Dear Physics Community,

The week has ended and I do not have much to say.  We are still going and that is something to be grateful for.

MIT Press – has made their books related to pandemic available online for free.

Wash or sanitize your hands frequently – how you dispense is up to you.

Special Tuesday Lunch Talk Series

• Tuesday April 14, 12pm noon, https://mit.zoom.us/j/632177654 BYOL
• Steven Silverberg — “Peter Pan” Disks: Long-lived Accretion Disks Around Young M Stars, and How Citizen Science Found Them
• Jinghui Liu “Vortices, space-time braids and loops in the membrane of a living cell”.

If you’d like to give one, contact Anna.

Physics Department

Majorana particles – Patrick and Jagadeesh found a new particle in gold – paper here. Majorana particles are their own anti-particles and are found as excitations in topological insulators.  Neutrinos might be a Majorana particle – I hope Lindley finds out for us.

MIT/EMS – MIT students (including Physics students) run the ambulance, a great thing. Most of the EMS crew left, but the remaining students convinced MIT to let them keep operating, so we are safe.  Thank you!  If our student who is involved wants to tell us about it, please send me an email.

UROP direct funding – Direct funding proposals for SUMMER UROP are due April 21.  Faculty: please apply for these.  Current UROP students: please encourage your faculty supervisor to apply for you to work during the summer.  Students who would like a UROP – fill out the form Cathy sent you NOW and we will direct you to faculty with compatible interests.  Faculty can also support UROPs from directly – if you have funds to a UROP, please apply for MIT direct funding to take another.

Summer forms for undergraduates – Cathy sent out a form for you to fill out about your summer plans and if you would like help in finding something this summer.  Please fill it out as soon as you can and the Department will try to find something for you.  No promises except that we will do out best.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Messaging – first part of the meeting was about how to message the admitted students our uncertainties about when and how MIT will ramp back up to “normal” level of research and teaching.  To soon to tell (\begin{rant} I think MIT is 10% too busy.  We operate full out, with no margin.  When something bad happens, we have no excess capacity to absorb a crisis – we just keep going.  My from all this is that we learn we need to build in margins and use the extra time for self-improvement and deep thought.\end{rate}).

Remote teaching – Krishna ask three instructors to talk about new ideas in remote teaching:

• Jacob White – showed a bag of parts that he put together for students to do cool experiments and data analysis in their homes.
• Gunther Roland – teaches 8.13/8.14 remotely with analysis of LHC and LIGO data and a couple of remotely operated experiments.
• Keeril Makan – talked about intro. to acting and intro to composition, with an example :

Restart – in another meeting, we had a discussion of how to restart MIT.  PIs should start thinking of how to ramp up labs.

Los Endos

Google Earth challenges are now on physics-mit.slack.com.  So far, I have not stumped everyone.  Look for daily posts.

Peter