Dear Physics Department,

School of Science meeting with the Senior Team Monday 11:30 am – 12:30 pm to discuss the options for re-opening in the Fall.  Details here.  Zoom: link.

Amazing – the City of Cambridge will close three streets to cars to allow social distancing.  Never thought I’d see this…

Academic Continuity Meeting

(Reported by Bolek)

The Baker Administration formed a committee to look into university re-open.  A summary of their report is in two parts, here and here.  MIT is following the suggested process for re-starting.

Maria Zuber on the phased ramp-up of research 1 2 3

Physics Department

Tex – we all know Donald Knuth created it, but do you know why? Thanks to Brodi.

Wash your hands – how health care workers in Boston keep from getting infected by SAR-CoV-2 (much…)

Los Endos

In a weird mood after a week of huge ups and downs, I re-read John McPhee’s 1987 article on the Mississippi, which was oddly calming.

Getting some rest, back Monday.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Thanks to Cam Fox at IS&T, my blog is now at fisherp.mit.edu.  Cam nicely cleaned up the mess I made with the update and moved me off of x.dailup to a place where there is plenty of space and the server is kept more current.  Thanks, Cam!

No Academic Continuity Meeting Today

Physics Department

Department Commencement – happened Tuesday.  Thanks to Emma for the great slide show and Cathy for making sure everyone made it.  You can see it here. 

Hooding – happened today.  Thanks to Syd and Cathy for a moving ceremony!  I’ll post a link when I get it.

Radioactive beams – Ronald Garcia Ruiz, a new MIT Assistant professor, do spectroscopy on radioisotopes to discern their nuclear properties.  Ronald is sheltering in Switzerland and just has a Nature paper on his work.  Story here.

ITER – means “The Way” in Latin, but stands for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.  ITER is a magnetic confinement fusion project in France designed to reach scientific break-even.  Construction is so complex that they decided not to stop because of COVID-19, the story here.  

Machine learning – is all around us.  Physicists played a role in their early development and now, according to this article, physicists are supposed to figure out how they work. I’ve used a machine learning algorithm for a long time and they can be quite useful, but I wonder if understanding how they work is really part of our writ.

Los Endos

Commencement is tomorrow, we had hooding today and celebrated our undergraduates last Tuesday.  The end of a long, hard term.  MIT came through okay, but there will many decisions to make in the coming months and work to do as we enter Fall.  This is the time of year when I slow down and change gears.  I sense that doing so will be harder this year, but I am going to do it anyway. 

I have complained to Deans, Presidents, Provosts, Chancellors, and many others about how much MIT asks us to do and MIT is objectively demanding.  I am learning, through help of the squad of experts paid to help me, that stopping this is up to me – the things MIT asks are all important and worthy of my time and effort, but I have to be much more careful about which I choose to do. I’ve taken 25 years to learn this and I’m telling whoever reads this for free right now – resist the fear of missing out and triage what you do to what you can manage.

Peter

Dear Physics Comunity,

No va – Falcon with Dragon didn’t go, rescheduled for Saturday, news here.

Academic Continuity Meeting

MIT Forward – a newsletter about planning for Fall very popular – 58% open rate, very few unsubscribes.

Yossi Sheffi – proposed a scheme from now on the have freshman year completely online, then they apply to MIT as sophomores.  Slides here.

Cindy Barnhardt – talked some more about 2+3, slides here.  Hard to tell – may be getting traction.  Followed by questions and discussion.

If you have comments or concerns about the Fall plans, see here.

Pulse survey – wants to know how you are doing in the COVID-19 era.

Physics Department

Baryons – are protons and other nuclear matter.  Cosmologists can compute how many there should be, but when astronomers count up the baryons in galaxies, they come up about a factor of two short.  I think recent observations concluded they were in warm interstellar gas.  Now radio astronomers have used Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) to measure the column density of electrons between the FRB at cosmological distances and confirm the result.  Story here and paper here.

Superspreading – recent work seems to indicate that SAR-CoV-2 is spread by a few highly contagious individuals rather than everyone with some average R value.  I’m still digesting.  Story from Science here and original Nature article here.

Los Endos

Rejections – good article from Science on handling “noes” in your career.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Well, the WordPress update did not go well.  I was running WP3.7 and I updated to WP 5.4.1.  The auto-update did not work, so I went manual. All went well, but when I loaded my new home page, I got a message saying the PHP package was too old for WP 5.4.1, which is probably why the auto-update did not work.  I have all this on Athena and they do not have a PHP update anytime soon, so I tried to back up to WP 5.1.5.  No dice: permissions problem.  Futzed for an hour before contacting the help desk and a nice person there is working to recover everything and move to a new hosting space.  Until then, I may have lost everything and I am stuck with a feeble font I will have to read a raft of documentation to learn how to change.

Future of the Message – These messages started on March 14 during a time clear communication with the Physic Community was essential.  Since then, I have prioritized the factual information related to the cataclysm we have been living in.  With time, I added other news, mainly to remind everyone that we are bound by science with a long history and one that is going through important changes in its climate and accessibility.  The intent was always to inform.

We have adapted, or at least survived and MIT now has MIT Forward a newsletter devoted to MIT’s path back to campus.  Decision making has slowed down, Commencement is Friday, and summer is here.  It is time for the message to evolve.

Starting the week of June 1, the message will go to once a week on Thursday. The message will still emphasize reporting but will continue to have some physics news and links as things happen and occasional reporting on things like marble racing.  With time, I will stop using the community mailing list and move to a mailing list of people that opt in.

Thank you for reading and the friendly notes!

No Academic Continuity Meeting today

Physics Department

Seminars – some bright spark has put together a worldwide list of online seminars sorted by field, time, etc. here for all of us.  I don’t have time to do anything but sit in zoom meetings, but maybe you do…

Shaving – Neil Clader (a.k.a. Spike Kalashnikov) has a new post on his blog The Quiet Ripple Defines the Pond mostly about shaving, bird, and food, but at the end is a picture of his check for $1,200 from Pres. Trump that came with a letter from The Donald.  Neil last lived in SF and was unemployed there (i.e. retired) before moving to Okinawa as Vice President of Communications for the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.  he has since retired for a second time.

Is it something? – The LHCb collaboration at CERN had observed unusual decays of the second heaviest quark, the b quark.  A Quanta story is here and the paper is here.

Los Endos

GLX – it is really Los Endos for the Lechmere T Station.  After 98 years of service, the quirky, ramshackle station will close and a new station will open across the MacGrath.   Lechmere was really wonderful: it was at the end of the line and trains would come across the viaduct, down into the station with a turnaround, here and here. The station had two concentric turn-around loops and four storage spurs.  There was a bus station at the arrival platform.

Peter

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

Dear Physics Community,

Note: there will not be community messages over the three day weekend.  I will be using the time to fix the website.

What a week!  All kinds of things happened.  Some real grinding.  I’ve heard from Cathy that she and her team got all the grades from instructors today, so thanks for the attention.

Advisories

• Please nominate a worthy colleague for the Dresselhaus lectureship
• Guidance on remote student appointments for Summer and Fall

Academic Continuity Meeting

Owing to a Lightning Restart meeting, I missed the 8 am Academic Continuity Meeting for the first time.  Rob Simcoe attended.

Cecilia – report on testing

David K – is everywhere, including leading an ethics panel on the restart.  Slides here.

Physics Department

Quantum radar – if you have time, learn about it, it is an amazing feature of entanglement.  Story here, paper here.

Mathematicians – may be out of a job – AI-driven programs now do integrals and may prove theorems.  Great Quanta article here.

Los Endos

GLX – Lechmere station closes for a year.  This is worth paying attention to.

Peter

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

Dear Physics Community,

Please note: I am having a problem with Athena (!) uploading files, so I have linked to articles that I would normally upload.  They may be behind paywalls and I apologize if they are.  I will refresh and upgrade WordPress over the weekend.

Announcements

• Community input to what happens in the Fall term plans is here.  Please participate if you can.
• Letter from Cindy about graduate students returning to campus.  Please note: graduate students who applied to live on campus will be receiving a separate communication this evening with the results of the housing lottery process. If they receive an assignment, they will participate in a phased move-in process in August. If they do not receive a housing assignment, they will be informed about the waitlist process for securing on-campus housing as well as resources to assist with off-campus housing searches.
• Letter on appointments for graduate students in foreign countries and not able to return to campus.
• Research Town Hall, Friday, 1 pm

No academic continuity meeting today

Physics Department

Clocks – new optically coupled atomic clock has frequency stability of 10^-18 s.  In the Earth’s gravitational field, that is equivalent to moving the clock by 1 cm.

NASA’s return to human flight – May 27 will see the first launch of SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying a crew to the ISS.  Story here.  I will opine: the early twentieth century was the dawn of aviation.  The federal government had a role through the Smithsonian and the War Department (now called the Department of Defense), but progress was really driven by private companies.  Progress was fast but lots of people got killed in test flights.

Langley – Samuel Langley as a physicist and astronomer before going into aviation.  At the Allegheny Observatory in the 1860s, he worked on establishing time zones and established a commercial time service.  Later, he developed the bolometer for measuring the intensity of IR radiation.

Los Endos

Trying to get sound files working…

Anthem for the times: here

Or an embedded player:

Let me know which works for you.

Peter

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

Dear Physics Community,

This just in – re-start process letter from Maria

Listening to your gut – the human gut biome has become the object of intense study in the last five years.  In the gut, there is about 1.5 kg of living bacteria, virus, and other living stuff that protects our body in many complex ways.  These are creatures living inside us, not human cells.  Now there is more in-depth evidence that the gut biome signals the brain, and the two communicate in complex ways.

No Academic Continuity Meeting today

Physics Department

Quantum radar anyone? – PMTs and APDs can detect single visible and IR photons, but microwaves have much lower energy, and single microwave photon with high efficiency and little background has remained elusive.  Single microwave photon detection using two coupled two-level systems has just been achieved, here.

Katherine Johnson – for “Hidden Figures” fame passed away.  Obit here.  At Johnson Space Center, there was a display about her first calculation of the flight to the moon and back done by hand and slide-rule.

Los Endos

Dating – the venerable C-14 method is up for a refresh.

Peter

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

Dear Physics Community,

The Harvard Business Review is more useful than you might think.  Over the weekend, I read an article on “Leading through Anxiety” and realized I have a pretty bad case.  Anxiety does not feel bad for me – it is more this bad thing that is there.  I decided to slow everything down through June – a good time since the Department needs to concentrate on basics – getting grades in, make sure our graduates get on degree lists, getting various things to the Dean, etc.  With finals over for many of you and research s-l-o-w-l-y restarting, this is a good time to give yourself a checkup from the neck up.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Fall – Pres. Reif outlined in his letter last week the engagement process for input to the decision of how to return to campus next Fall.  A more detailed letter should come out tomorrow or the next day.  Whatever you think, please make your voice heard.

Much of the meeting was a meandering discussion of the Fall restart options.

Physics Department

Italian – Paola Rebusco was featured in the WaPo’s “Distance learning isn’t just for kids: 12 online classes to nurture the mind, body, and soul” for her class “Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full”, here.  Italian language, culture, and diet.  What could be better?

Office hours on hiatus – in keeping with making some whitespace on the calendar, our weekly student office hours will take a hiatus and resume first week in June.

Community lunches – ditto above for weekly lunches.  If there is anyone who would like to help organize, please let me know. “helping” consists of making suggestions of people or topics and perhaps hosting.

GlueX – Mike Williams built a cool detector for the GlueX experiment at JLab with parts of an old detector from SLAC.  Story here.

Los Endos

What we need to do – Arup Chakraborty and John Gruber have an Op-Ed in Newsweek about what we need to do.

Peter

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

Dear Physics Community,

I hope this will be a quiet weekend on the MIT front, so I will not write messages Saturday or Sunday unless something happens that warrants doing so.

The nature of some sciences leads to fieldwork that can be isolating.  Here is advice and comments from five scientists who have to cope with isolation when conducting their research.

Advisories

• Letter from Pres. Reif

Academic Continuity Meeting

This morning’s meeting was primarily taken up with a discussion of the five scenarios for Fall.  The questions mainly dealt with technicalities, and the big picture will fill in the community engagement that starts next week.  Please participate.

Physics Department

Anyons – good article in Quanta about their recent discovery

More Wilczek – Frank’s obit for Freeman Dyson in Science.  Reading this, I learned that Dyson was also responsible for the proof of the stability of matter, here. Showing that a system of point particles can be stable is a significant result, and I am surprised I never knew about it.

Los Endos

David Brooks frequently has something good to say so that I will leave it with that.

Peter

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