Dear Physics Community,

Cabin fever – I want one of these.

No academic continuity meeting today

Physics Department

Restart in the Fall – the OVC asked us to consider and respond to five scenarios for instruction in the Fall (here).  We had an hour-long discussion at lunch last Tuesday, the Physics Response Team discussed our response and so did the Education Committee.  Our response is here.  The Society of Physics Students also met and discussed it and had an anonymous email for comments.  Their report is here.  Both were sent to the Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor yesterday.  Thank you for your efforts on this.

Tomorrow’s lunch – will be for faculty and instructional staff.  Libby Mahaffy will lead us through a discussion of two scenarios that take place in the new virtual world.  The scenarios were written by the Physics Values Committee Traning Group. There will small groups in zoom breakout rooms to discuss each scenario and synthesis at the end.  Please come – these discussions are always helpful and things are different in the new virtual world.

Closest black hole – about 1,000 light-years away, two stars orbit nothing – believed to be a black hole.  This is the closest known black to Earth.  News story here, article here.

More twists of graphene – two years ago, Pablo and Co. found that two sheets of graphene twisted by 1.5 degrees created a superconductor with the right applied gate voltage.  In this new paper, they mapped local variations of twist angles in twisted layer graphene in an attempt to understand how the disorder of twist angles can be used to engineer electric properties of twisted by layer graphene.

Los Endos

Anti-body testing – this a blood to tell if you have the anti-bodies indicating that you have been infected by Sar-Cov-2 and maybe immune, for a time.  Any test has systematic effects and Pablo pointed me to two good videos by Michael Cima from the MIT-Lemelson Program, here and here. Understanding statistical arguments like these will be important in the coming months.

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.