radios and things. Then at some point, I learned that there's a career where you can make a living from that sort of curiositybeing a scientist.

And then some family friend asked me what kind of scientist I wanted to be. I didn't realize there were different kinds. So I found a dictionary and I went through page by page and read the definitions of chemist, biologist, all of the -ists and -ologists. And when I hit physicist, I thought, this is the one, because the entry said that physics underliesall the other scienceswhich appealed to me because I wanted to keep my options open.

I got interested in particle physics reading authors such as Paul Davies and Abraham Pais as a teenager. And then in my undergraduate studies at Imperial College, I began to learn about the issues of trying to quantize gravity, which led me to study string theory for my PhD at the University of Southampton. The universe really does seem to be fundamentally quantum mechanical. So, it's a real problem if we don't know quantum mechanically how to understand gravity, spacetime and where the universe comes from.

Ive been doing outreach in a way since I was 8 or 10 years old. I was that annoying kid who was always explaining things. In school, people would call me the professor. Everyone thought they were giving me a hard time, but secretly I thought it was an awesome nickname.

Outreach, for me, is a natural part of being a scientist. Research is all about the story of how things work and where they came from. And what's the point of knowing the story, if you can't also get other people excited about it? If someone wants to know, I'm going to tell them. I got reasonably good at explaining things in a coherent way. Word got around, and I started presenting on radio and TV.

Sometimes, people would get in touch from the media because of something they read on my blog. I co-founded a blog called Cosmic Variance with four other physicists in 2005, and also started a solo blog called Asymptotia in 2006. Id write about interesting ideas and what was going on in research, as well as my other interests and day-to-day life. Blogging created communities where people would engage in conversation and we'd have great discussions, and then that would encourage us to write more.

It is very frustrating to me that science is often portrayed as a special thing done by a special group of people. It is a special thing, but anyone can be involved, and everyone should be involved. I often say that science should be put back into the culture where it belongs.

Public outreach is important because a lot of people think they wouldnt understand scientific issues, and so they leave it to a small group of people to make decisions. And thats not democratic. We aren't a democracy if people aren't more familiar and comfortable with science and the people who do science.

I agonized over writing a book for the general public for a long time because I didnt think there was any urgency to write one of the standard kinds of books that get written by people in my field. Not that theres anything wrong with those books. But I thought that if we could break out of the narrow mold of how popular science books are supposed to be, we could reach so many more people.

Though I was a comic book fan from a young age, I essentially snuck up on the on the graphic-novel concept backwards. The ratio between prose and illustration changed as I began to conceptualize what I really wanted to be able to do with the book. The illustration aspect began to eat the prose aspect and became a narrative in its own right. And then I realized it was going to be a graphic novel. Writers often say that you try and create the book that you want to see in the worldso I did, and I even took the time out to teach myself to draw at the level needed to do it.

In all graphic novels, spacetime is created by the reader. When youre looking at a series of comic panels, your mind constructs how space and time come alive on the page. So what better medium to talk about physics, the subject that is about spacetime, than graphic novels? I could take advantage of the medium to illustrate ideas, like arranging panels to swirl into the interior of a black hole and mess up the order to convey how space and time get messed up there.

Yes. The plan is to do a new set of dialogues. Unfortunately, Im still working on the time machine in the basement so I can manufacture more hours in the day. Sooner or later, Ill get it to work.

Most of the work is not the glamorous, sitting-around-chatting-with-Spielberg kind of thing that people envision. Theres no industry standard for science consulting. The work can be anything from a writer getting in touch with me and asking if I'll take a look at a script, or if Ill talk with them about an idea they have. Or the directors call consultants in at the end and ask us to fix something before they start shooting, although by then its usually too late for a good conversation.

If the science is going to be part of the DNA of the story, then it's best if conversations happen early. The best stuff happens when theres an environment where science can be an inspiration at the writing stage. For the Avengers: Endgame and Infinity War movies, one of the smart things the filmmakers did is they got in touch early on and then we brainstormed ideas. They did this with other scientists, too, gathering a lot of good material to draw from.

Anywhere from zero to a hundred percent. I have no control over how much. When I give public talks, I talk about the trade-off between how much control you have and the size of the audience you can reach. I have complete control over the content of a public lecture to a few hundred people. I had zero control of what ended up in the final cut of Avengers, with an audience of many millions.

In a few projects I advised on, there are even scenes where I wrote most of the words. I either went over the script and revised the science talk, or the writers left a hole for me to tell them how to say something, and then they used my suggestions verbatim. Thats not common, but it happens sometimes.

Overall, the science is more likely to survive all the way to the screen if its for television, which is more of a writers medium. In television, the director works for the writers. In film, the writers work for the directors, who may or may not care about the science content.

Season two of the show Agent Carter is a great model of how things between TV writers and science consultants are supposed to work. Entire characters and storylines on the show were invented based on things we brainstormed together in the writers room. A few times, I sketched an idea about what a machine might look like and they just went away and built the machine for the set!

Another project where I was involved very early on was the first season of National Geographics series Genius, about the life and work of Einstein. Not only did I teach the writers a lot about relativity, but I helped pick pieces of science that they could unpack thematically for episodes and helped them write scenes so that the science could really be on show.

Maybe most importantly, they took seriously my encouragement to show that Einstein discussed his ideas with others around him, to help break that lone genius mythology that often drives people away from thinking they can be scientists.

Some people get hung up on getting all the facts right, but I'd rather focus on things like representing the scientific process correctly, as opposed to making it seem like magicrepresenting the thought processes and the people doing those thought processes.

I care about whether the scientists are portrayed like real people with narratives that help you relate to them and understand them. When I'm working with artists and media people creating images of scientists, I encourage them to make those people more real, make them more accessible, show that they're human beings.

I think the most important skill to learn is dealing with interruption and knowing how to put something on hold and then come back to it. I've gotten better at doing a lot of stuff in my head in preparation for that short time I'm going to have where I will be able to sit at my desk and do my physics.

I hope that I am helping to dispel the myth that if youre good at outreach, it means that youre not goodor not interestedin research at the highest level. Thats often used to discourage people from spending time on outreach and engagement, or as an excuse to dismiss people of color or women in the field. The fact that I have been very successful at research and teaching and also science outreach shows that it is possible to be a significant player in both realms.

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On the marvels of physics | symmetry magazine - Symmetry magazine

Often times, finance and physics are considered as mutually exclusive fields, with little or no correlation whatsoever. However, if you take a closer look, you can see the glaring similarities between them. For each of these, I will try to touch on some of the material issues that have generated significant interest in each field.

Financial crises

The world of finance is not short of overwhelming events that go beyond our wildest expectations, and catch even the best analysts off-guard. From the most recent financial crisis of 2008, to the fifteen-minute flash crash of 2010, to the most recent short-squeeze of video-game company Game Stop; the financial markets have proven that they cannot be mastered.

In my opinion, there is mainly one cause of uncertainty in the markets: the markets are fundamentally based on human behaviour and psychology, which is largely unpredictable, and cannot be sufficiently modelled.

Traditional finance is based on the assumption that all market participants are rational. However, the reverse is true. In many cases, people are driven more by psychological biases, than common sense itself. This has led to studies that combine neuro-biology with finance and economics neuro-economics. It focuses on how the human brain generates chemicals that influence decision-making, and hence is a constraint to fundamental economic theory.

Leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, banks were doing risk assessments that seemed sufficient at the time, had collateral that seemed sufficient, and were very optimistic about the future.

However, we were all living in a bubble, which was about to burst, but very few analysts could actually tell.

In hindsight, we realize that banks were not making enough provisions on bad debts, stress tests were not exhaustive enough, investment banks were converting low quality mortgages into high-quality bonds, and selling them to pension funds, etc.

Of course, at the time, these bonds seemed to be of high quality, since they were issued by government-backed agencies like Fannie Mae, and had significant collateral. However, these bonds high credit rating was all based on an incorrect assumption: property value can only increase, and besides, if any client defaulted, they could recover their money plus an abnormal profit. In addition, these were government-backed issuers, which could not default.

However, their models could not simulate all possibilities that could evolve from human behavior, to model them into risk & return scenarios. This was because these risks and returns were so intertwined like a cobweb throughout the entire industry.

Commercial banks sold relatively high-yield mortgages to Fannie Mae, and simultaneously invested in Fannie Mae bonds, which were secured by similar mortgages. These same bonds were securitised by an investment bank, and given a high credit rating by a credit rating agency which also invested in the same bonds. In addition, these bonds were insured by insurance companies through credit default swaps. Effectively, this enabled the biggest funds, which generally have a low risk appetite, to take a significant share of the high yields from mortgages, without having exposure to the default risk of these mortgages.

The relationship became so lucrative to the big funds, since they were receiving yields much higher than normal. However, their available capital outweighed by far, the eligible mortgage applicants, and yet their thirst for yield could not be quenched.

At the source of this relationship was the mortgage borrower. At this point, it was clear that the solution was to significantly increase mortgages even to applicants who were not eligible, in order to feed the entire chain.

Therefore, when mortgage borrowers started defaulting and the property values dropped, the entire chain of stakeholders were significantly affected, and the financial crisis started to unravel like a burning bush.

As the legendary boxer Mike Tyson put it, Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

Quantum mechanics

The world of physics is largely predictable and makes perfect sense, until you get to the micro-level of atoms. Quantum mechanics is the study of how atoms behave, and hence it explains how chemistry, biology and physics work. Put simply, it is the explanation to how everything in the universe operates.

Even some of the most mind-boggling discoveries like black-holes, the big bang theory, time-space continuum; are childs-play, when compared to how atoms operate.

At the level of atoms, the famous laws of physics no longer apply; things seem to operate on an almost-mystical or spiritual logic.

Albert Einstein died before he could figure out why things happen the way they do at that level the theory of everything as it is called. A few scientists thereafter tried to decode this theory, but with no success.

Therefore, both financial crises and quantum mechanics cannot be modelled. Nonetheless, an attempt may be made at the former, rather than the latter. In addition, the fundamental causes of both mysteries (financial crises and quantum mechanics) lie within the human being the human brain, and atoms.

editor@newtimesrwanda.com

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What financial crises and quantum mechanisms have in common - The New Times

The study of UFOs could potentially redefine "all of science."Breaking Physics

The US military has started to take reports of unidentified aerial objects more seriously in recent years, even setting up a taskforce to investigate strange sightings by its personnel.

Many of the reports include mysterious objects spotted by Navy pilots, traveling through the sky at astonishing speedsand seemingly defying the laws of physics.

Thats why, according to Rizwan Virk, an MIT graduate and founder of incubator Play Labs at MIT, it would be a huge mistake to not take these reports seriously going forward. In a recent opinion piece for NBC News, Virk argues that the profound lack of curiosity in UFOs resulted in a mess of taboos and biases amongst the ranks of academia.

To Virk, studying UFOs could potentially redefine all of science and lead to a new understanding of our place in the universe, and new advances in materials science, biology, quantum physics, cosmology and social sciences.

Is Virks a consensus view? Absolutely not. But his embrace of the concept does show that its a line of inquiry thats making inroads into traditionally buttoned-up institutions including MIT.

Rather than convincing people that UFOs do in fact exist, Virk is hoping to encourage academics and industry leaders to move beyond their biases into an open-minded investigation to figure out who or what created them, and how they work.

The rewards for those continuing the research into UFOs could pay off big, in Virks analysis.

In the long term, there could be multiple Nobel prizes, not to mention new laws of physics, for those who are willing to dive in and risk ridicule in the short term, he argued.

READ MORE: The U.S. military takes UFOs seriously. Why doesnt Silicon Valley or academia? [NBC News]

More on UFOs: This Theory Could Explain Many Military UFO Sightings

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MIT Researcher Says UFO Research Could Lead to New Laws of Physics - Futurism

Collins' C-130 brakes, which feature its proprietary DURACARB carbon heat sink material, can allow for 2,000 landings per overhaul compared to 250 landings per overhaul experienced by operators of the C-130's current system. That lifespan is eight times longer, significantly reducing maintenance time and cost. In addition, the brakes are capable of handling higher energy than the aircraft's existing equipment, which increases the safety margin when stopping heavily loaded C-130s.

The boltless wheels feature an innovative lock-ring design and higher fatigue life than the current C-130 system, also reducing maintenance times and costs for operators. Additionally, the combined wheel and brake assembly contains 17 percent fewer parts than the C-130's existing equipment, further simplifying maintenance and service.

"At Collins Aerospace, we're committed to keeping our warfighters safe while delivering the most efficient solutions to our customers to help keep their aircraft in the air. And that is exactly what our boltless wheels and carbon brakes will do for the U.S. Navy," said Ajay Mahajan, vice president, Landing Systems for Collins Aerospace.

Collins is a leading provider of wheels and brakes for military platforms, including the U.S. Air Force's F-15, F-16, C-5, C-130 and Global Hawk fleets. Recently, the company was selected by the U.S. Air Force to design and develop a new wheel and carbon brake for the B-52. Collins has also completed wheel and brake upgrades for several air forces around the globe. In total, the company provides wheels and brakes for more than half of all active C-130s worldwide.

About Collins Aerospace Collins Aerospace, a Raytheon Technologies Corp. (NYSE: RTX) business, is a leader in technologically advanced and intelligent solutions for the global aerospace and defense industry. Collins Aerospace has the extensive capabilities, comprehensive portfolio and broad expertise to solve customers' toughest challenges and to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving global market. For more information, visit CollinsAerospace.com.

About Raytheon TechnologiesRaytheon Technologies Corporation is an aerospace and defense company that provides advanced systems and services for commercial, military and government customers worldwide. With four industry-leading businesses Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon Intelligence & Space and Raytheon Missiles & Defense the company delivers solutions that push the boundaries in avionics, cybersecurity, directed energy, electric propulsion, hypersonics, and quantum physics. The company, formed in 2020 through the combination of Raytheon Company and the United Technologies Corporation aerospace businesses, is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts.

SOURCE Collins Aerospace

https://www.collinsaerospace.com

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Collins Aerospace upgrades US Navy C-130 fleet with long-lasting wheels and carbon brakes - PRNewswire