• MIT Kavli Institute (Scott Hughes, Rob Simcoe) – ), 1:00 – 2:30 pm, zoom link, password 835025.
• The ABCP Division will hold a Zoom event from 10:00-11:00 am – a zoom link will go out later today.
• Physics Department open office hour for all grad and undergrad students (Peter Fisher, Nergis Mavalvala, Syd Miller, Emma Dunn, Cathy Modica) – 4 – 5 pm – zoom link, password: 349406 (Note to Students: please see Cathy’s message.)

Other events are being planned and will be announced later today by email.

(*) Non-Black People of Color

Strike – I will participate in the  Particles for Justice strike next Wednesday.  I am an administrator and I will not participate in any zoom meetings and spend the day educating myself from the resources here, write the MIT Administration, and offering comfort to those that I think need it.

Dear Physics Community,

Apologies for the resend – I am still working out how to sort between Departmental and personal.

Advisories

• Pres. Reif’s message about the vigil on Tuesday
• Results from Student Remote Experience Survey
• Upcoming TLL summer programming
• Process for Requesting an Exception to Phase 1 Research Ramp Up
• Tips for Difficult Conversations – COID-19 edition

MIT’s Response to Presidental Proclamation

The proclamation is here.  I was in contact with Dan Goldston of our Washinton Office and the following are from notes he sent.

• Through the higher ed assns., MIT is working to try to influence State Dept. decision-making and to make sure Congress is aware of how big a threat Friday’s Trump Proclama1on represents (and how untargeted it may be). MIT has also itself reached out to several key Cong’l offices about the Proclamation.

• MIT and the higher ed assns. are working constantly (literally) to counter proposals to unduly limit interac1ons with China and especially to counter proposals aimed at Chinese students. We have pointed out, to some effect, that there is liable evidence that Chinese students play a significant role in any ques1onable Chinese ac1vi1es, but they contribute a huge amount to the U.S., and the vast majority of them stay here. So going after students, has minimal impact on constraining China and maximum negative impact on us.

• The industry will have more impact on this debate than universi1es, and the higher ed assns. are working with industry groups and have put out some joint statements.

• The higher ed assns. worked with the Hill to get a letter from a number of House Republicans in support of the OPT program – the next likely victim of Administration policy, though the latest rumors indicate that the limits may be less. Draconian than originally feared.

Building Awareness about Racism

The events since the murder of George Floyd call for the building of awareness about racism.  Here are some resources:

• Anit-racist resources for white people – Thanks Pablo
• Particles for Justice Strike.  To see who I am striking, go here. Thanks Dan and Tracy!
• “These Truths” by Jill Lepore
• Goldwater Scholars Call for Action and Resource list.  Thank you, Megan!

Stay safe,

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

As I mentioned last week, I’m moving to a weekly message to the community.  I want to keep a separation between my personal communications and Departmental business.  The departmental business will go out to the community mailing list and my more personal communications will go on my blog roll at fisherfiles.com.

Academic Continuity Meeting

MIT COVID-19 Response – many people visit the MIT campus and this explains the policies around the different visits

Best version  – of two-semester option for the fall

Feedback  – to the 2020 team from the charettes here.

Status – of summer programs and sponsored travel here

Physics Department

Physics Community Lunch – tomorrow 12 – 1 pm.  We will resume our weekly lunches open to all.  Or Hen and I will handle the organization.  If your would like to give a presentation or make a suggestion, please let me know.  Look for a note from Ryan with the zoom link.

Conferences – in the time of COVID-19.

Los Endos

Thank you all for the comments, both positive and negative, about the daily message.  I learned a lot about the Department doing this.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

To the memory of George Floyd, murdered on May 25, 2020, by four police officers in Minneapolis. MIT’s Vigil for George Floyd here.

Academic Continuity Meeting (Monday)

Advisories

• Use of common space during re-opening
• Major Immigration update from ISO – what we know about the Administrations’ shocking order from late last week.  I will find out what MIT is doing and report back.

Quiet room reservation – available during the summer.  Details here.

Campus space – “Office Hours” with Krystyn team about access to buildings. modifications for distancing, etc. here.

Two-semester options for Fall – some details about plans here. The presentation was followed by a wandering discussion.

Physics Department

Neutron star – finding the neutron star equation of state (EOS) has been a long quest.  A new paper indicates that the center of a neutron star weighing more than 1.4 solar masses could be purely quarks.  Stay tuned…

Unruh radiation – is the idea that an accelerating body has a black body temperature and radiates a black body spectrum.  There is a nice derivation here. I keep coming back to this paper about how you might see it at a storage ring, but can never quite get there.

Los Endos

What we need now: Monet.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

I’ll send an update tomorrow about the various things that happened related to the Physics Community tomorrow.  Right now, I am having trouble even typing or putting together a sentence – so many awful things happened in the last days I am still sorting through.  I’m sorry, I just do not have the words.

Others do: Cathy Modica, always inspiring, Alan Grossman, Head of Biology, and graduate student Olumakinde Ogunnaike and the Physics REFs have all written great heartfelt things and asked me to share.

What I can say now is this: I know many of you are feeling great pain and fear because of your race or heritage.  Many feel afraid of the people who are supposed to protect us.  Many are afraid of the violence on our streets, not from those peacefully expressing their anger and fear over the way their communities are treated, but from opportunists seeking to create chaos for reasons I cannot fathom.  Astoundingly, our Federal government seems to side against us at every turn, ignoring their duty to protect and help those who need it most.  All in the midst of a worldwide crisis that could draw us together, except that being together is unsafe.

I feel like crawling into a hole and pulling it in after me.  Instead, I am going to reach out to a few people I know who may need it.

The Sun will come up tomorrow and maybe something good will happen.

Thank you Cathy, Alan and Olumakinde.

Peter

Dear Physics Department,

School of Science meeting with the Senior Team Monday 11:30 am – 12:30 pm to discuss the options for re-opening in the Fall.  Details here.  Zoom: link.

Amazing – the City of Cambridge will close three streets to cars to allow social distancing.  Never thought I’d see this…

Academic Continuity Meeting

(Reported by Bolek)

The Baker Administration formed a committee to look into university re-open.  A summary of their report is in two parts, here and here.  MIT is following the suggested process for re-starting.

Maria Zuber on the phased ramp-up of research 1 2 3

Physics Department

Tex – we all know Donald Knuth created it, but do you know why? Thanks to Brodi.

Wash your hands – how health care workers in Boston keep from getting infected by SAR-CoV-2 (much…)

Los Endos

In a weird mood after a week of huge ups and downs, I re-read John McPhee’s 1987 article on the Mississippi, which was oddly calming.

Getting some rest, back Monday.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Thanks to Cam Fox at IS&T, my blog is now at fisherp.mit.edu.  Cam nicely cleaned up the mess I made with the update and moved me off of x.dailup to a place where there is plenty of space and the server is kept more current.  Thanks, Cam!

No Academic Continuity Meeting Today

Physics Department

Department Commencement – happened Tuesday.  Thanks to Emma for the great slide show and Cathy for making sure everyone made it.  You can see it here. 

Hooding – happened today.  Thanks to Syd and Cathy for a moving ceremony!  I’ll post a link when I get it.

Radioactive beams – Ronald Garcia Ruiz, a new MIT Assistant professor, do spectroscopy on radioisotopes to discern their nuclear properties.  Ronald is sheltering in Switzerland and just has a Nature paper on his work.  Story here.

ITER – means “The Way” in Latin, but stands for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.  ITER is a magnetic confinement fusion project in France designed to reach scientific break-even.  Construction is so complex that they decided not to stop because of COVID-19, the story here.  

Machine learning – is all around us.  Physicists played a role in their early development and now, according to this article, physicists are supposed to figure out how they work. I’ve used a machine learning algorithm for a long time and they can be quite useful, but I wonder if understanding how they work is really part of our writ.

Los Endos

Commencement is tomorrow, we had hooding today and celebrated our undergraduates last Tuesday.  The end of a long, hard term.  MIT came through okay, but there will many decisions to make in the coming months and work to do as we enter Fall.  This is the time of year when I slow down and change gears.  I sense that doing so will be harder this year, but I am going to do it anyway. 

I have complained to Deans, Presidents, Provosts, Chancellors, and many others about how much MIT asks us to do and MIT is objectively demanding.  I am learning, through help of the squad of experts paid to help me, that stopping this is up to me – the things MIT asks are all important and worthy of my time and effort, but I have to be much more careful about which I choose to do. I’ve taken 25 years to learn this and I’m telling whoever reads this for free right now – resist the fear of missing out and triage what you do to what you can manage.

Peter

Dear Physics Comunity,

No va – Falcon with Dragon didn’t go, rescheduled for Saturday, news here.

Academic Continuity Meeting

MIT Forward – a newsletter about planning for Fall very popular – 58% open rate, very few unsubscribes.

Yossi Sheffi – proposed a scheme from now on the have freshman year completely online, then they apply to MIT as sophomores.  Slides here.

Cindy Barnhardt – talked some more about 2+3, slides here.  Hard to tell – may be getting traction.  Followed by questions and discussion.

If you have comments or concerns about the Fall plans, see here.

Pulse survey – wants to know how you are doing in the COVID-19 era.

Physics Department

Baryons – are protons and other nuclear matter.  Cosmologists can compute how many there should be, but when astronomers count up the baryons in galaxies, they come up about a factor of two short.  I think recent observations concluded they were in warm interstellar gas.  Now radio astronomers have used Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) to measure the column density of electrons between the FRB at cosmological distances and confirm the result.  Story here and paper here.

Superspreading – recent work seems to indicate that SAR-CoV-2 is spread by a few highly contagious individuals rather than everyone with some average R value.  I’m still digesting.  Story from Science here and original Nature article here.

Los Endos

Rejections – good article from Science on handling “noes” in your career.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

Well, the WordPress update did not go well.  I was running WP3.7 and I updated to WP 5.4.1.  The auto-update did not work, so I went manual. All went well, but when I loaded my new home page, I got a message saying the PHP package was too old for WP 5.4.1, which is probably why the auto-update did not work.  I have all this on Athena and they do not have a PHP update anytime soon, so I tried to back up to WP 5.1.5.  No dice: permissions problem.  Futzed for an hour before contacting the help desk and a nice person there is working to recover everything and move to a new hosting space.  Until then, I may have lost everything and I am stuck with a feeble font I will have to read a raft of documentation to learn how to change.

Future of the Message – These messages started on March 14 during a time clear communication with the Physic Community was essential.  Since then, I have prioritized the factual information related to the cataclysm we have been living in.  With time, I added other news, mainly to remind everyone that we are bound by science with a long history and one that is going through important changes in its climate and accessibility.  The intent was always to inform.

We have adapted, or at least survived and MIT now has MIT Forward a newsletter devoted to MIT’s path back to campus.  Decision making has slowed down, Commencement is Friday, and summer is here.  It is time for the message to evolve.

Starting the week of June 1, the message will go to once a week on Thursday. The message will still emphasize reporting but will continue to have some physics news and links as things happen and occasional reporting on things like marble racing.  With time, I will stop using the community mailing list and move to a mailing list of people that opt in.

Thank you for reading and the friendly notes!

No Academic Continuity Meeting today

Physics Department

Seminars – some bright spark has put together a worldwide list of online seminars sorted by field, time, etc. here for all of us.  I don’t have time to do anything but sit in zoom meetings, but maybe you do…

Shaving – Neil Clader (a.k.a. Spike Kalashnikov) has a new post on his blog The Quiet Ripple Defines the Pond mostly about shaving, bird, and food, but at the end is a picture of his check for $1,200 from Pres. Trump that came with a letter from The Donald.  Neil last lived in SF and was unemployed there (i.e. retired) before moving to Okinawa as Vice President of Communications for the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.  he has since retired for a second time.

Is it something? – The LHCb collaboration at CERN had observed unusual decays of the second heaviest quark, the b quark.  A Quanta story is here and the paper is here.

Los Endos

GLX – it is really Los Endos for the Lechmere T Station.  After 98 years of service, the quirky, ramshackle station will close and a new station will open across the MacGrath.   Lechmere was really wonderful: it was at the end of the line and trains would come across the viaduct, down into the station with a turnaround, here and here. The station had two concentric turn-around loops and four storage spurs.  There was a bus station at the arrival platform.

Peter