Dear Physics Community,

EMTs – MIT has a student-run Emergency Medical Service (EMS).  When the pandemic hit, eight students, including Physics graduate student Elena Allen, volunteered to stay and serve.  The EMS handle non-COIVD-19 emergencies, which do continue.  I am very grateful for their service.

Academic Continuity Meeting

End of term – the registrar Mary Callahan talked about end of term dates and regulations.  Slides here.  The main thing: instructors, please submit grades on time or early.  With commencement moved earlier, there is very little time between grade submission and commencement and it is hard on the staff.

Physics Department

Repost of Hong Liu’s paper mentioned earlier this week.

SRI internships – Jesse Wodin, an MIT alum who is a group leader at SRI, has an internship opportunity here.  Please have a look, it looks pretty good.

Summer opportunities are here.

Massive black holes – LIGO detection of 30 solar mass black holes was a surprise – theorists did not think black holes of that mass would be common.  A while ago, astronomers in China published a paper with the observation of a 70 solar mass black hole using the wobble of a companion star to measure the black hole mass. A Belgian group os astronomers disagreed, claimed the light used to measure the wobble was distorted by the binary system.  The first group has looked into the criticism and claims their method is correct but the black hole mass is now 23-65 solar masses.  Both groups agree more data is needed.

Los Endos

 This site tracker hate crimes against Asians blamed for COVID-19.  I don’t have words for how I feel about this. Thanks to Sandi Miller for sending this.

Peter

P.S. I am posting these messages in my blog roll here. Thanks to Physics Council, Cathy Modica, Vicky Metternich, and Christina Andujar for input and comments on these messages.