Dear Physics Community,

Sign here – behind John Hancock’s crazy signature.

Announcements

• Commencement – news is here
• Grading memo for this Spring here – Message to instructors – please get your grades in on time.
• UROP proposals for direct funding are due May 7, Thursday
• Office hours for graduate students with Peter, Nergis, Emma, and Syd tomorrow at 3 pm (an hour earlier because of a conflict at 4 pm).  Question, “What do you expect from your research advisor?” Zoom: mit.zoom.us/my/peter.h.fisher

Physics Department

Time – from Quanta, a timeline of time with biology, physics, and timekeeping.

Pion decay – the decay of the neutral pion to two gamma rays was a favorite topic of Aron Bernstein’s, whom we lost last year.  The Primex II experiment at Jefferson Lab, with Stanley,  has made the most precise measurement of the 1e-16 s lifetime and there is a small disagreement with theory.  This is important because the theory is simple and pretty well understood. The story is here and paper is here.

Los Endos

Sar-Cov-2 – Nature has a good article on the virus and how it works here.

The microMort – your government in action.  A microMort is worth $9.80.

Peter

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.

Dear Physics Community,

I’d like to thank everyone who showed up for the lunch discussion today.  These are the slides I showed and I would be happy to hear further thoughts from anyone, especially students and staff.  Please send me your thoughts. We will share our response to the Vice-Chancellor in some form next week.

I sent Ian Waitz and Mark DiVencenzo an email earlier this week asking how much trouble I would get in if I created a list of matches between students on campus with people in Physics who need child care.  One thing led to another and I learned that MIT actually has a benefit for students, faculty, and staff for up to 30 days of subsidized babysitting.  MIT also has an affiliation with care.com that provides matching to local babysitting and coaching for homeschooling etc.  All this is managed through the Center for Work, Life, and Well Being.  I’ve been in touch with people there and if you need help with these things, please let me know and I will connect you.

Physics Department

The woodwork squeaks – and out come the freaks.  Pseudoscience in the COVID-19 era.

Entanglement – David gave a great colloquium today.  It reminded me of how great the original papers in this field were: EPR, Bell, and Aspect. If you want to work through the problem, here is a problem from Eugene Comins 221A Quantum Mechanics Course.

Los Endos

When you feel you need a break, have a look at Dark Roasted Blend.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Nature has a great graphic about the race for a SAR-Cov-2 vaccine here.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Advisories

• No more cutting across the field
• Fine for not wearing your mask, $300, includes inside public (including MIT) buildings. You can get a mask in Lobby 7.

Events

• Second Town Hall 4 pm Tuesday – announcement here
• Ragon Institute Webinar, on Anit-body testing and reopening. Friday, 10 am but will be recorded. The last one was excellent

Some glimmer of good news for international students: David Elwell reported that students had been given appointments for via interviews in mid-late June, including in China.  The earliest dates before were in November.

Physics Department

In planning for the Fall, the Vice Chancellor has asked the Department to write 1-2 paragraph plan here for each of the four or five scenarios spelled out in these slides.  On Thursday at lunch, I would like to collect your thoughts on how we should respond to each.  

 We will certainly like some of the scenarios more than others (and we should say so) but we must respond to all of them as we really do not know what will happen.  I invite all of your to respond from your own perspective as an instructor who will organize and give the course, a student who will learn the material, and a staff member who will administer all the logistics to get the courses going.

 No decisions have been made about the Fall and the work we do in this document may very well inform those decisions when they are made.

AMO dark matter searches – Vladan’s group used the isotope shift in Yb+ to look for new bosons in the 1-100 MeV mass range, same range as accelerator experiments.

Squeezing – a major effort in our LIGO group in the past couple of years is to use squeezed light to improve LIGO’s sensitivity and increase LIGO’s range.  New paper on their and Japanese here.

Los Endos

Openings? –  Harvard letter from the Provost, and NASCAR in Charlotte May 24, 27.

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.

Dear Physics Community,

How to do it – containment of a COVID-19 outbreak in a South Korean call center.

Announcements

• Pre-registration this year.
• Undergraduate office hours Wednesday 4-5 pm, on zoom, “What do you expect from your academic advisor?”

Physics Department

A hundred years ago – the Great Debate about whether the Milky Way was the whole universe and the “nebulae” were gas clouds inside it or the nebulae were really outside the Milky way and are “island universes” that we now call galaxies.

Rai and LIGO – last year, Mike Sipser, Dean of Science, produced a series of short videos about science at MIT.  This one features Rai Weiss, talking about how he came to LIGO. Nergis, Scott, and Matt all make appearances. Music from Sate, very classy.

Los Endos

Several people wrote asking if the US had something like the Russian Losharik spy sub.  Adm. Rickover, as a personal project, built NR-1, which even had wheels so it could drive around on the bottom.  If you are really interested, there is a book, “Dark Waters” written by a former crew member.

Dear Physics Community,

Done bingeing? – “Homeland” ended last night (but I have not watched it yet), “Better Call Saul” is done, and you’ve binged, “Ozark”, “Billions”, “The Good Place”, “Wolf Hall” and just cannot get in to “Dispatches from Elsewhere”, and when is “Lodge 49” coming back?  Try this opera!  Courtesy of Hale Bradt.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Articles related to re-starts at other colleges:

• Chronicle article (College plans for fall):
• Brown University

New working group: Academic Policy and Regulation Team – faculty, officers, CUP, CAP, COC chairs+ others to work out academic regulations.  Replaces EARS team that worked out P/NR during the shutdown.  Several things under consideration:

• Pre-registration – normally Friday, delayed until mid-June, most probably
• Grad. admissions yield – unchanged at the school level, except Sloan which was down a little.
• Graduate deferrals – handled at Department or program level.
• Subject evaluation – most likely two parts: experience survey (similar to Quality of life survey) and subject-specific with open-ended questions.  Instructors will not be evaluated and this term’s evaluations will not be used in tenure decisions.

Our input on Fall restart teaching scenarios is coming…

Physics Department

Hubble crisis update – In the Fall, Adam Reese gave a colloquium about measuring the Hubble constant locally and at cosmological distances and getting results that differed well outside of errors.  A new Quanta article talks about theoretical work to explain how this might happen. I’m putting my money on a new measurement of the Hubble constant that LIGO will make in the coming years.  Scott Hughes invented the method with others and wrote a Physics Today article about it.  The paper is here.  Stay tuned.

Aerosols – an aerosol consists of droplets or particles that are small enough so that they do not fall and can remain suspends for hours in are, circulating with the local airflow.  This article gives data on airborne SAR-COV-2 measured in China.  Makes me think we should be requiring fluid dynamics.

Los Endos

Too cool! – the Shelter in Place Gallery

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Things to look at:

• Brain pickings
• From Pioneer Works run by Janna Levin.  Jana worked with Alan Guth while at MIT, I think, and then got into the Pioneer Works.  Everything she does is interesting and The Broadcast is no exception. She also wrote a book about LIGO, “Black Hole Blues”.

Advisories

Advisory about summer programs from Rafael

Physics Department

Contact tracing – Gov. Baker started, going old school by using people and phones.  Eventually, we’ll probably use our phones in some clever way, but right now, I’m betting on a phone tree.

HEPA filters – I’m starting to think about the air quality problem in closed rooms.  Aerosols hang around for tens of minutes and are not well controlled by masks.  The temptation is to open the windows, crank up the airflow and just get the stuff out, but turbulent flow around objects can cause aerosols to collect.  Not surprisingly, the pros have thought about how to do this, so I am going to digest this report before making a further nuisance of myself.

Los Endos

Repost – Nergis sent this last week, but I posted it with a bad link.

Peter

Peter