Free Books by Einstein on Kindle and a Request by "The Big Bang Theory"

I will get back to answering reader questions with my next post, but I wanted to mention some other things...

Free Books by Einstein on Kindle

I love to read (preferably books with vampires or other creatures that go bump in the night) and my Kindle has become something I am rarely far away from.  I am also frugal so I like to browse pages that list free or reduced cost ebooks (my favorite is eReaderIQ).  Today, I noticed that there are a number of books by Einstein that are free (if you don't have a Kindle, you can still download these books and read them on the Kindle app for your computer/smart phone):

• The Theory of Relativity: and Other Essays
• Essays in Science
• The World As I See It
• Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words
• Sidelights on Relativity
• Essays in Humanism
• Letters on Wave Mechanics: Correspondence with H. A. Lorentz, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrodinger
• Letters to Solovine: 1906-1955 

I've only read all of "Out of My Later Years" but I have also read bits and pieces of most of the other titles.  I've always been impressed by Einstein's thoughts on a wide range of topics like religion and politics, even when I didn't agree with him.  I hope that you check these out to get a unique view of who Einstein was.

A Request by "The Big Bang Theory"

I recently received an email letting me know that the producers of "The Big Bang Theory" requested permission to use the "Gravitational Waves" poster I worked on with the APS.  The request went to the APS (as the publisher), they granted it, and forwarded the legal paperwork through channels to me.  By and large, the release is what you would expect but regarding how, when, and where the producers can use the poster it states:

"in any and all media whether now known or hereafter devised, in perpetuity, throughout the universe by Producer or its assignee."

"... Throughout the universe ..."  I suppose it makes sense to cover all your bases these days.  Evolving technology has made the wording of copyright notices ever more complicated and this kind of generalization seems to take care of that.  That's great, but I am not sure that the Earth laws this release is tailored to will hold up in Martian court :)

So, take a close look at the backgrounds on this season's "Big Bang Theory" and look for the "Gravitational Waves" poster.  It will be quite a thrill to see something that I worked on glimpsed on television and my favorite show to boot!

 

Using Astronomy to Teach Physics Workshop and AAPT Summer Meeting

I've just returned from a week long trip to Nebraska for 2 conferences, one in Lincoln and the other in Omaha.

Using Astronomy to Teach Physics Workshop:

The Lincoln trip was for a special workshop on Using Astronomy to Teach Physics (UATP).  The goal of this workshop is to bring educators in physics and astronomy together, share the information on the state-of-the-art science projects in their fields and then breakout into small groups to identify ways to bring this frontier science into the undergraduate physics curriculum.  I put together a professional poster (see my post on the different types of posters for more information on scientific posters) on the educational work done in the Science Education Center (SEC) at LIGO, both locally and nationally as part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration's Education and Public Outreach (EPO) group [this group has just announced its partnership with the 2012 US Science & Engineering Festival].  (I will put a link to this post as soon as it becomes publicly viewable.) While I was making this poster, I found pictures of all of the SEC staff and myself engaging students and the public in some way.  For my picture, I found one that I adore (which is shocking since I hate nearly all pictures of myself) that shows me talking to school students while giving a tour of the LIGO control room:

I found this workshop particularly interesting for 2 reasons: 1) there were talks on the different frontier astronomy projects to make sure everyone in attendance at least had a working knowledge of what the state-of-the-art is and 2) there were breakout sessions where groups who were interested in similar goals met to discuss actionable ways to incorporate the new astronomy into the undergraduate physics curriculum.  My big project that I am now working on as a direct consequence of this is a document I intend to publish in the American Journal of Physics on connections between the basic physics concepts taught in the undergraduate physics courses and the technology that makes LIGO possible.  For example:

LIGO is looking for gravitational waves that will change the length of its 4 km arms less than 1/1000th the diameter of a proton (that's 0.000000000000000001 meters).  At this length scale, one must consider the effects of quantum mechanics.  So, here's the issue: the thermal vibration of the atoms in the mirrors used in LIGO is going to be much bigger than the "big" gravitational wave cited above.  How can LIGO possibly hope ever detect gravitational waves distinctly from this thermal mirror vibration?  (The 'no math' answer is at the end of this post.)  

After publication of this document, I am thinking about approaching LIGO's EPO group to propose that we create a web site to support this kind of effort.  Basically, I would like to take the document apart and use it to make a skeleton for the web site.  Then, any time a LIGO member has a homework question, activity, etc. that they use in their classroom, they can contribute that content to the site so that anyone who is interested can also use that content.

AAPT Summer Meeting:

After 3 days in Lincoln, I then went to the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) Summer Meeting in Omaha.  There I got to make new friends in the Physics Instructional Resource Association (PIRA) and we did something together just about every night (which, if you know me, is remarkable since I am the type to hole up in my hotel room during down time).  I also co-presented an invited talk on LIGO outreach using demonstrations with my colleague Kathy Holt.  Demonstrations are really at the core of the outreach we so since we do demonstrations with teachers and give them the tools they need to take those demonstrations back to their classrooms, we do demonstrations during public open houses and there is often a demonstration or two when we work with student field trips.  It was great doing this talk with Kathy since the combination of our backgrounds (she was a teacher before working at LIGO) give different and useful perspectives on what we do in the SEC.

Then, besides going to other talks, I also had some academic service obligations.  I believe that I have mentioned that I am on the APS Forum on Education (FEd) Executive Committee.  Even though the AAPT is not affiliated with the APS, they work together closely since they both serve physicists but with different focus.  Because of this, the AAPT Executive Board meets with the APS FEd Exec. Comm. to coordinate efforts and we had a good lunch meeting this year.  I am also on the AAPT Committee on Graduate Education in Physics and this committee also met to make plan for the upcoming AAPT Meetings and to discuss the broader impact activities we are undertaking.

In past blog posts, I have included pictures of the city I happened to travel to as seen from my hotel window (see Long Beach, Milwaukee, Anaheim).  The view out of my window was a horrible view of a parking lot and another hotel.  Fortunately, the view from my colleague's room was much better (she got a room in the main hotel for the conference and I didn't since I waited too long to make my reservations).  So, here is the view of Omaha from the window:

OH!  One more thing...  When I was flying from Omaha (whose airport in actually in Iowa), the north terminal of airport of evacuated for a "suspicious package".  Luckily for me, I was flying out of the south terminal.  Once I got home, I found out that the hours long closing was due to someone's physics classroom apparatus that got TSA's panties in a bunch (it went through security as a carry-on).  I suppose it's good that they were awake enough to think something suspicious but what concerns me is that it is almost a certainty that the same thing was carried on the plane to get to the meeting at all.  I guess it wasn't as threatening then :) 

Answer to the quantum mechanics question posed above (highlight text below to uncover the answer):

The thermal vibration of the mirror's atoms would indeed make it impossible to measure a gravitational wave only if the laser was so well focused as to only shine on the area of a few of the mirror's surface atoms.  Fortunately, that is not the case in LIGO!  The beam spot on the mirror is about 10 cm (4 inches) in diameter.  In that area, there are MANY surface atoms that are vibrating.  By observing this large area, LIGO effectively averages over the vibration of all of the atoms that the light falls on yielding a zero net motion.  Thus, LIGO works just fine!

Academic Genealogy

I think that I have mentioned in other posts in this blog that one of my hobbies is genealogy.  I am planning to write more on my family history someday (it's always fun to find a great-grandfather in the state penitentiary when doing a census search) but I wanted to talk a little today about my academic genealogy. 

When earning an graduate degree in an academic field, one normally had an advisor that mentors the students in their research.  So, you can trace back through time who your advisor's advisor was and so on.  Normally, a modern student has only one advisor unless their research is interdisciplinary or other reasons.  Therefore, unlike a normal family tree where each child has a mother and a father, an academic genealogy doesn't branch as much.

I have done some research in the past on my academic genealogy.  My doctoral advisor was Lee Samuel Finn at Penn State and his advisor was Kip Thorne at Caltech.  On my own, I was able to trace my academic genealogy back about 10 'generations'.

Recently, I found the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP).  This work by North Dakota State University tracks the academic genealogy of mathematicians both their 'ancestors' and their 'descendants'.  Lucky for me, physics is closely related to mathematics (after all, Newton did pioneer calculus in order to do his physics) and my immediate academic family is documented in the MGP.  I found my advisor and started moving back through my ancestors.  It was amazing going back in time like this!  My academic genealogy goes back through 7 centuries to the High Middle Ages (essentially the founding of universities in Europe) and spans the fields of physics, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, biology, medicine, philosophy and theology.  Before my academic great-grandfather all my 'ancestors' were educated in Europe, mostly in Germany, Austria, France and Italy.  And while this is not at all surprising, I am the only female in the tree (if you click on the poster sized image below, it will be a 6 MB JPEG; you can view the < 1 MB PDF here):

Warning: Clicking on this image will load a 6 MB JPEG.  Click here for the < 1 MB PDF.

You can also view my page on the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

Some of my academic ancestors of note (just the historically significant names I am familiar with):

• Nicolas Copernicus - known for heliocentrism (a system where the Sun is the center of the solar system) which was in opposition the accepted geocentrism (a system where the Earth is stationary and the center of the Universe).
• Christiaan Huygens - known as the first theoretical physicist, Huygens is also known for explaining Saturn's rings, wave theory and centrifugal force, among other things.
• Jacob Bernoulli - known for discovering the mathematical constant e (2.71828...) among other mathematical contributions.
• Johann Bernoulli - known for his development of infinitesimal calculus and other mathematical contributions
• Leonhard Euler - mathematician and physicist who made contributions to many sub-fields including mathematical notation (e.g. using the Greek capital sigma as notation for summation), graphing and astronomy.
• Joseph-Louis Lagrange - known for development of the calculus of variations and Lagrangian mechanics among other things.
• Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier - known for the series approximation for discontinuous functions and related transformation that are both named after him, he also was the first to discover the greenhouse effect.
• Siméon Denis Poisson - known for the Poisson distribution which described the probability of a regular event that has no memory (dependency) on the events that happened before the present, among many other contributions to mathematics and physics.
• Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet - mathematician credited with the modern formal definition of a function.
• Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert - known for his contributions to fluid mechanics and testing for the convergence of a series, among other things.
• Pierre-Simon Laplace - known for work in celestial mechanics (especially work concerning the stability of the orbits in the solar system), the dependence of the speed of sound on temperature, and was also the first to expound upon an object similar to a black hole, among many other things.

So, what does this illustrious heritage say about me?  NOTHING!  Even if you are mentored by the best, it is ultimately up to you to establish and prove yourself.  However, it is humbling to have any connection not only to history but to the science that I've been using for many years.

If you are interested in learning more about academic genealogies and why they are documented in the article "A Trace of Greatness" from the Times Higher Education (6 May 2010).

Weekend at the APS April Meeting

The APS April Meeting started in full swing on Saturday 30 April.  The meeting is composed of many (~12 or so) parallel sessions during the day (form 8:30 am to 5 pm).  These sessions are composed of invited talk (about 30 minutes each) and contributed talks (about 12 minutes each).  In the evenings, there is usually a feature presentation and on Saturday night was on of the best ones I've been to.  This event was titled "The Physics of Hollywood" with panelists Bill Prady (executive producer and co-creator of "The Big Bang Theory"), Bruce Miller (executive producer of "Eureka") and John de Lancie (the character "Q" from "Star Trek: The Next Generation").  Junnifer Ouellette (author of "The Physics of the Buffyverse" was the moderator.  The picture below is from the back of the room when they were showing a clip from "The Big Bang Theory":

The panel at the front is hard to see here, so here is a zoom:

The people seated by the screen are (from right to left): Ouellette, Prady, Miller and de Lancie.  It was great!  They even answered one of the questions I have wondered about for a while:  Exactly what positions do these characters hold at the university?  They are clearly not grad students but they don't seem to be faculty members either.  Well, it turns out they are just like me...  They are postdocs!

I also had another "in the wild" sighting of the "Gravitational Waves" poster I worked on with the APS.  The picture below is the poster as it was distributed on the APS outreach table:

 

After another full day of listening to talks (I primarily go to sessions focused on gravity or education, unless there is something I don't specialize in that seems especially appealing) on Sunday, I had the Executive Committee Meeting of the Forum on Education (I serve on the Committee as an APS-AAPT Member-at-Large).  The FEd is just one of many units that members of the APS can join that address their special interest and their executive committees are the way these units are governed.  (Perhaps I should write a blog post detailing the governance structure of the APS - but perhaps that is more bureaucracy than anyone is really interested in...)  I may be very early in my career, but I have always felt welcomed by these physicists who are much more distinguished than myself.  So, I love going to these meetings (we only have one face-to-face meeting a year) and I get fed too!

That pretty much sums up my weekend at the APS April Meeting!  There are 2 more days left and I speak on the last day (Tuesday).  I am in the final stages of getting my talk approved by the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations since my talk is on their behalf.  I will write more about this process, how the talk went and about a few other things I got to do while at the meeting.

April APS Executive Board & Council Meetings

I've arrived at the site of the APS April Meeting after a few delays in my flights (the storms in the south and mid-west on the 27th required flight plan changes and congestion at airports).  As long as I make my connections (which I did since I had a 3.5 hour layover), I don't mind since I have a Kindle full of books (vampire books are my guilty pleasure).  However, I did land over an hour late at the Orange County Airport and after taking the SuperShuttle, I arrived at the hotel over a half an hour into the Executive Board dinner.  I was disappointed since the food is usually wonderful and the conversation even better but it wasn't horrible to jump into the shower and get to bed early.

The Executive Board Meeting started at 8:30 am on the 28th.  Like the last Board Meeting, strategic planning for the future years of the Society took up more than half of the day.  This planning is led by a facilitator to focus our discussions on a topic and organize the brainstorming conversation that results.  The experience has been a fulfilling one since I had a few ideas develop in the process and feel that they may become a reality in the future.  It feels good not only to have your ideas valued, but to feel like you are making a lasting impact on something.

Today is the Council Meeting.  Since I am writing this during this meeting, I don't have much to share so far.  However, the schedule for today is very similar to the meeting I described last November.  I did take a short walk to the back of the room and I thought you might be interested in what a meeting of the Council looks like:

Here, we are discussing the budget for 2012 and comparing it with the actual income and expenses for different activities (like publishing journals and professional meetings) of the society in past years.

As far as the April Meeting is concerned, over the last two days preparations for this have become apparent.  Registration booths have gone up outside of the hotel lobby, and display boards for research posters are up (see this post about what professional conference posters are like).  There are also more physicists milling about.  I find it interesting that I can identify other physicists but I'm not exactly sure what it is about a person that indicates that they are like me...  Is it they way they carry themselves?  Or is it they way they dress?  Or is it that these are the people who don't look like they are planning a day of fun at Disneyland (just up the road)?  By tomorrow, it will be very easy to tell since all of us will have name tags!

Well, it is almost break time in the Council Meeting...  I write more soon.  Have a great weekend!

On Science Posters, Three Ways...

In my last post, I mentioned that I presented a poster at a recent physics workshop.  Today, I want to tell you more about the role that posters play in science.

I believe pretty much everyone is familiar with a poster.  Most people have had one hanging in their bedroom, office, etc. at some point in their life.  Posters are used to communicate in some way, be it a motto, a feeling, etc.  In science, posters are used to educate and I feature three levels of this education here.

THE BASIC INTRIGUING POSTER

PhysicsQuest Poster

This poster is meant to get the audience thinking about the world around them and the matter that they are made up of.  The audience is broad, but this particular poster is geared to get elementary and secondary students excited about science (thereby learning the answer to this teaser - which you can do by clicking on the link below the poster).  Note that this poster is mostly composed of graphics with minimal text.  The audience is hooked quickly.

THE EDUCATION POSTER

APS Education Posters

Yes, I am not beyond shameless self-promotion!  You have seen this poster before in a previous post.  I worked with the APS to create this poster that discusses what gravitational waves are, where they come from, how we plan on detecting them and why we are interested in them.  The audience for this poster is mostly high school and college students as well as anyone who is interested enough to read through the poster.  That is a hallmark difference between this poster and the basic intriguing poster - the amount of text (which will only get worse with the professional poster).  There are eye-catching graphics on this poster, but that is not the focal point.  This poster is also delineated into clear topical sections (where there was only a single message in the basic poster).  These delineations are made clear with the use of white space, background color and text grouping. 

THE PROFESSIONAL CONFERENCE POSTER

Poster in the LIGO Document Control Center

This poster is the most intensive of the three I talk about here.  When a scientist takes a poster to a conference, the poster is meant to present their research for them in place of them giving a talk.  Most meetings will have poster sessions where the attendees roam around a room displaying posters and discuss the work with the author that is usually standing nearby.  Posters can also stand for themselves during coffee breaks and other social times during the meeting.

Note that the text on the professional poster is the feature.  Graphics are also important, since they can often communicate complex concepts more efficiently than words, but these are used in support of the text.  If they are eye-catching, all the better!  The audience for these posters is obviously other professionals, but there can still be a broad range there.  For example, a poster I prepare to present at a LIGO centered conference can safely assume that the audience is familiar with the basics of the science and familiar with our jargon.  But at meeting where there are scientists from different fields, even different fields in physics, care needs to be made to make sure that jargon isn't used (which is difficult to do when you are so used to using these specialized terms).  Also, since there is so much being communicated, these posters can become quite large in size - I have one hanging in my office right now that is 3 feet by 4 feet!

SUMMARY

What poster a scientist creates depends on the goal of the poster.  The more general the audience, the less text, more graphics and judicious use of white space is needed.  The more professional, the narrower the audience and text becomes more important.  In the end, what is really important is to consider the motivation of the audience - the more they know about the subject being presented, the longer they will be willing to stand in front of it and read it!