Dear Physics Community,
MIT Activities Committee has a list of virtual activities here – thanks to Carol for pointing this out.
Physics Events
Odd-even staggering – The masses of isotopes of an element tend to stagger larger and smaller around an average value with increasing neutron number. Careful measurements of this effect can lead to a better understanding of nuclear structure and new physics. Our new colleague Ronald Garcia Ruiz has a new paper out on a recent measurement.
Light-by-light scattering – in E&M, we teach superpsoition, which can be viewed as the notion that light does not interact with light. Quantum mechanics tells us this is not quite true and photons can scatter off of each other, called Delbruck scattering. If was surprised to learn this was observed three years ago at CERN. A good writeup is here and the paper is here.
Academic Continuity Meeting
Commencement – We heard today a Virtual Commencement will take place on May 29. The schedule is
- 11 am – 12 pm – pre-commencement show with student productions
- 12 – 1 pm – Commencement with speeches from Pres. Reif, Chairman Millard, Prof. Dufolo (economist, 2019 Nobel Prize), and Adm. McRaven. Degrees will be conferred digitally, Corrallaries, ring-turn.
- 1 pm – 2 pm – production by the alumni association
Details to follow.
Remote instruction – Krishna has been arranging 5 minute presentations by faculty about how they are handling remote teaching. These have been very interesting and today’s were excellent:
- Nicholas Monchaux – been at MIT for nine weeks, new head of Architecture. He told use about architecture was about experiencing place and how to best bring that online.
- Polina Anikeeva (DMSE) – had produced high qualtiy videos of her lectures for 3.024 (which sounds like a great class) only to poll the students and find they prefered live “awkward” lectures. “They want to feel like the lecture is just for them – not the class of 2016, or 2024 – just for them.” I think there is a great truth to this.
- Miroslav Kazakoff (Sloan) – broken down the “zoom experience” and showed some really interesting changes the make online more interesting and personal (black background, standing, …) Lectures are about “…not knowing what is going to happen in class.”
Really good – I hope Krishna finds a way of sharing these broadly. They are very informative about what happens in a residential classroom, as well as remote.
Los Endos
Loosely speaking, a feature of particle physics is that matter interacts the same way as anti-matter. Deviations from this have been observed in quark interactions. A big question has been, “Do neutrinos interact the same way as anti-neutrinos?” A nice Quanta article about how an experiment may be closing in on a hint of whether or not neutrinos and anti-neutrinos are the same.
Peter