per second per second

I started reading James Joyce's Ulysses yesterday, on the flight home from the COMEX6 conference.  I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, excepting one of the best novels of all time, but I was was a little surprised to find some musing on that difficulty in basic physics of understanding of weight as a force:

What is weight really when say the weight?  Thirtytwo feet per second, per second.  Law of falling bodies:  per second, per second.  They all fall to the ground.  The earth.  It's the force of gravity of the earth is the weight.

COMEX6: Days 2-5

After writing a post following the first day of the COMEX6 conference, I've not given a day-by-day account, and now the conference is coming to an end.  I'm glad I came.  I have a to-do list (consisting of 22 items) based on things I have heard in the presentations, people I've talked to, ideas that have come to me based on discussions between the attendees.  I always come away from conferences full of ideas and enthusiasm, and the trick is now to follow at least some of it up to keep the momentum going.

Last night was the conference dinner.  I was a bit aghast when I learnt that the earliest coach leaving back for the hotel would be at 11pm.  That's well past my bedtime these days.  But it was all fine.  I'm not at my most comfortable in social situations, but I had a good time, and the vegetarian food options were really good (excepting amuse bouche of oysters, which I did not let amuse my bouche).  There was enforced fun in the form of group drumming.  I wasn't taking a video of that because I was drumming, but the attached video is an excerpt of the professional drummer who was part of the team leading the fun. 

COMEX6: Day 1

We've had a first, and rather full, day at the COMEX6 conference.  From the hotel at 7:45 to get a bus to iThemba Labs, who are organising the conference (though for the rest of the week we will use the hotel conference room, so no busing back and forth).  The labs are about a 30m ride from downtown Cape Town, and are a fairly typical nuclear physics facility with their big buildings housing accelerators, and their own unique set of animals wandering around outside (different from GANIL's many rabbits) .  The conference room is great, with probably the most comfortable lecture room seats I have come across.  Well done iThemba Labs.

As at most conference, they handed out a pad of paper on which we delegates can make notes.  No doubt we don't all use it:  some will not make notes, some will do it on computer or in their own notebooks.  I did make notes, filling up about half the 50-page A5 notebook, as well as start a list of calculations I can make that relate to the talks (that's taken up one of the pages, so far).  So plenty of interesting ideas out there in the conference for me.  I've started some of the calculations going, to try to understand the question posed in the title of one of the talks; "Are the molybdenums fluffy too?"  If course, the answer given in the talk follows the rule that the answer to questions posed in the title of science talks is "no".

The day ended with a tour of the lab, during which I took the pictures posted here.  Then we had the poster session and a dinner, which was mostly a braai (a kind of barbecue) except for us vegetarians, who got vegetable curry.  Yummy.

Puns in author lists

A tweet, below, that I saw yesterday asks (jokingly, I assume) for potential scientific collaborators just to make amusing author lists:

Searching for a scientist named 'Spice' with which to write a Shugar & Spice paper. Please send my way.

— Dan Shugar (@WaterSHEDLab) October 27, 2018

There is already a famous example in nuclear (astro-)physics: The Alpher, Bethe, Gamow paper whose author list was partly contrived to make a play on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet.

With my surname (Stevenson) I don't see much scope for good co-authorship puns.  Perhaps I should marry my partner, and take her surname, Fox.  Then I can collaborate with a Hunt, Hunter, Cub or Trot (if those are even names), or perhaps just changed my title to "Fantastic Mr".

Readers, are you aware of any other such punning author lists, or have any aspirations of your own?

COMEX6

 I'm in Cape Town for COMEX6: COllective Motion in nuclei under EXtreme conditions.  I've not been to sub-saharan Africa before, and this is about as sub as it gets, I guess.  I have been a sporadic attender of the COMEX conference because part of my work involves studying giant resonances -- excited states of nuclei which are collective, meaning many or all the protons and neutrons in the nucleus are acting together in the excitation.  In particular, my most recent PhD student and I looked at the magnetic spin-dipole excitation, and how often-neglected terms in the nuclear interaction have a strong effect on the structure of these excitations.  We put a paper up on the arXiv about it (https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07823) last year.  Now, here in Cape Town while immersed in the topic, may be the time I do one final supplementary calculation on the results in that paper to get it finally published in a journal.

People's Vote March

Today I was one of the c.650,000 people who marched in central London, hoping to push for a vote on any final deal on Brexit.  Hopefully a "Leave with the presented deal, or Remain" kind of vote.  Not only were there a lot of people there, but what seemed to me a very wide cross section of people.  Clearly in terms of age there were, but also in terms of, say, proxies on social indicators and lifestyles such as dress.  In other words, it wasn't a group of semi-professional protestors, but a lot of people frustrated at the omnishambolic brexit route we are currently heading down.  Guess we'll see if it has any effect.

Piers review

Since my last post about my contribution to Piers Morgan's #papoosegate, I have found myself appearing in various places in the media.  

Here I am in Huffington Post; here in BuzzFeed; here MSN; here bento.de.

Fortunately, though media attention can be unwelcome, it is not the dads with children in slings who are being mauled here.  The whole thing is somewhat silly, prompted by a ridiculous statement from Piers Morgan that couldn't be left unchallenged.  The men who are walking round carrying their children in slings are not heroes.  We are just doing what we are supposed to -- parenting.  Too bad that some prominent men try to put us off doing it.