Category Archives: Fisher Files

Message to the Physics Community, Saturday, April 11, 2020

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Dear Physics Community,

A quiet day – no Academic Continuity Meetings, phone/zoom/texts were quiet.  A good day to think about things.

Alan de Botton – is an active philosopher/adventurer/deep thinking.  He was a writer in residence at Heathrow Airport and founder of The School of Life.  I will read anything he writes.  He just has a great piece relevant for today here.

Physics Events

  • Wednesday, April 15, 4-5 pm, Undergraduate Office Hour
  • Thursday, April 16, 2020, 4-5:50 pm – Colloquium – Mina Arvanitaki
  • 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

Special Tuesday Lunch Talk Series

  • Tuesday April 14, 12pm noon, https://mit.zoom.us/j/632177654 BYOL
  • Steven Silverberg – “Peter Pan” Disks: Long-lived Accretion Disks Around Young M Stars, and How Citizen Science Found Them
  • Jinghui Liu “Vortices, space-time braids and loops in the membrane of a living cell”.

If you’d like to give one, contact Anna.

Physics Department

Two important repeats:

UROP direct funding – Direct funding proposals for SUMMER UROP are due April 21.  Faculty: please apply for these.  Current UROP students: please encourage your faculty supervisor to apply for you to work during the summer.  Students who would like a UROP – fill out the form Cathy sent you NOW and we will direct you to faculty with compatible interests.  Faculty can also support UROPs from directly – if you have funds to a UROP, please apply for MIT direct funding to take another.

Summer forms for undergraduates – Cathy sent out a form for you to fill out about your summer plans and if you would like help in finding something this summer.  Please fill it out as soon as you can and the Department will try to find something for you.  No promises except that we will do out best.

Los Endos

Saturday Night is a movie night at our house.  Jane Ann chooses something relatively short and uplifting.  So far:

  • Big – Tom Hanks
  • Bringing up Baby – Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn
  • The Way, Way Back – Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell (who looks like Bob Millard)
  • Nim’s Island – Abigail Breslin, Jodie Foster

All recommended for families.

I have always felt MIT is too damn busy and we need to scale back by about 10% to give time for thinking, socializing, and “wasting”.  The Administration is absolutely unsympathetic to this point of view – I have brought it up with them.  This is why I never fill out the Quality of Life Survey.

Now we are in this weird time with everything upended.  This could be a time when we build in 10% unstructured time.  I will write more in the coming days.  Thoughts welcome.

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.

 

Nobel Week

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Dear Physics Community,

Jane Ann and I just returned from Nobel Prize Week in Stockholm where we were guests of Rai Weiss.  The Nobel Prize is about the biggest thing that happens in Stockholm, they really go all out for the Week, to a stunning result.  The events of the week are televised and Sweden spends the week celebrating intellectual achievement.
Rai-01
Last Friday, Rai gave his Nobel Prize lecture as the first of three parts, followed by Barry Barish and Kip Thorne.  Rai spends a good deal of his time recognizing the great contributions of the LIGO team, LSC, NSF,…
You can see Rai’s Nobel Prize Lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgICZnAo04A
 
Sunday, was the Nobel Prize Ceremony, where the Laureates receive their medal and diploma from the King of Sweden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNWwGQAKidA
If you look carefully, our Department is well represented on stage. The Nobel Peace Prize is given on the same day by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo, Noway.  This year, the Pease prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and you can see their ceremony here: http://www.nobelpeaseprize.org.
Followed by the Banquet, where Rai gave a short speech on behalf of the Physics Laureates.  Video shows just how lavish the Banquet (*) is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiKovEM1Cb4
(Thanks to Tran for finding these.)
The other Banquet speeches are well worth watching – they are short, informal, and quite moving:
The Nobel Laureates work hard during Nobel Week, with many other lectures and appearances you can see here: https://www.nobelprize.org/
It was a privilege to be a part of this amazing week.  Many from MIT went and there are stories and pictures to collect and share.  The above is the “official” part I wanted to be sure everyone in the community got a chance to see before too much time passed.
Peter
(*) This video shows the setup of the 2011 Nobel Banquet: https://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=2396

Bonsai Status Report #1

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I have a Chinese Elm I got from Amazon (!). I kept it inside for a couple of months during with winter and it grew some runners. When the warm weather started to return, I moved it outside and cut off the runners. Here is what it looks like now:

It looks pretty scraggly, so I cut off all the foliage on the top and they are starting to bud:

It still looks woody.

My question: should I cut away the woody parts? If so, how severely? I am aiming for something like this:

I am also trying to grow seedlings and cuttings from my river birch. I have several pots with cuttings in them that I have just left under the birch as it dropped its seeds this year. There is a lot going on in this pot: . You can see the cuttings (very slow to deploy their leaves), the seedlings from last year and the seeds form this year.

I plan to just leave them out until winter and water them. If anyone sees anything else I should do, please let me know.