Four Are Given Highest Honor in Mathematics

One of them was Grigory Perelman, who was given a medal for his solution to the Poincar
é conjecture - but refused to accept it. He also refused $1 million from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

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Fields Medal won by the man who solved the Poincare Conjecture

Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman has been awarded a Fields Medal, a version of the Nobel Prize, at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
You can read the NYT article here.
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Bilingual Education

I have a daughter and a son, one is bilingual and the other is not. Circumstances and habits produced this. I prefer bilingualism and biculturalism, it was just hard to provide a conducive environment for one of my children. Now I am applying to a bilingual program, if I get accepted I will try my best to get those students able to live productively in either culture.

Evolving Universes

Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin looked at the simple, functional elegance found in the the theory of natural selection, and thought that maybe such a concept could be applied on a universal scale. Thus the theory of Cosmological Natural Selection was born.

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Frontier

Tim Flannery from Australia wrote a book about the United Sates of America - "The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples" - One conclusion of that work is that the environment in North America is fragile. There is a blog in Blogger with this name, http://eternalfrontier.blogspot.com/.

It is not an accident that the peoples of America did not conquer Europe but the other way around, as one can read in Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies", the reason is very likely the different geographies of the two regions. This part of the world where we live, North America, is more fragile than Euroasia.

The same is true for Australia. It is ironic that the two countries that will benefit more form the Kyoto Protocol, are among the four (Liechtenstein and Monaco are the other two) that refuse to ratify it. Maybe the fragility of these God forsaken lands makes us unsure of ourselves.

Math genius living in poverty

Grigory "Grisha" Perelman, the genius who won fame last week spurning a million-dollar prize after revealing his solution for Poincare's Conjecture. Is living with his mother in a humble flat in St Petersburg, co-existing on her $74-a-month pension.

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Jurisprudence and Mexican Elections

When a court has consistently voted in one way for a number of occasions it establishes precedent or jurisprudence. The electoral tribunal in Mexico consistently has considered illegal to have voting booth results with more ballots than the alloted ballots for the booth. In the past July 2 election for president if the tribunal follows its jurisprudence annuling the polling booth results of the cases already recounted the opposition wins.

Will the court follow jurisprudence?

Blogs and Newspapers

I lived in Puebla Mexico for over eighteen years. During that time I started using the Internet in 1994 and decided that the local paper, La Jornada de Oriente, should be online. Together with some colleagues from the Autonomous University of Puebla we offered the service to the director of the newspaper. We did that work for several years. The paper is still online even after I left town in 1998.

Today I found out that this newspaper, that I read from Illinois whenever I have time, has an article that also appears in Blogger!

I went to http://circulodeescritores.blogspot.com and sure enough, the Professors from another university in Puebla keep a Blog in Spanish of their writings online.

After more than twelve years now is very easy for anybody to make their thoughts known online. These are interesting times.

New Mexican Constitution

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in an assembly announced yesterday the program to change the Mexican Constitution. Here you can read the Spanish version of the official document.

This meeting is scheduled for September 16 of this year in the Constitution Plaza of Mexico City. By tradition the Mexican Army has a parade there, I do not know how are they going to resolve that conflict.

Thoughts

I do not want this blog to be a series of news items.There are a series of new posts dealing with relevant science issues that do not get many diggs.
People Power Prof. Almond, rightly observes that if the American media defines a political event as a manifestation of "People Power", then it is, otherwise it is not. The Mexican political events of the last few days are historic, and the American media hass chosen to ignore them.
Recommendation enginesEsther Dyson points out in her blog the present dilemma of too many good causes to spend our good intentions on. Which one is the right one? She offers a thoughtful answer to that question.
Climate and Collapse This American Scientist article addresses the very relevant scientific problem of whether or not the Maya empire collapsed due to a drought? Our own present civilization may equally collapse like that, if you do not think that is relevant science, I have a hard problem bringing up a more important issue nowadays.

Climate and the Collapse of Maya Civilization

A series of multi-year droughts helped to doom an ancient culture.

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Esther Dyson Report from Foo Camp: goodness, IT and recommendation engines

Outstanding piece from Esther, on a discussion at Science Foo Camp (Stewart Brand, Sol Katz, Mitchell Baker, Sunil Paul & George Dyson). She discusses Morality vs Ethics and the impact of information/transparency on our inclination for "goodness." She links to ImportantGifts, a new nonprofit bringing IT & transparency to the nonproift sector.

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Guardian Unlimited 'People power' is a global brand own

The US and the western media back protests over controversial elections when it suits them, but are silent over those in Mexico.

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Report: Diversity growing in nearly every state.

Minority populations are growing in every state but one. West Virginia with its struggling economy and little history of attracting immigrants has seen an increase in the majority population.

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Bush 'helped Israeli attack on Lebanon'

The US government was closely involved in planning the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, even before Hizbullah seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross border raids in July. American and Israeli officials met in the spring, discussing plans on how to tackle Hizbullah, according to a report published yesterday.

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Emotions and Politics

When strong emotions are linked with politics I get nervous. In this picture you can see how a mexican girl cries while AMLO touches her face. Is she expecting salvation?

Lopez Obrador calls for years of protest

MEXICO CITY Apparently bracing to be declared the loser of Mexico's presidential election, contender Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador vowed Sunday to lead protests against the process for years to come if necessary.

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September 15 in Mexico City's Zocalo

I just heard the speech by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in Mexico City's Zocalo today. I looked for some news in English informing of AMLO's decision to be in the Zocalo by September 15. I am sure that some of the readers of my blog don't know what that means, so here is my interpretation of this historic speech.

If he wins the election by Septembers 6 that is his official obligation, to be in the Zocalo to celebrate the Mexican Independence Day. The war against Spain started that day in 1810. If he loses the Mexican army will have to take his people out of the Zocalo, because the elected president, his opponent, Felipe Calderón, has to be there.

Today this looks to me as a declaration of war; Mexico could be entering into a new civil war.

My family is there, I do not want a war there. I am worried.

Video of philosopher Dan Dennett speaking at TED Conference.

"Dan Dennett is a Tufts philosophy professor and cognitive scientist, renowned for his books, Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea. His most recent book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon calls for a rational examination of religion as a cultural phenomenon that has co-evolved over milennia to meet human needs."

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Gates Charity Races to Spend Billions ($3 Billion Per Year)

Largely lost in the June announcement of Buffett's gift of $31 billion to the foundation was its terms. For tax reasons, starting in 2009, the foundation must give away every nickel that Buffett contributed in the previous year. At the current price of the stock Buffett will be donating, the foundation will have to distribute $3 billion annually.

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Now For Something Truly Bizarre

Variations in the prevalence of Toxoplasma gondii "may explain a substantial proportion of human population differences we see in cultural aspects that relate to ego, money, material possessions, work and rules." It sounds like an absurdly grand claim, but toxoplasma, a protozoan, is such strange organism that it might not be entirely crazy.

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The Damage in Lebanon and Beyond

The idea that you can solve social and political problems militarily from the air is, on the face of it, ludicrous. The historical record is filled with the dead dreams of air power solutions to ground-based problems. But that stops no one.

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Nassan Nasrallah

I just watched a speech by Hassan Nasrallah in C-SPAN. He asked the people of Haifa to leave the City so Hezbollah could bomb it. Also the Israeli Air Force has dropped messages to Lebanese citizens to leave their towns so they can bomb them.

It is hard for me to imagine going to my backyard to pick up a letter dropped from an airplane telling me to leave so they can bomb my house.

I am very sad.

Lieberman

There is a new book by MIT Professor John Tirman "100 Ways America is Screwing Up the World". Prof. Tirman is a student of Howard Zinn the Emeritus History Professor of Boston University. Lieberman is not one of the 100 ways in the book, but he could have had a chapter in Tirman's book.
I do not like Lieberman because he followed Bush to Iraq almost as much as England's Tony Blair. I will feel more secure if both Bush and Blair, stop promoting war in the Middle East, by the unwelcome presence of American and British troops over there.
I expect terrorist attacks until the day I die. Most of the history of the world is filled with terrorist attacks. Whenever there is a people with less weapons than another, they fight terrorist wars. Maybe Americans forgot that a terrorist attack to the US was carried out by Mexico's Pancho Villa, like the bin Laden of his time he hid in the mountains of Mexico and General John J. Pershing could not find him. The world did not come to an end. To end terrorism is like ending the flu, you have to learn to live with it.

The Unmaking of a Senator: How Bloggers Pulled It Off

As much as it was a repudiation of his support for the Iraq War, Joe Lieberman's loss Tuesday in the Senate primary also signaled the ascendancy of a legitimate new power center in the Democratic party, the Netroots.

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We don't need no stinkin' recount

Greg Palast on evidence of electoral fraud in Mexico.

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Full recount rejected

Mexico's electoral court yesterday rejected calls for a total recount in last month's bitterly contested presidential race and instead ordered a partial re-tallying - a ruling that could light a match under already massive protests by voters crying fraud.

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Media

Last night I was watching Charlie Rose on PBS. The Lebanese Prime Minister Faoud Siniora made a case for returning land to Lebanon. According to him that could stop the attacks on Israel, and one would assume the attacks on Lebanon as well.

Nevertheless if I read and listen to the media, all I see is more and more preparations for war, and war, with pictures in the New York Times of very likable Israeli soldiers after a long battle in Lebanon.

How am I supposed to understand?

I will say give those Shebaa farms back and stop the killing.

Am I missing something? I guess I haven't read enough. When will this nightmare end?
Here you can find the US-France proposal, they do mention the Shebaa farms, at least I understand that much, they are fighting over land.

Mexico to conduct recount hearing

MEXICO CITY -- Amid paralyzing street protests and rising concerns about damage to Mexico's democracy, the nation's highest electoral court will hold an open meeting Saturday to consider a recount of the July 2 presidential vote.

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More than a million Israelis are in bomb shelters.

There is war inside Israel. Militant islamists determination to fight even at the cost of their lives, makes me think of all soldiers that know they may die and go to the front anyway. Nevertheless there is something more disturbing to me, when I realize that suicide soldiers know they are going to die. When another person is in that state of mind my hopes for the survival of humankind go down.

Downtown Mexico City Semi-Paralized!

Many hundreds of thousands of people went downtown on Sunday (7/30/06) and many stayed even today Monday(7/31/06). What is going on? Read the LA Times.

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Why do you need one million people?

Today one million people protest in Mexico City, you can find here my translation of the legal demands of the demonstrators. Today's NYT chronicle here

Mexico City's Zocalo

The post below is about the Zócalo. Your computer may not have the font, without accent the name of the place is Zocalo. This site is about relevant science, many of the readers may think that this is just politics, maybe relevant, but not science. I hope the following paragraphs give some perspective.

Before Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón) came to America in 1492, Mexico City was called Tenochtitlan. The center of the huge Aztec empire was inside Lake Texcoco, and the center of town was the Zocalo. There were pyramids and other government buildings. This place has been important for mexican politics for more than four hundred years. Maybe only in Perú is there another plaza as old and as relevant for the human story. Tomorrow Andrés Manuel López Obrador is asking one million mexicans to protest at that historic place.

Right now his party, Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), is in control of the police and the city government. I was in that plaza in 1968 protesting, and the police did not want us there; maybe americans can have an idea of what I mean if they know what happened in Lincoln Park in Chicago in the summer of 1968 during the Democratic National Convention. Then Mayor Daley from the Democratic Party did not want protests in his city.

Tomorrow a million mexicans will meet in that historic plaza to protest, but you know what, now the protesters control the police. Keep tuned.

Next Mexican President?

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is asking a million people to protest tomorrow in Mexico City. He wants a ballot recount. Gore could have done this in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, maybe AMLO will succeed in 2006.

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Free Education with RSS

Great RSS feed source to learn for free on a lot of different topics.
This is a good service.

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No light in Queens?

NYT(07/23/06)NYT(07/24/06)NYT(07/25/06)NYT(07/26/06)
NYT(080106)There is no date for the restoration of electricity in a famous burough of New York City. The National Guard may be called. What is going on?

Congratulations American Team!

Americans won gold medals in Singapore in the 2006 Physics Olympics.

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Science Olympiad

http://www.aapt.org/olympiad2006/

Congratulations, great team!

This, is how it's done America!

"900,000 protesters marched through the Mexican capital on Sunday to demand a manual recount in the disputed presidential election, led by a leftist candidate who says fraud cost him the presidency." Can't imagine what 900,000 truly is? Take a look at the photos.

According to Mexico City Police it was 1.1 million people.

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Information Processing Bound

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0607082

Prof. Hsu from the University of Oregon has recently made public a fundamental result.

This result states the deep connection between two foundational concepts of physics; Information and Size.

The rate of Information processing cannot be bigger than the size of the device times 10⁸⁵.

This is a tremendously big number, but it is not infinite.

Any device, no matter how big, cannot perform more than a certain number of computer operations per second. According to Hsu's bound, the mind of the Universe only has performed 10¹⁰⁰ operations so far.

Gaia

James Lovelock recently wrote the book

"The Revenge of Gaia"

I write a few comments here.

As I write I am listening the UN's debate on C-SPAN on the Israel-Lebanon War. I was born in 1949, one year later than the establishment of a new state in Palestine. Fifty seven years from then we are witnessing now the war between two semitic people, descendants of Abraham: the children of Ismael and of Isaac. When the children fight, the Earth, Gaia suffers. Our mother Gaia is sick. Lovelock does not think that she will die; but he is not so confident as to the future of the children of Abraham.

In more scientific terms the problem Lovelock's warns us about is relatively simple. The Sun is getting hot, the gases on the Earth's atmosphere are keeping more heat inside than is reflected back into space. The result is that most of us will be able to survive only moving North in the northern hemisphere, and South in the southern hemisphere.

Why should we believe Lovelock? He was the first or one of the first to recognize that the Earth-Sun system is more dynamic than previously thought. Once life starts on Earth it is unavoidable to establish feedback connections that control the temperature of the atmosphere. There is a balance between life, i.e. the biosphere, the temperature of the atmosphere and the Sun's temperature. There are indications that this balance is moving to a new point of equilibrium, that likely will make the Equator unhabitable.

We can choose to disregrad Lovelock's warning, I for one take him very seriously.

Triumph of the authoritarians

"CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATISM and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest." John W. Dean
I recommend Dean's book. I see some Relevant Science in Dean's ideas. Followers of authoritarians do not ask questions. If true, that explains partly why DeLay does not explain us why he effectively took away the vote of minorities by redistrictering Texas voting places in the middle of census results. The census is every ten years, the next one is 2010, why 2006 is a moment to define the districts?

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Florida 2000, Ohio 2004, and Mexico 2006

It seems that Mexicans take vote counting more seriously than Americans. They want to do it twice. "Voto por voto, casilla por casilla". Vote by vote, ballot boot by ballot boot. Read Greg Palast note on the Mexican presidential election.

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Claims of Election Fraud in Mexico: Why Mexico Deserves Better

Story about how the current claims of widespread election fraud by the second runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are failing behind the expectations they raised. The facts produced so far do not support the widespread fraud that is being claimed.

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The Stolen Election of 2004.

title says it all.

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Mexican Presidential Election

Greg Palast's expertise on the US presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 comes handy when one wants to analyze the Mexican presidential election of 2006.

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General Breaks Down While Speaking of Immigrant Father

A hush fell over the auditorium at Miami Dade College as Pace, a Marine who was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., was overcome with emotion and struggled to continue reading from his statement as the opening witness at the field hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

General Pace, you are a man.

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Tesla: Master Of Lightning

10 July 2006 marks what would be the 150th birthday of the great inventor Nikola Tesla. For those who could make it, Tesla is immortalized as a statue at Niagara, New York depicting the master of lighting. Tesla's AC became the current used throughout the world's electrical grids today.

Now Tesla is the unit of magnetic field. One Tesla is 10,000 Gauss. Both were great men, one studied small fields, the other big fields.

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Power in Mexico II

"Algunos de los ejemplos citados: la casilla básica 2876 y sus tres contiguas, tienen 264 votos para Calderón cada una. La básica 893 y sus 3 contiguas, tienen 179 cada una. Y la básica 3177 y su contigua, 274 cada una."

Antonio Gershenson writes the above in today's La Jornada:

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/07/09/025a2pol.php

He is a physicist and a journalist. He believes that he uncovered a program used by the electoral comission in Mexico to fix the numbers, thus helping the government's party in the presidential election last Sunday.

The irregularity consists in having several polling sites with identical number of votes for the ruling party. These sites are related, but there is no reasonable explanation of why each has to have exactly the same number of votes for one candidate. One case is an acceptable accident, but the three reported by Mr. Gershenson, seem more like fraud than accident.

The last word has not been said. Yesterday there were hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico City's main plaza. The challenger asked them to bring ten friends and relatives next Sunday. We may have over a million angry voters in the Aztec capital. Every hundred years or so there seems to be restlessness in the land of the first people of this continent. Mexico did not start in 2000 when the current president took over, and will not end in this year of 2006.

Power in Mexico I

This graph by the Federal Elections Institute in Mexico can be analyzed.

It does not show statistical fluctuations. The challenger candidate was winning and near the end the incumbent party's candidate overtook him for a final photo finish. That is exciting in sports but unreal for statistical data.

Power in Mexico

"El político tabasqueño señaló que no hay duda de que se manipuló el PREP, y eso lo pueden demostrar, ya que tienen todas las pruebas. En una elección cerrada, "como aparentemente se está dando, cuando hablamos de 42 millones de votos, como en el conteo rápido, nunca hubo cruces de datos y siempre el candidato del PAN estuvo arriba, lo que estadística y matemáticamente es imposible"."

For those that do not read Spanish, the opposition candidate in Mexico, states that it is statistically and mathematically impossible to have a situation where one party, never more than 1 % above, is always above and never comes down.

I agree with him, even though through most of the night the opposition was less than 1 % above, at the end, the elections authority, ended up giving the race to the current government's party.

It seems that there is not going to be a winner before early Septemeber; by law the elections authority has to resolve this election  by then.

Power

There were elections in Mexico last Sunday July 2, 2006. Up to today it is a tie between the current president's party and the opposition. In Mexico the president cannot be reelected. The six year term is all one president has to implement his or her government plan. The decision on the next president must be taken before early September of this year.

Is there any relevant science here?

Politics is relevant, that is how power is established. A president affects the lives of many people. The question is that if science is an issue in this important event of mexican life.

There are some technical issues related to the election, like the official count update stopped on monday night:

http://www.unam.mx/elecciones2006/

Today the electoral commission is counting the ballots to reach a definite conclusion.

From a technical point of view this shows that electoral processes have not used the most current technology for counting votes.

One scientific issue I can consider here is the statistical distribution of random processes, in most random events events follow the law of big numbers, leading to a bell-shaped curve. I do not have graphs for the election yet, but if there was tampering with the numbers, those curves could be one of the places where one can look for illegal intervention to modify the results.

High Altitude Airship

The Lockheed Martin High Altitude Airship is an unmanned lighter-than-air vehicle. It will operate above the jet stream in a quasi-geostationary position to deliver persistent station keeping as a surveillance platform, telecommunications relay, or a weather observer.

With the solar cell strips from:

http://www.nanosolar.com/index.html

more than blimps are coming our way.

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Large-Scale, Cheap Solar Electricity

"...In fact, maintains Roscheisen, the company's technology will eventually make solar power cost-competitive with electricity on the power grid."

This company will be bigger. This is important.

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Digg Demand too high

Digg V3 is attracting too many users for their servers to cope

Something big is happening!

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Wave Theory of Quantum Gravity

Kris Krogh has studied an alternative to General Relativity for several years now. He just published his most recent work to understand Active Galactic Nuclei.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0606489

I see a connection to Álvaro de Rújula's idea for a Theory of Cosmic Rays (cosmic rays note below). If Krogh's wave theory of gravity is correct, one should be able to predict properties of cosmic rays so far not observed and thus verify Krogh's ideas.

Flock Again

I just installed Flock. Both previous posts were made with the tool that comes with this new browser. I had a problem with the html. I had to fix it directly in the blog.com site. Maybe with time I will learn how to do it directly with this tool

Cosmic Rays

"We contend that we have identified the acceleration mechanism promoting the constituents of the interstellar medium of our Galaxy and others to become the bulk of the cosmic rays of all energies, and the 'magnetic-racket' accelerators themselves: the cannon balls emmited by ordinary core-collapse supernovae."

Thus ends the article by Arnon Dar and Álvaro de Rújula.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-ph/0606199

The authors claim that all Cosmic Rays observed so far can be understood with their cannon ball magnetic-racket model.

If true, this is a big accomplishment. The Auger Detector, half of which is already in Argentina, and the other half soon to be build in the United States of America, should have no problem in verifying this theory.

Flock

This post was written using my flock tool to blog.

Princess

My mother was a princess in her hometown Huitzuco in Mexico in 1942. Here is her picture.

Practical Foundations of Mathematics

Students and teachers of computing, mathematics and philosophy will find this book both readable and of lasting value as a reference work.

If you want all the formulas you will have to put some work, otherwise the book is useful.

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X Men: The Last Stand

I know movies are not real; somehow I feel like adding my 5 cents. Most mutations are harmful.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060525/REVIEWS/60509005/1023

't Hooft

Gerard 't Hooft posts his results on black hole horizon physics.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0606026

New High School

"For students, part of the appeal is that they're treated more like adults, and in their college courses they get to mix with students of all ages. Being on a college campus also helps focus their long-term ambitions. Tabitha Grant, an articulate 17-year-old who just finished her junior year at Guilford, had dropped out of high school and was working in a grocery store when a social worker referred her to the school. It changed her life. At Guilford, she thrived in small classes with close connections to her teachers. "If they suspect you're upset about something," she says, "they'll pull you in and talk to you. You get people who really want the best for you and really care about you." In the college classes, students are exposed to a wide range of promising careers—everything from nursing to information technology to graphic design. That appealed to Grant, whose father worked in the furniture industry for 20 years before losing his job a few years ago. "He was out of work for two years," she says. Grant changed majors several times, but now has settled on accounting and will head for the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "I love math," she explains."

I like this. I took it from Newsweek today.

Last day at school

I am at school waiting to be picked up. On Monday I will not be coming back. This is how I feel: I met intelligent teachers, staff, and students. I am glad I worked here. There is something holy about a place where people care about learning and teaching. There are the leaders, obviously more able than the rest, and the rest of us.

But, there is always a counterpoint. I did not find a community of like minded people to grow intellectually here. They are not keeping my services, and I myself am not sure about my desire to stay. We parted in good terms, both with the students that loved the grades they got, and the faculty on staff, that were welcoming all along.

I am afraid I was more interested in sharing my passion for physics, than in actually making sure EVERYBODY got it. Even though I taught to three classes of gifted students, not everybody was equally interested in physics. I fail insofar as not making the subject interesting to all.

Gravity is not a "force"

Today I received my copy of the American Journal of Physics. I have been assimilating my first year teaching high school physics. What I write here has to be taken as very preliminary thoughts. I want to separate ideas on how to teach at this level, from how I personally "feel" about the experience; the first topic is more objective, and the second less. When I feel more settled about the second I can do it more justice.

I have considered for a long time how to teach modern physics at earlier stages of students academic life. There is a conceptual core related to the human experience with the Microworld and the Universe at large through particle accelerators, and different types of telescopes. As a species we know more about these realms than our predecessors just fifty or so years ago. The issue is then how do we communicate this knowledge to our children.

I start with a direct quote from Robert M. Wald's Resource Letter TMGR-1: Teaching the mathematics of general relativity. This letter appears in The American Journal of Physics, Volume 74, No. 6, June 2006.

"Gravity is not a "force" at all, but rather a change in space-time structure that allows inertial observers to accelerate relative to each other."

How does one go about "translating" that to a high school student?

The way I taught physics this year emphasizes that there are four known fundamental forces. Some students can repeat what I said, others cannot. I have not looked carefully at what they mean when they tell me that there are four fundamental forces, when they do tell me that. Right off, to use Prof. Ward's definition quoted above I have to change my introduction. I am afraid that there are many elementary school teachers that have to change even more what they say.

This note is just a first try on presenting that idea to young ones.

To begin with I have to state as clear as I can, what do I understand by that description. I believe Prof. Ward wants to separate gravity from the other three known forces; namely Electromagnetic, Nuclear Weak, and Nuclear Strong. In my mind I am tempting to paraphrase Ward in saying that neither of those other three are "forces" at all, but rather a change in internal space-time structure that allows inertial observers to accelerate relative to each other."

I am expressing here an speculation that is not only mine. There may be more dimensions to the Universe than the four we are used to; and there are mathematical ways to relate those extra dimensions with the internal symmetry groups associated with electric charge, nuclear strong charge, and nuclear weak charge. Even though this is speculation, it is not inconceivable that in the future humanity knows better the origin of all the "forces" of the Universe. Then what?, do they stop being forces, and turn into curvatures of ever more abstract spaces?

I do not know, but I agree with Ward that we should start talking to students more and more about what we do know about this Universe of ours. Unfortunately or fortunately we have to wait unitl ALL TEACHERS join the conversation. They cannot talk about what they don't know.

Education is our way to bring young ones into our conversations. I for one intend to keep the conversation alive.

Community of minds

A school that works well needs faculty that are in synchrony. After that the students feel the good vibes and they themselves flourish. It is not so easy to be a gardener of minds. 

The way of the mind

Today I was talking to two of the best students in the high school. They were somehow constrained by the faculty, it seemed that they had overstepped some boundaries of decorum. For my taste it was a bit risquè but acceptable. Nevertheless I feel that my limits of acceptable behavior do not always coincide with the rest of the faculty. I bring this about because of another more academic matter that intrigues me right now.

This has happened to me; I have an idea in the middle of a presentation, and I plunge in trying to prove it. Sometimes I catch myself in dangerous territory and back up. Going back to the regular line of argumentation. If I am training mathematicians or scientists this is healthy, if I am training high school students this can be disconcerting.

There are some high school students more than ready to be trained this way. One needs intellectual partners to go the way of the mind. I worry about gifted students with square caregivers, but that is life.

I am glad I met some very bright students this year.

1491

I just read this book by Charles Mann.

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Chumash/Population.html

To my mind it tells us that we have to go back and take back the land, just like our indian elders were doing it (yes, I am part Mayan).

Interesting concepts, maybe they are true.

A new physics course?

Physics is a hard science. The current core starts with Newton's Principia from 1687; then we end with quantum and relativistic physics, that is basically 1915. Does this need to change?

Maybe more chaos theory, and complex phenomena, together with nanotechnology, among other topics. Unfortunately the core has not changed. There is no Theory of Everything, not even a Quantum Theory of Gravity. Fundamental physics got stuck in 1915.

Brown girl

The stuff we learned was interesting but it was hard to learn at first. After I got used to the teaching style and began doing individual stuff, it was actually fun.

This is an anonymous post by a student on my WebPage:

http://physics.etl.myfxh.com/viewtopic.php?p=218#218

This is my response:
 
I like that. It was fun.

Next time around though. I plan to work more directly with students. Some ideas.

The first day of classes, give a pretest like this year; but unlike this year, I won't let the students off-the-hook, until they know all the concepts in the pretest. This year I gave the pretest again at the end of the year, and I did not see much improvement. A week for this seems reasonable, all the class and I, talking about what physics is all about.

The second week give a math pretest. This I expect will take more than one week. We need, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and vector algebra. The last topic will just be introduced, we will work all year on this mathematics topic together with trigonometry.

Now we are ready to start. I do not plan to cover a book almost cover to cover as I did this year. A more qualitative approach seems to work at the high school level; definitely more emphasis on experiments and demonstrations is better than the more abstract approach I took.

All of you did almost everything I asked from you, for that I thank you. I was expecting you to do more than I asked; some of you did, I am very impressed with you and I think you will do well in academic and practical work.

Finally next time around, I will put my students in a little more stress, as long as nobody gets hurt; I think it is actually good for students to work harder and direct them away from a lot of entertainment that is not productive.

Technorati

My rank is very low:

Rank: 1,205,569 (0 links from 0 sites)

http://relevantscience.blogspot.com

I am a novice on the blogosphere. I do not exist. 0 links from 0 sites. One million and two hundred and five five hundred and sixty ninth place, at the bottom of the heap, today May 30, 2006.

How do I know that you know?

I know that you know physics when I see you solving physics problems, and when I see you setting up an experiment to prove a principle or any regularity observed in physics.

For the basic conceptual core of physics, I do not have to warn you, I just ask and you respond. This is not different than knowing spanish. I start talking and you respond, you do not need your book.

I hope my students in the future can talk physics when the course is over. I am not there yet.

College without high school diploma?

You can check in today's New York Times (NYT) the following:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/education/30dropouts.html

I gave high school students a conceptual physics test today. I did not ask them to study for it, I just asked them the same questions I asked them at the beginning of the year.

Then I read the above article informing us that some colleges take students without General Education Development (GED) diploma, nor high school diploma.

My opinon is that everybody deserves a place in college, but they have to demonstrate high school equivalency.

As far as my students are concerned, I believe they will do well in college, but they definitely need to know more physics.

Milgram's Experiment

This is an old experiment which will help us remind that technology shouldn't be dictated by corporate freaks.
We all know already what GOOGLE did in CHINA.
GOOGLE please stick to your motto 'Don't be evil!!!'

This is a classic scientific experiment. We should not forget.

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Random thoughts

This note may help me to collect my thoughts. Recently I have been thinking about my life contribution before I die. One of my deep interests has been the nature of entropy. I do not give references here, but I have read the work of some thinkers, some very successful, and some not so much.

I see two intimately related aspects of the concept of entropy, one is the entropy of the system, the other is my perception of that entropy. Objects are mental constructs, we choose where something begins and where something ends. When we count the number of objects we are using a filter. The filter is not part of what is outside. Our filter introduces randomness, and therefore increases the entropy, as another observer looking at us trying to count the objects may himself perceive. Among human beings we use the peer review method to agree on how many objects we all count. But I feel that either another type of intelligence, or maybe the thing itself, whatever that means, gives a similar number of parts.

Shannon defined information taking both aspects into consideration, a message is not something in itslef, it depends on who gets the message. The recipient of information has expectations, Shannon's information incoprporates in an intrinsic way those expectations.

Now Quantum Information. The wave function of the Universe counts all the ways the Universe could have been when we ask a question. Both the question and the Universe define the probablilities we give for the Inflationary Universe say, according to Hawking they are much bigger than zero. If I understand  correctly what Hawking is saying, Alan Guth has to be given a Nobel Prize.

Science in the US

American students are not as much into science as I want them to be. I think future citizens of the world  have to be rational and passionate about understanding our Universe and our place in it.

An almost religious attitude about the role we play in the Universe is a must, in my mind, if we are going to survive.

On the other hand the understanding of the Universe gives us pleasure and helps us find meaning in life. 

Why American College Students Hate Science

Science education faces two serious problems. The first is that too few Americans perform at the highest level in science, compared with our competitors abroad. The second problem is that large numbers of aspiring science majors are turned off by unimaginative teaching and migrate to other disciplines before graduating.

The article ends with:

"The university community needs to absorb these lessons quickly, so the country can begin to train scientists in the numbers that it clearly needs. Without them, America is unlikely to preserve its privileged position in an increasingly competitive and science-based global economy."

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End of the school year

Before I write my reflections on this year's experience as a high school teacher, I write one comment on Internet dialogue. Recently I checked two posts one on nuclear fusion energy research and another on global warming. The first comments on digg.com were civil and I felt like adding my 5 cents. The comments for the second post were virulent, I did not write any comment. I see the difference this way, the first one is not controversial because the fusion nuclear plants are not ready, maybe a few negative comments on the billions of dollars already spent. The second set though, is different. Vice President Al Gore is asking all of us to do something. There are worrisome signals we can choose to look into or just ignore. I assume the negative and emotional comments against Mr. Gore are a good thing, whoever is writing with so much passion must feel something, maybe when the time comes she or he will do what is necessary.

There are strong opinions on high school science education also. I just read in the New York Times, that the twelfth grade science students performed worse this year than a few years back. I teach eleventh and twelfth grade physics students. These are my opinions and reflections on my year's work.

I was surprised the first day of classes, I gave them a pretest on physics concepts. I did not find a good grasp of physics concepts. Today was my last day before finals next week. I am not very happy.

There is a part that is my fault, and another one that I believe is the fault of the students. I only talk bad about me. This is what I did wrong; at the end I write what the students did well. By the way my son is in middle school and I am not happy about that either.

After the physics concepts pretest I should have had one on mathematics skills. After the results I should have spend two or three weeks on stating and practicing the mathematics that we need for a high school physics class. That would have set the tone, we have to get this right guys, so we can move on. I treated the high school students as if they were in college and self regulated besides. This method only worked half way, I explain at the end.

Since I myself did not spend time doing many problems, the students did not do many problems either, only the problems assigned. I did not do many lab sessions, so the class was abstract, and I believe outside the radar screen of some students, the ones that did not do the problems in tests well. You see, I know how to do the problems, so I did not notice that the students could benefit a lot from seeing somebody doing the problems. I emphasized the ideas behind the course, the important ideas of physics, and did not spend enough time with the nitty gritty, which is the bread and butter of novices.

The worst aspect of my teaching practice was the follow up and students wrong work. Next time around most of my time will be spent on working with students work. Good work and bad work. Now I finish this post with a positive note.

I was flabbergasted by the quality and originality of the final presentations.

Once I saw that I was doing all the talking and many students had lost interest, I decided to change course. Let them do the talking. I gave a list of special topics in physics and the students chose from it, or requested to speak about other topics. After considering whether or not we were going to learn some physics I let the students go ahead with their presentations.

We had a flash animation on the laws of motion. When my daughter was in high school, she made a movie every year, this presentation reminded me of her. She would take her camera and shoot very interesting stuff around town or at school. There were good power point presentations by the students from roller coasters to nuclear reactors, passing through elementary particle theory. There were two poster presentations on the Big Bang Cosmology of Lemaitre-Friedmann-Robertson-Walker-Hubble-Gamow-Guth; one on the Illinois State Energy Program, and one on Einstein's 1905 Annus Mirabilis. I felt like crying; it felt so good to see all the extra work the students put on expressing themselves; they talked about thermodynamics, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and special reltivity. It was exciting.

I asked around after the presentations, talking to students one on one, to find out how much physics they know. I finish this note with a bitter sweet comment.

I am afraid that not all the students would do well in a regular standarized physics test. Some are brilliant and will do well in almost any test that may come their way. I know they want to learn physics, I just hope that I started enough curiosity for some of them to look deeper into physics in particular, and science in general. I hope they find relevant science.

Comprehensive List of Mathematical Formulae and Concepts

This is a 66 page LaTeX/PDF document of just about every mathematical concept out there. It is written at an advanced undergrad/graduate level, and is a great reference for any mathematics student or engineer.

Saves a lot of time if you need to type these formulas in your work.

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You can find this author's LaTeX file for physics here.


Physics Formulae

Fusion reactor work gets go-ahead

Seven international parties involved in an experimental nuclear fusion reactor project have initialled a 10bn-euro (£6.8bn) agreement on the plan.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) will be the most expensive joint scientific project after the International Space Station.

Fusion reactions power the Sun, and before the century is over, could be heating our living rooms.

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Student Presentations

The school year is coming to an end at the high school. This week we had a series of over twelve presentaions. The topics were varied, from classical mechanics to modern physics. Some of an applied nature, and some knowledge for knowledge's sake. Some of the later are: Was there a beginning of time? If there was one; would we know more of what happened near this beginning of time? Some of the former are, How does a nuclear reactor work? What is the Illinois State Energy Program?

A constant element I want to report here in this forum of relevant science, is the student enthusiasm I observed. To tell you the truth, I was a little bit surprised. I did not see the same level of participation, most of the year. Only when I let the students free to create their own expressions, did I see this response. Next year I will do more of this. Of course it helps that grades are given, and students want to do well on the final. The currency at school is the grade. I expect good grades in general. As a teacher I feel that students should enjoy their work, but also this work has to be of the highest quality the students can do.

To conclude; at the end of the day, their knowledge of physics will be evaluated by people different than I. I hope enough enthusiasm was created , for them to keep learning physics. This ride does not end.

Centrifugal Forces

"Maliki, a tough-talking defender of Shi'ite interests since his return from exile in 2003, has won praise from Sunnis for his willingness to seek consensus. But many question whether a government cobbled together according to religious and ethnic labeling can overcome centrifugal forces tearing Iraq apart."

This quote is from today's New York Times.

Centrifugal forces are fictitious. How could fictitious forces torn a country apart?

Energy Use

One of the Special Topics the students are preparing for next week is about energy use. We talked about Newton's Law, F=ma, and how one can change that way of describing motion to, mv^2/2 + mgh = constant, then and there energy appeared in the high school classroom. Somehow though, I felt I was not getting across. Do the students know that when they go to the gas station, they are paying for energy?

After several days we went in a field trip to Six Flags, Great America, on Physics Days. Again; what is kinetic energy, and potential, and mechanical energy? Do they relate that to the price of gasoline?

I do not feel that most of us internalize what we learn at school and real life.

Some tips to understand, why gasoline is over three dollars a gallon?

"PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) -- If you've stopped to fill up your tank recently you've seen it: Gas prices have surpassed the three-dollar mark.

The state Energy Office says its latest survey found gas averaging three dollars and one cent a gallon. That's seven cents more than last week. It's also an increase of 82 cents, or 37 percent over this time last year.

A survey by Triple-A of Southern New England finds gas prices averaging three dollars a gallon."

Let me start with F=ma. I know my students ask me not to derive equations, just tell us what the equations are, and how to use them.

I feel that if I use words and no equations, I am allowed to "derive" results.

Newton wrote over three hundred years ago that inertia requires an external agent to change velocity. Let's see; car is at rest in the garage, or wherever you parked it. Inertia being what it is, it won't budge. It weighs over a few thousand pounds. We have two options, we may pull it with a rope, there is the F of old Isaac, or just turn on the motor. Little electric spark, and the fire inside starts. Somehow we don't see the force now, but the internal combustion engine is on fire, and it moves the wheels.

Where did that fire inside the gasoline come from?

To the best of my knowledge, there were dinosaurs happily munching food sixty five million years ago in the Yucatan peninsula; a big rock hit the Earth, and they passed away. After many years they became oil, and then gasoline.

First tip.

Rocks like that, do not come often; that is our good luck. Many of them and we will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Scarcity means high prices. That is the first tip to explain three dollars a gallon.

Second tip.

The Yucatan dinosaurs are being sold now by Mexicans and Americans, there are Arabs selling theirs also. Dead dinosaurs are a non-renewable resources.

Third tip.

We should be getting the energy from where the dinosaurs got it. Frist from plants, and then from the Sun directly.

How does F relate to energy?

That is called the work-energy theorem, that will be a different post on this site.

Disordered locality

Smolin reports in his review on quantum theories of gravity, that when one considers discrete ways to connect points through edges; a smooth spacetime emerges. Nevertheless there is redundancy. More than one object corresponds to a given volume say. This can be described as "disordered locality".

Locally there may be room for creation, but globally the object seems fixed. Neat idea. Maybe this is the origin of Quantum Mechanics.

From Research to High School

I worked for eighteen years as a physics professor at the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla in Mexico. I had a few stints as a software engineer and part time college instructor in Illinois. Now I am teaching physics in high school, also in Illinois.

I did not publish enough to work in research. To this day I spend time following research work in physics. The work as a teacher requires effort, and I have to find a happy medium, I am afraid that sometimes I do not achieve that happy medium. It is good that I follow current research so I can interest my students to consider a scientific career; sometimes though I feel I could do more to help the students that are struggling with their physics work.

Maybe I should strive to be a human being, not a researcher, or a college professor, or a high school science teacher. From certain distance my predicament seems amusing.

Just give us the equations.

I finished my student teaching practice at Glenbard East High School in Lombard. In my physics web page you can read the comments by my students after a whole year of study. A recurrent complain I had during the year, that shows up again in the WebPage, is the difficulty in deriving physics formulas. Students prefer to be given a list of formulas with indications as to when to use them, instead of deriving them in class.

This was an error in my lessons. I forgot how was it when I was the age of the students. In the beginning one does not see the point in coming from first principles and deriving general results. Tasks have to be specific. It is only after months of familiarity with the subject matter that patterns appear in our mind. They are right and I am wrong. Next time around I will be more concrete, more demonstrations and experiments, and as the course develops then it will get more abstract. I myself do not have a very abstract mind, the previous note on Plebanski's action is an introduction to a subject that requires more mathematical knowledge than what I have right now. We are all in this continuum of understanding, some of us are more concrete than others, but all of us should move up in the "abstraction ladder"

The Plebanski action

Jerzy Plebanski was a great man. He was born in Poland and died in Mexico City. Unfortunately we did not interact as much as I would have liked. He was the first director of the Physics Department where I got my Master's Degree at Centro de Investigacion y Estudios Avanzados (CINVESTAV), Instituto Politecnico Nacional (IPN), in Mexico City. By the time I got to CINVESTAV he was back in Poland, then I went to California, and he came to stay in Mexico.

Prof. Plebanski worked with Leopold Infeld, another great Polish physicist that wrote the "Evolution of Physics" with Albert Einstein, a classic science popularization book. Here I want to pay tribute to this great physicist. He discovered how to separate einsteinean substructures in General Relativity in 1976. This was unknowingly used by Ashtekar to prove that General Relatvity (GR) is a Gauge Theory.

"All known classical gravity theories such as GR and supergravity in any dimension are diffeomorphism invariant gauge theories. Hence they all provides examples of causal spin network theories. But it's even better than this, because the dynamics turns out to act simply on the spin network states, through local moves of the kind described above. This is a consequence of the second principle, which is that the dynamics of all known classical relativistic gravitational theories are arrived by perturbing around[14] or constraining topological field theories[15]. In 4 dimensions one route to this is through the Plebanski action[16]."

This quote is from a recent review by Lee Smolin of Quantum Gravity theories.

http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0605052

This is relevant science because my generation of physicists is trying to construct a Quantum Theory of Gravity, and Plebanski's decomposition of Einstein's Theory is considered an important step in unifying the mathematical structures of quantum theory and classical Differential Geometry, which is the foundation of General Relativity.

The Plebanski action is a simple code to express the dynamics of space time.

How to Teach Modern Physics

I am teaching high school physics. This month we have been studying Modern Physics. I use a college level textbook because these are classes for gifted students; nevertheless I feel that the subtleties of Modern Physics were not understood.

These are some thoughts on how to do this better.

It is crucial to have interested students, these subjects require thinking, by their nature they are abstract. We do not move at the speed of light nor see quantum objects every day. These subjects are mathematical in nature, and some times even gifted students do not know enough mathematics. My emphasis was conceptual, I had to make analogies to water waves and classical physics concepts, but I felt that the unique character of relativistic quantum objects was not grasped by some students.

All in all I prefer a course in which these notions are presented than one in which they are not. After all we do live in a quantum relativistic universe and we should make an effort to understand it.

Next time around though, I will require more effort on the part of the students to grasp these concepts. I can help, but in the end there is no substitute for good all hard work.

HHH

I read comments on Hawking-Hertog; these gentlemen use Hartle-Hawking.

I read Hawking-Hertog a few days ago. My conclusion is that it is an accomplishment to derive Inflation. Now we should just wait for the other predictions to be vindicated, and we will have one of the first Quantum Gravity theories.

Not just our minds, also experiments are essential to know the truth.

Stephen Hawking says, right now you're actually creating your Past!

Hawking and Hartle's original work on the quantum properties of the cosmos suggested that imaginary time, which seemed like a mathematical curiosity in the sum-over-histories approach, held the answer to understanding the origin of the universe

Hartle-Hawking-Hertog

Good things coming from them.

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Design or Accident?

Prof. Frank Wilczek from MIT writes in the May issue of Physics Today about fundamental constants. Max Planck on discovering the constant that bears his name organized several fundamental constants to calculate what we now know as Planck's length, time, and energy.

As you may remember from school physics, all physical quantities can be expressed in units of length, time, and mass. One could say, that every ponderable object of our physical Universe, at some level is related to deep fundamental notions of space-time-matter.

The question is, are the values of these fundamental constants an accident, or were they "fixed" by some higher being?

There are books written about this question with different answers, here I just add my answer.

This is a meme. I am not going to be completely original. This is just my current version of the answer. By writing it here it becomes part of the noosphere, or blogsphere, or memespace, or memeland.

If you think of Design as the left, and Accident as the right side of the spectrum of answers, mine is veering towards the right. I definitely believe in some design, but it is design by the Universe itself. I do not believe that there was a previous Universe to this one that had a plan for us. I prefer a self contained answer, all in this Universe.

In the beginning the Universe was so simple that it did not have any plans, for itself or for us."US" means sentient living organisms.

I believe in Emergence, from a simple Universe, a more interesting and complex one is constructing itself. The answer is then:

In the beginning there was no plan, all fundamental constants were equally likely, as time passes, and good things are found, they are kept. Good is what remains.

Nowadays all constants have just the right values to keep good things going. I believe in a self-regulated Universe. Constantly tweeking the knobs, until all conditions are right. If we are good, we will be invited to play with the knobs.

We have not been very good. We are taking our house to the brink of destruction. Global Warming is already the result of our careless management of the house we were given. We better believe it, there is no plan for us to stay here, if we don't help it happen, we won't be around to the end of our Solar System.

Moon Representation in Mexico

Old Moon monolith announced yesterday in San Luis Potosi Mexico.

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/05/08/a02n1cul.php

This huge monolith could be 2800 years old.

Cosmology and Elementary Particles

I started my studies on Theoretical Physics with Quantum Electrodynamics. I believed that experiments are the best guide for theoretical speculations. I am surprised though, by the pace of advances in Cosmology in the last thirty years. The Hubble space telescope and other satellite based instruments have increased our knowledge of the Universe tremendoulsy. Now we know that the electron and the photon of my initial studies comprise less than one percent of all the stuff that fills our Universe.

Presently I am reading "The View from the Center of the Universe" by Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams

http://currents.ucsc.edu/05-06/02-27/primack.asp

I have changed my mind, there is much to learn, without using only Earth bound accelerators.

Top Quark Mass

Is the top quark mass relevant?

Read an answer in:

http://qd.typepad.com/6/2005/06/a_new_top_mass_.html

Nuclear Physics

A proton and a neutron form a stable nucleus called deuterium. A free neutron decays in 15 minutes. I wonder if americans and mexicans have a similar relation. Who is the proton and who is the neutron?

NYT on Immigrants

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/opinion/02tue2.html

Interesting

A Day Without an Immigrant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Boycott

What does it mean? How could millions of people that officially are not here, stop economic activites for one day?

digg RSS Widget for Dashboard -- Version 3.0

The widget just got some major updates, including being able to choose which digg.com feed to view, if you want to digg for stories, and the ability to see stories which have been dugg, submitted, on the front page, or commented on by a specific user. The widget also has an optional extended view which lets you view stories' descriptions.

Check it out.

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A Day without Immigrants

This is what the New York Times has to say.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/
AP-Immigration-Glance.html?pagewanted=print