Message to the Physics Community, Wednesday, April 1, 2020

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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

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.