Dear Physics Community,

We are starting in on difficult weeks and will learn a lot about ourselves and each other as we navigate this.  We have to accept where we are and think in terms of how we and those around us are today and tomorrow.

I’m keeping away from national and international news – I hear about it anyway because that’s what people tend to talk about.  State and local news is more relevant to me right now and can be inspirational.  I read Somerville Times (which is good), Wicked Local Cambridge (okay), Universal Hub, and the Globe.  The smaller and closer, the better.

One of the cooler things going on is GLX.

Physics Department Events

• Tuesday, April 7, 12-1 pm, Special Tuesday Lunch Talk Series: Zoom info: https://mit.zoom.us/j/632177654

Jeremy Owen – Universal Bounds on Nonequilibrium Response with                                                                      Biochemical Applications Elisabeth Matthews – Probing exoplanet populations with debris disks

• Wednesday, April 8, 4-5 pm – Office Hours for Graduate Students with Peter Fisher and Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 9, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing”, David Kaiser and Julie Shah
• Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri

Physics Department

Dear Physics Community

Dear Physic Community, 

I read a very interesting article on glass today in Quanta Magazine.  Noise from the glass itself is a limiting factor in the performance of the LIGO interferometers and the thinking is the noise comes from impurities forming two-state systems in the glass itself.  Thermal activation causes the systems to flop back and forth – absorbing thermal energy and re-emitting it as thermal energy.  The challenge is to reduce the number of two-state systems in the glass.  However, doing so requires laying the molecules that makeup glass down one at a time…

Physics Department Events

• Wednesday, April 8, 4-5 pm – Office Hours for Graduate Students with Peter Fisher and Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 9, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing”, David Kaiser and Julie Shah
• Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri

Physics Department

Our colleague David Kaiser has a book, “Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World” dropping today.  Here is an interview he did with Sean Carroll.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Advisories

• How its going at Stanford
• Statement on online conduct

Zoom cheat sheets from Donna Behmer – quick zoom intros you can send to those who might need it (like your yoga instructor):

• Scheduling, starting, running a meeting 
• Setting zoom meeting defaults

MIT Medical – is beginning voluntary testing of students to learn how to monitor a cohort of students at MIT.  A description is here. The Broad will do the analysis.

Next things – working groups are beginning to think about how major declarations and subject evaluations will be handled in this new world we are in.

Revised “Last Supper” – from Ernie Ihloff’s uncle.

Peter

P.S. I am posting these messages in my blog roll here and I have been accumulating useful links that have gone by here. In particular, I am trying to keep a list of MIT policy communications.

Thanks to Physics Council, Cathy Modica, Vicky Metternich and Christina Andujar for input and comments on these messages.

Dear Physics Community, Huge thanks to Alan Guth for a terrific colloquium today!  About 275 people zoomed in and there were good questions at the end. I read this interesting paper in Science Advances the studied bias in stories journalists chose to cover.  The conclusion is that there is little liberal/conservative bias in the stories mostly liberal journalists choose to cover.  Also, the methodology of the study is very interesting. Physics Department Events

• Wednesday, April 8, 4-5 pm – Office Hours for Graduate Students with Peter Fisher and Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 9, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing”, David Kaiser and Julie Shah
• Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri

Physics Department Thursday Lunch – we devoted today to a discussion of how remote teaching was going so far.  Ryan will post the video of the discussion, led by Iain Stewart and Nergis Mavalvala.  In the meantime, many of the ideas are on the Piazza page Iain has set up, 8.ONLINE-EDU.  Some high points:

• Ed Bertschinger has set up a mentoring program in his 8.02 section that is becoming widely used.
• There was an interesting discussion of the value of being able to see the students on the video to gauge audience reaction while at the same time we heard concerns that students might not want their images or voices recorded.  We do not distribute these lectures outside MIT, but there still may be a chilling effect.
• Exams – Barton had an 8.051 midterm using the MITx platform that went well.  There were 10 T/F questions and 3 problems.  The in-class version would have been 1.5 hours, but he allowed 3 hours.  The three problems had no partial credit but were broken into 16 parts.

Academic Continuity Meeting Transition rules – We were reminded of the Rules and Regulations of the Faculty, Section 2.12:

Exercises shall, in general, be held between 9 A.M. and 5 P.M. Monday through Friday. Exercises shall begin five minutes after and end five minutes before the scheduled hour or half-hour.

applies to online instruction as well as residential.  When using zoom, you can switch from one meeting or lecture to another in less than a minute, but it is important to take breaks.

CPW (now called CP*)- Campus Preview Week, like everything else, is virtual this year.  Stu Schmill reported that CP* is important for MIT as the more people know about MIT, the more likely they are to accept an offer of admission.  He reports this is especially true of women, students of color, and first-generation students, important demographics.  Admissions is working hard to make CP* go well this year.

PPE – Elazer Edleman of IMES report MIT’s efforts to provide PPE to local hospitals is growing.  The donations program has gotten about 220,000 pieces of PPE form MIT and Lincoln Labs delivered, our alumni in China is sending PPE from there and there is an MIT led manufacturing effort that is delivering 100,000 face shields next week.  Other manufacturing efforts are moving along as well and we are working on partnering with other Massachusetts universities.

Campus – MIT will use several now-empty dorms to support Cambridge and MIT students:

• MIT essential personnel overnight accommodations – 100 beds
• City essential personnel overnight accommodations – 100 beds
• MIT COVID positive – convalescing – 100 beds
• Tier 2 acuity hospital – care for those with COVID-19 who do not require Tier 1 care (See here for definitions)

My friend John Schule passed away last week.  John spent his career as a minister and Robert Hughes sent me John’s benediction:

JOHN SCHULE’S BENEDICTION Go forth into the world in peace. Be strong and courageous. Do that which is just. Love your God and each other with a singleness of purpose, And rejoice always in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Peter

P.S. I am posting these messages in my blog roll here and I have been accumulating useful links that have gone by here. In particular, I am trying to keep a list of MIT policy communications.

Thanks to Physics Council, Cathy Modica, Vicky Metternich and Christina Andujar for input and comments on these messages.

Dear Physics Community,

Some housekeeping – I’ve cleaned off the pages of links, etc. as the MIT COVID-19 site has most of the material on it now.  Also, I will continue to give the Physics Events schedule as below for the rest of this week, but then stop in favor of the calendar and weekly email that Christina Andujar and Ryan Higgins have put together. Here is a sample of the weekly email.

Physics Department

Remote teaching resources – remote guru Iain Stewart has started a piazza page 8.ONLINE-EDU at piazza.com that has a great deal of information for everyone about remote teaching: hardware configurations, video tutorials, Q&A fora, etc.

Physics Department Events

• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 4-5 pm – Colloquium – Prof. Alan Guth, MIT, “Inflation”
• April 1-3, Admitted Graduate Student Open House, details to come.
• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “How we are doing with Remote Teaching So Far?”
• Wednesday, April 8, 4-5 pm – Office Hours for Graduates with Peter Fisher and Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 9, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing”, David Kaiser and Julie Shah
• Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri

• Town Hall with Pres. Reif – April 7, 2020 – MITtownhallQs@mit.edu

Academic Continuity Meeting

Advisories

• A follow-up to the emergency grading policy
• Senior thesis – process for submitting your thesis is the same as a Ph.D. thesis
• Guidance for on-site employees

Campus – the access plan for campus continues to evolve. You can request access here, but it seems unlikely to be approved.  Best to come to campus and contact the MIT police at 3-1212.

Changes to syllabi – must be made by Friday.  If you change your final exam, please let the registrar Mary Callahan know.

I have always been interested in electromagnetic radiation.  That light gets created by an accelerating charge that has always struck me as odd and beautiful.  There is a dirty secret: Maxwell’s Equations, which we tell you describes everything, does not explain how a radiating electron slows down as a result of losing energy by emission – it is not built-in, you have to take care of it by hand.  Of course, it gets fixed in quantum theory, which knows how to handle point charges, but it should be okay in the classical theory, but it was never clear how.

Two of the people who worried about it in the early 1940’s were Feynman and his Ph.D. advisor Wheeler.  They actually “solved” the problem in one of the weirdest papers I have ever read.  It is here – if you have a few hours to kill, you can work through it and see that it all hangs together.

Peter

P.S. I am posting these messages in my blog roll here and I have been accumulating useful links that have gone by here. In particular, I am trying to keep a list of MIT policy communications.

Thanks to Physics Council, Cathy Modica, Vicky Metternich and Christina Andujar for input and comments on these messages.

Dear Physics Community,

I read this article in Universal Hub today that I found somewhat reassuring.  As I have mentioned before, I do not generally believe the pandemic forecasts and this one is no exception.  However, this one does have an error band (a factor of two) and the Baker administration is using it to predict what medical resources they will need in the worst case.  From the story and reporting in the Globe, they are some of the ways of acquiring the resources they need for the citizens of Massachusetts.  Data-informed decision making like this should be the rule, not the exception.  Maybe it is in the Baker Administration – I have to confess I have not paid much attention to them until this week.

Physics Department Events

• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 4-5 pm – Colloquium – Prof. Alan Guth, MIT, “Inflation”
• April 1-3, Admitted Graduate Student Open House, details to come.
• Wednesday, April 1, 4-5 pm – Office Hours for Undergraduates with Peter Fisher and Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “How we are doing with Remote Teaching So Far?”
• Wednesday, April 8, 4-5 pm – Office Hours for Graduates with Peter Fisher and Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 9, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing”, David Kaiser and Julie Shah
• Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri

Physics Department

Open House – starts tomorrow and goes through Friday.  If you are involved, you should have the schedule information from Cathy and Syd.

Alumni – Quanta has an article about a new paper by Steve Weinberg resurrecting an old idea about why in the Standard Model, things come in threes.  Weinberg is one of the architects of the Standard Model wrote his famous paper while on leave from Berkeley at MIT. Following his leave from Berekely, he was a professor at MIT 1969-1973.

Theorist Phillip Anderson passed away on Sunday.  Anderson was a major figure on condensed matter physics but his ideas spanned all of physics.  I first heard of him when I read his paper called, More is Different, an attack on reductionism.  Many in our Department knew him well.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Advisories

• TA tipsheet – Teaching Remotely
• Community support in the time of COVID-19
• Thesis submission guidelines
• Securing zoom – here is why you should

Academic Council parked itself on top to the 8 am meeting, so they left me to run the meeting, so I queried those remaining (staff and Department Heads) about how the first day of remote learning went and how everyone was thinking about exams.

I also queried Physics instructors about the first day of remote instruction went.  I’d say everyone succeeded in getting their classes up and running.  Other Departments had similar experiences.  There were technical glitches and everyone is still learning how to pace themselves – I think everyone is finding it takes 50% longer to do anything online.  I did not hear of anything that crashed and burned.  Emma Tang reported that 65 online language class in her Department all went well.

Janet Rankin of TLL had a lot of advice about pacing, breaking things up with concept questions and other activities, breaks, etc.  TLL does a great job with this – for instructors, there is teachremote.mit.edu and students learnremote.mit.edu.  They also run online seminars and videos.    TLL also sent out some tips for TA from MechE, posted above.

Following the 50% rule, many classes are removing some assignments and, if the syllabus has changed, the new syllabus has to be out by the end of the week.

Micheal Fee of BCS mentioned that he hung around for a time on zoom after his lecture ended and had a very productive talk with the student in his class about other things.  If students and faculty have time, it might help everyone to have a little hung out time before or after lecture.

Jacob White of EECS reported that he sent his students home with a bag of parts and they have a final project to make something and demo it, in lieu of a final exam.

On the subject of online exams, it appears many classes will just do without exams entirely or make their exam open book due 24 hours after it is assigned.  Some classes are using the MITx system that allows entering of equations and automatic grading.

In all this, keep in mind it was a small sample of instructors.

By the way,

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Remote teaching got off to a good start, at least according to my first-year advisees.

Physics Department Events

• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 4-5 pm – Colloquium – Prof. Alan Guth, MIT, “Inflation”
• April 1-3, Admitted Graduate Studnet Open House, details to come.
• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “How we are doing with Remote Teaching So Far?”
• Thursday, April 9, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing”, David Kaiser and Julie Shah
• Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri

All events are open to the entire Physics Community.  The zoom link for all lunches is https://mit.zoom.us/j/514440037.

Physics Department

DOE Office of Science  – “Dancing electrons solve a longstanding puzzle in the oldest magnetic material headlined” on University Research News from Nuh Gedik, Carina Belvin and Eduardo Baldini.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Zoom security – MIT’s approach is different than other places:

• By default, restrict the meeting to members of the MIT community with Touchstone
• Otherwise leave zoom mostly open
• Miscreants will be dealt with by COD or HR processes, as appropriate.

Despite the optionality expressed in the security instructions here, the Administration has asked Department  Head to tell their communities that they MUST either,

• Restrict zoom access using Touchstone, or,
• Using password access for people outside the MIT community to join zoom sessions.

Student events – are restarting: I did not get all of them, but two are:

• Career Fair – April 8
• Nick Roy from the Quest is getting Minecraft servers for each Department for community building (literally, I guess) but each Department needs a moderator.  If you are interested in serving as the moderator for Physics, please mail me.

Cambridge – MIT and Cambridge are working on how to help each other as the crisis persists.  Several agreements are in the works.

Access – here is a note about the idea behind the access plan.

• If you want to reserve a quiet space in E17 to prepare or record a lecture, details are here.
• If you need one-time access and are not on the list, please go here and fill out the request.

Advisories – for graduate students – how to submit your thesis – yay!

Please do not try things like this.  (Thanks to Scott Hughes).

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Another quiet day, MIT-wise.  I was cleaning the bathroom today thinking about the first time I heard about MIT.  I remember loitering in the College of Marin Library and seeing Technology Review.  The cover article was incredibly intriguing and I thought, “Main, that is where I want to go to school…

…I was not admitted either as an undergraduate or graduate student.  No matter, I got here anyway.  Many paths.

Physics Department Events

• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 4-5 pm – Colloquium – Prof. Alan Guth, MIT, “Inflation”
• April 1-3, Admitted Graduate Studnet Open House, details to come.
• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “How we are doing with Remote Teaching So Far?”
• Thursday, April 9, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing”, David Kaiser and Julie Shah
• Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri

All events are open to the entire Physics Community.  The zoom link for all lunches is https://mit.zoom.us/j/514440037.

Physics Department

Remote learning starts tomorrow – I wish the best to our students, instructors, and staff who will make it all go.  Please let me know of any problems you can encounter I can help with or anything you did that went well.  We will have the faculty-staff-student lunch Thursday devoted to seeing how we are doing.

Zoom – Krishna and Mark Sillis have a message about zoom security here, mainly about setting to prevent outside zoom-bombing.

I looked up the word “dongle” which first heard about 10 years ago.  The etymology is not surprising:

Peter

P.S. I am posting these messages in my blog roll here and I have been accumulating useful links that have gone by here. In particular, I am trying to keep a list of MIT policy communications.

Thanks to Physics Council, Cathy Modica, Vicky Metternich and Christina Andujar for input and comments on these messages.

Dear Physics Community,

Pretty quiet today, which is good.

I read a new paper on the reverse Janssen effect. The Janssen effect is the support of grain in a silo by the wall of the silo – when you add up the force acting on the base of the sile, F, then mass m=F/g is less than the mass of grain in the silo because the wall of the silo carries some of the weight of the grain, about 10%.  The author of the paper shows that when the filling height is about 15-20 times the grain size, the walls of the silo actually push down on the grain, increasing the force on the bottom.  I suspect knowing this will be useful someday. If you are just starting out in physics, I recommend reading the PRL – it is well written and short.

There was also a good story and animation on how black holes image the entire universe for the Event Horizon Telescope, along with a good animation here.

Vladan Vuletic made a Public Service Announcement about exponentials and epidemics here (file downloads, click to play) which I quite liked.

Physics Department Events

• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 4-5 pm – Colloquium – Prof. Alan Guth, MIT, “Inflation”
• April 1-3, Admitted Graduate Studnet Open House, details to come.
• Thursday, April 2, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “How we are doing with Remote Teaching So Far?”
• Thursday, April 9, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing”, David Kaiser and Julie Shah
• Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
• Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri

All events are open to the entire Physics Community.  The zoom link for all lunches is https://mit.zoom.us/j/514440037.

Zoom – as we start remote instruction the day after tomorrow, you may want to watch this zoom tutorial.  It is an hour and pretty basic but has some worthwhile things in it.

Peter

P.S. I am posting these messages in my blog roll here and I have been accumulating useful links that have gone by here. In particular, I am trying to keep a list of MIT policy communications.

Thanks to Physics Council, Cathy Modica, Vicky Metternich and Christina Andujar for input and comments on these messages.