Dear Physics Community,

Academic Continuity Meeting

Advisories:

• Academic regulations – memo from Rick Danheiser

Town Hall – Tuesday, 4 pm, students, faculty, staff, Lincoln Labs, parents.  The last one had 7,000, this one will include parents.  Announcement here.

Using classrooms – the Administration is busy trying to figure out how to accommodate students back on campus in the Fall.  A fundamental question is how well we can fit students into our classrooms while avoiding crowds.  There was a very interesting presentation on the first thinking about this, slides here (32 MB, pray for bandwidth).  I was very happy to see the level of thought being put into this problem, one of many.

Physics Department

Uncle John – article in Washington Post today about John Trump, the President’s brother.  John Trump was a physicist and Course 6 professor who was rather distinguished.  He built a van de Graaf accelerator that still operates int he High Voltage Research Laboratory on the corner of Albany and Mass Ave.  Some of us used it for an experiment a couple of years ago.

Los Endos

Damnation – watch it.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Thank you for the nice notes wishing me well.  Every few months, I work, eat, and drink too much and crash.  It is a circuit breaker.

The weekend so no Academic Continuity Meeting

Physics Department

Kilogram – last Spring on International Metrology Day, Wolfgang gave a great talk about the new kilogram.  His article with Alan Jamison has just appeared in Physics Today here.

Planet 9 – used to be Pluto, but Pluto got demoted.  Now, there is some evidence based on analysis of the orbits of Kuiper Belt object, the notion of a Planet 9 object with a mass of 5-10 Earth masses had come up.  This paper by Witten proposes an almost-plausible trip to Planet 9 to have a look to see if Planet 9 is a primordial black hole.

Invasive species – ten years ago, it was Killer Bees from the south, now it’s Murder Hornets from Asia.  Good lord…

Los Endos

Serial – the Globe has started a serial of a novel, “The Mechanic”.  The first two chapters are in today’s Sunday Globe, here.  I’ve always enjoyed serials in newspapers and am looking forward to this one.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

The is nothing urgent to report.

I did not sleep well last night, woke up with a searing headache and have been dragging all day.  The next thing I can do is go to bed early.  Tomorrow will be better and I will send a more fulsome note then.

Peter

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.