Dear Physics Community,

In the midst of all this mess, we still have to navigate international waters.  H.R. McMaster has a very interesting piece on US-China relations here.

Physics Department

What happens when you get behind on your reading – I try to follow what people in Physics are doing, but this week was just hard.  Catching up, I found this paper from Hong Liu relating condensed matter physics, gravity, many-body physics, and string theory.  I really recommend this nice, non-technical review.

Census – one of the most interesting things going on right now is the US Census.  The Constitution says there has to be a census every ten years and Congress says it has to be a count, not a sampling, and it has to protect citizens’ privacy.  The Census determines the allocation of congressional seats and the number of votes in the Electoral College, which we learned in the last presidential election is important. There is cool math used to ensure privacy.

Los Endos

This from Bob Jaffe.

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,

Today the Globe reported that the Ragon Institute would go back into full operation, as an experiment, in the next couple of weeks.  Terry Ragon, who endowed the Institute, chairs the Physics Visiting Committee and is a great friend of our Department.  The Ragon Institute also works on antibody testing for COVID-19 and there was a Ragon Institute Webinar last week about their work, which was quite good

Academic Continuity Meeting

MIT Medical – is expanding its testing capabilities.  Cecilia reported the tent outside of MIT Medical will be replaced this weekend by a trailer to allow testing in a better environment and with more technicians. Self-reporting – if you or someone you know might have COVID-19 please contact covid19reports@mit.edu right away.  They can connect you with resources, testing, and MIT Medical

Fall term – remains a hot topic with a new option: half the student population on campus for half of the Fall term.  Not sure how it works.  I think in a week or so, the Departments will be given clear scenarios and asked to work on developing plans for them.

Physics Department

UROPs – the Department is working to find UROPs positions for the summer for any undergraduate who has filled out Cathy’s form, so please do that so we can move ahead.  If you are a student and already have a UROP planned for summer with someone, please write a proposal and apply for direct funding by May 7.  Faculty and the Department can also fund UROP positions, but first, we need to match students with faculty.

Why did sex evolve? – this Quanta article has some interesting ideas, aside from the diversity of offspring.

X-ray induced mutations – Quanta had a link to Herman Joseph Muller, who in 1926, discovered that X-ray radiation could cause genetic mutations.  This was before DNA was known.

Los Endos A look ahead – from Nergis.

Damn glad it is Friday.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

NYT had a piece today, “The Year You Finally Read a Book about Climate Change”.  First on the list is “What We Know About Climate Change” by Kerry Emanuel from MIT.

While flipping through the Times, I found this.

Physics Department

When? – A piece on what’s needed for reopening campuses and businesses.

Networks – contact tracing of infections is a network problem.  I was reading this paper and wondering if the results could be applied to contact tracing to estimate the total number of infections.

Bound state beta decay – I have always been interested in this process.  Bahcall predicted it in 1961 and it was first observed in 1992 at GSI in the very intriguing Dy-163 – Ho-163 system.  Does not appear to be good for much, but interesting to think about.

Los Endos

Carol Breen reports that today the 403rd anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.  This shows the frequency with which people in his collected works were dispatched.

Trouble coping (thanks to Ray Ashoori)?

Peter

Duke

Dear Physics Community,

Pablo and Matt sent a  very interesting paper about pulse oximetry and its potential value in identifying people with COVID-19 before there are symptoms.  I’ve sent the paper to experts and will wait to see.  There is also an interesting series of posts by Tomas Pueyo here about coping long term.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Where 160 sq. ft./person in labs comes from – Earlier this week, I reported that safe density in labs needed 160 sq. ft./person and I got a lot of emails about it. I asked at the 8 am meeting and Krystyn Van Vliet explained it comes from analyzing the layout of labs at MIT.  Because of lab benches, cabinets, and equipment, the accessible floor area is much smaller than the total floor area and the stuff in the room has the effect of forcing people closer together.  The 160 sq. ft. comes from the average space needed per person to prevent incursions inside 6 ft. between people.

The same was then applied to classrooms, where I do not think it applies very well.  To get occupancy, the projected floor area is divided by 160 sq. ft..  10-250, floorplan here, is steeply sloped and the projected area is about 40′ x 64’=2,560 sq. ft., for occupancy of 16 people.

Opinion – Pres. Reif’s op-ed in the Globe.

Physics Department

LIGO – Science reports on a heavy/light black hole merger here.

Bright black holes – why?  They’re supposed to the black, but they aren’t.

Los Endos

Jesse Wodin was an undergrad who UROPed with me.  Then he went to Stanford and got a Ph.D. with Giorgio Gratta working on AMO and particle physics.  Now he works at a cool company called SRI that does a lot of government-related research and he asked me to advertise some positions for SRI here.  If you are interested, let me know and I will put you in touch with Jesse.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Today we were back at “work” – at home.  Up early and reading the New York Times to find a story on the MIT ventilator design that started 10 years ago as a student project, now with FDA approval.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Student work news – MIT has decided to make UROPs for credit an option for this summer (waiving tuition that is usually associated with course credit).  Also, seniors may be hired after graduation this summer and the Administration is working to make it administratively possible to have short term postdoc positions for those who defend their Ph.D.’s this Spring.

CP* – used to be CPW, was last week.  Very good turnout, 2,100 parents and students.  Lots of questions about what happens in the Fall, etc. that we cannot yet answer.  Early evidence is that yield will be higher this year than last.

Success coaches – well underway. 4,400 undergraduates and 1,110 graduate students have coaches.  Pretty good for a program that started as an idea about three weeks ago.

Discussions about the fall – have started.  There are three scenarios under consideration, depending on local circumstances:

1. Fully remote – no or few students in residence, all courses online
2. Some remote/some residential – what this means is not yet clear, but could be the case if visa problems prevent foreign students from entering the country.
3. Fully residential, with physical distancing.

Some interesting numbers: MIT has a total seating capacity of 13,000 in classrooms at any one time.  These classrooms have a total area of 260,000 sq. ft., so that is 20 sq. ft. at full capacity. If we require 6 feet between people at all times, each student has to be in the center of a 13′ x 13′ empty square, about 160 sq. ft.  Imposing this in classrooms lowers the capacity of 1,600 students.  To give you an idea, 10-250 would seat 15 students…

…we’ll have to see how this shakes out.

Physics Department

Graduate admissions – is largely complete.  It looks like the incoming graduate class next year will be 39-40 students, so it is a good year.

Summer UROPs – we are working on helping students connect for UROPs.  There will be a followup note from Cathy and Kimeee to the student who responded to the first message, so please respond quickly.

Los Endos

At times, I feel optimistic that we will take the things we learn from this time into our lives and things will change.  This poem, which appeared on my high school alumni page, gives me some hope.

And the people stayed home
And the people stayed home.
And read books, and listened, and rested,
and exercised, and made art, and played games,
and learned new ways of being, and were still.
And listened more deeply.
Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows.
And the people began to think differently. And the people healed.
And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways,
the earth began to heal. And when the danger passed,
and the people joined together again,
they grieved their losses, and made new choices,
and dreamed new images,
and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully,
as they had been healed.

– Kitty O’Meara, Irish March 2020

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,

Fineberg – writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Harvey Fineberg from Harvard explains what is needed to eradicate Sar-Cov-2.  Not easy, but doable.

Physics Department

John Conway – when I was young, the best was the math column in Scientific American by John Conway, who passed away this week.  Obit here.  He left behind a legacy of making match cool and interesting before almost anyone else.

LHC – is shut down right now but will come by with wicked intense beams.  Intense enough to make a detectable number of high energy neutrinos.  This paper considers what a detector and location in one of the more interesting things I have seen in a while.  Might be high energy enough to see the Glashow resonance.

Quantum networks – look more and more possible.  But why?

Los Endos

End of a much-needed break.  Tomorrow will again the contract between the banal and extreme that we have all be suffering.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

In the past week, there has been much discussion about how we re-open MIT and society at large.  This article from Science does a good job of laying out the issues and levers administrators and governments can pull.

There was no Academic Continuity Meeting today

Physics Department

Neutrino and anti-neutrinos work differently – has been shown by the T2K experiment in Japan at 95 % confidence level.  The paper is here.  There is a pretty good video explanation of the science here.

Ball lightning – a reported phenomenon in which a roughly 1-meter sphere of air ignites and remains glowing for several seconds.  I always thought the whole thing was b.s., despite a Physics Reports article on it. I just stumbled across a paper that claims to have measured the spectrum of ball lightning and shows the discharge is from elements found in the soil.  There is a Physics Focus article about the paper, with video.

Los Endos

I am now really intrigued by ball lightning.  Stay tuned.  Have a good holiday and stay safe.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Today was a day of small challenges: mold in the clothes washer and flakey wireless in the house.  After reading this article Cathy sent, I did sit outside and listen for a while.  I’ve always found it remarkable how many sounds there are that I just tune out.

Physics Department

Physics Today – has a new Q&A with David Kaiser

Primordial Black Holes – I was going through references for an article today and found this paper by Hawking in which he considers black holes produced in the early universe.  I remember working through it when I first read it and learning a lot.

There is an industry of people, many scientists and not a few physicists, who spend time plotting data related to the current pandemic and prognosticating about what will happen.  Prediction based on statistics and modeling of this pandemic is very difficult and, as I have said before, hard to believe.  This article from the Atlantic is trying to make a point about statistical inference which I just found baffling.  Maybe someone can explain it to me.

Los Endos

I  wish everyone a good three day weekend.  I’m reacting to the sameness of the weekdays by trying to make the weekends special (succeeding about half the time).  I think tomorrow, I will get out my Marantz recorder and record the noises of Porter Square.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Quiet today – no Academic Continuity Meetings until Tuesday and fewer zoom meetings than usual.

Physics Department

Donald Kuth – Who doesn’t love Tex for writing papers?  Simple, great-looking output, Turing complete.  Originally written by Donald Knuth to publish his own books on programming – masterpieces in their own right.  Quanta has his bio here.  If you can get away from zoom for a while, you could read his series, The Art of Computer Programming.

UROPs – the Department is working with faculty and undergraduates to create as many UROPs as we can.  They will be remote and MIT has produced a guide to help faculty learn how to make the most of remote UROP experiences.

Light-by-light scattering – after reading the ATLAS paper yesterday, I went and found the paper describing the first observation of the scattering of light by light.  The work was done by Robert Wilson, who later was founding Director of Fermilab.  The paper, here, is marvelous.  This could be a Junior Lab experiment.

Los Endos

This might have been the toughest week so far – living with lots of uncertainty, but having to make important decisions.  This three day weekend is most welcome.  Please enjoy it.

Peter