Movies
drorzel | November 19, 2016People have been raving about the new movie Arrival, which is an adaptation of Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," which I did a guest lecture on for a colleague's class on science fiction some year ago. It's unusual enough to see a science fiction movie hailed for being smart that Kate and I actually arranged a babysitter for the night, and caught it in the theater.
It's a surprisingly credible effort at adapting a story I would've guessed was unfilmable. I wasn't as blown away as a lot of the folks in my social media feed, though. I think that's largely because I'm too familiar with the…
drorzel | August 14, 2015I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes:
-- What 'Ant-Man' Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped to watch a summer blockbuster. The movie was enjoyable enough, thanks to charming performances from the key players, but the premise is dippy even for a comic-book movie. It does, however, provide a hook to talk about quantum physics, so...
-- Great Books For Non-Physicists Who Want To Understand…
drorzel | June 5, 2015I'm massively short on sleep today, and wasn't going to blog until I saw somebody on Facebook mention that June 5th 1995 is the date of record for the first Bose-Einstein condensate at JILA in Boulder. I couldn't let that pass, so I wrote it up for Forbes:
Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1995, I was a young grad student having just finished my second year at Maryland, and one morning I packed into the conference room at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg (where I worked in the group of Bill Phillips) with most of the rest of the Atomic Physics…
drorzel | May 3, 2015So, Kate and I hired a babysitter last night, and went to see the new Avengers movie. You might not have heard of it, it's kind of obscure...
(There will be some mild SPOILERS below; if you're intensely opposed to that sort of thing, don't read the rest of this...)
So, I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a big mistake to watch this excellent video about Jackie Chan's style yesterday morning:
(in a sorta-kinda related vein, this Max Gladstone blog post is also very interesting...)
Having watched that video in the morning, and its discussion of how Jackie Chan's fight choreography and…
drorzel | May 2, 2015A month or so back, when I went to Vanderbilt to give a talk, I met Robert Scherrer, the department chair down there, who mentioned he was starting a blog soon. That blog is Cosmic Yarns, and has now been live for a while, but I've been too busy to do a proper link. He's using it to look at the science of science fiction, and has a bunch of nice posts up, including a good explanation of why you don't need to worry about giant ants:
Has this ever happened to you? While you are enjoying a relaxing picnic in the New Mexican desert, your lunch is overrun by ants: not ordinary ants, but 12-foot…
drorzel | April 12, 2015The Pip is in a big superhero phase at the moment, and all of his games revolve around being a superhero of some sort. He has also basically memorized a couple of 30-page Justice League books, after demanding them over and over at bedtime. As I did with SteelyKid, I make a game out of reading the wrong words from time to time, and as a result, he can now "read" at least two books all the way through, as you can see from this cell-phone video shot at bedtime:
His superhero pretend games have the bizarre inventiveness you expect from a pre-schooler, mixing and matching from all the various…
drorzel | March 19, 2015We'll be accepting applications for The Schrödinger Sessions workshop at JQI through tomorrow. We already have 80-plus applicants for fewer than 20 planned spots, including a couple of authors I really, really like and some folks who have won awards, etc., so we're going to have our work cut out for us picking the attendees...
We're also discussing the program for the workshop-- more details when we have something more final-- which has me thinking about good examples to use of storytelling involving quantum physics. I'd like to be able to give a few shout-outs to already-existing fiction…
drorzel | March 6, 2015I've updated the detailed blog post describing our summer workshop introducing writers to quantum physics to include a link to the application form. For the benefit of those who read via RSS, though, and don't follow me on Twitter: the application form is now live, and will be for the next few weeks. We expect to make acceptance decisions around April 1.
So, if you make up stories and the idea of spending a few days at the Joint Quantum Institute learning about quantum physics from some of the world's leading experts sounds like fun, well, send us an application.
drorzel | March 3, 2015
A few years back, I became aware of Mike Brotherton's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and said "somebody should do this for quantum physics." At the time, I wasn't in a position to do that, but in the interim, the APS Outreach program launched the Public Outreach and Informing the Public Grant program, providing smallish grants for new public outreach efforts. So, because I apparently don't have enough on my plate as it is, I floated the idea with Steve Rolston at Maryland (my immediate supervisor when I was a grad student), who liked it, and we put together a proposal with their Director of…
drorzel | December 20, 2014We're going to depart from the chronological ordering again, because it's the weekend and I have to do a bunch of stuff with the kids. Which means I'm in search of a story I can outsource...
In this case, I'm outsourcing to myself-- this is a genuine out-take from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, specifically Chapter 2, which tells two stories from the career of Luis Alvarez, who I've talked about before in the context of his experiment to x-ray one of the pyramids at Giza, and the time I wrote him a letter when I was nine about his theory that an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs…
drorzel | November 9, 2014I'm teaching a Gen Ed course on relativity this term, which means I'm spending the last few weeks of the term discussing black holes. Which, in turn, means there was no way I couldn't use that story about Kip Thorne calculating the appearance of a black hole for the movie. Especially since I have the students reading Thorne's book.
And that, in turn, meant I needed to see the movie. So we got a sitter for the kids Saturday night, and went to the local theater to check it out. And, you know, it's pretty much what it's advertised as: A very pretty giant SF movie, with all that implies, both…
drorzel | October 28, 2014As mentioned last week, I was the on-hand expert for the Secret Science Club's foray into Massachusetts, a screening of the movie Particle Fever held at MASS MoCA. This worked out nicely in a lot of respects-- it gave me an excuse to visit the newly renovated Clark Art Institute in Williamstown and check out the spiffy new library at Williams (where they have my second book on the shelves, but not my first; I may need to send them an author copy in lieu of a check this year...). I also did some random nostalgia things like grabbing dinner at Colonial Pizza (now in a strip mall halfway to…
drorzel | October 25, 2014I got the time for the regular hangout wrong, and then we had some weird computer difficulties, so we only had ten minutes for Uncertain Dots this week. Which was enough time for me to say disparaging things about comic book movies, so, you know, if that interests you...
Here's the making of Interstellar story about Kip Thorne.
Here's the Avengers 2 trailer.
Also, a program note: I will be at MASS MoCA tonight talking about Particle Fever, if you'd like to hear me talk about real physics on film, or just take issue with my slagging off comic-book movies in person...
drorzel | October 21, 2014That's "Mass" as in Massachusetts, not the stuff associated with the Higgs field... specifically, North Adams, MA, where I'll be this Saturday night, October 25th, at the Secret Science Club screening of Particle Fever. This will be at the MASS MoCA, tickets here.
The Secret Science Club is a regular gathering in New York City featuring mind-bending lectures, volatile experiments, and thematic chemical libations (special cocktails, that is). It’s like the coolest science class you’ve ever been to, but with drinks and a DJ. SSC rockets into MASS MoCA with a special screening of Particle Fever…
drorzel | May 3, 2014Below you'll find the slides from my Physics Day presentations at Space Center Houston, embedded via SlideShare. I was doing the TED-style minimal text thing, so they're probably not all that comprehensible on their own.
The event was supposed to have a pop-culture connection, so I decided to use space travel and extrasolar planets as a hook for talking about relativity, thus all the movie images near the beginning. The original idea I had was to look at different fictional ways of evading the ban on faster-than-light travel, but they wanted something more in the half-hour range than the hour…
drorzel | April 15, 2014I'm not really a comic-book guy, but I've watched a bunch of comic-book movies recently. Kate was really fired up for the new Captain America movie, so I finally got around to watching the first one as background for that, then when I was sleep-deprived last week I watched the second Thor movie via on-demand cable, then Sunday evening Kate and I went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier in the theater (her second time watching it-- she's really fired up).
Mostly, this has served to confirm that I'm not a comic-book guy. I'm just not invested enough in the idea of a movie about these…
drorzel | March 13, 2014So, last week I idly wondered about the canonical falling-bomb whistle. The was originally intended to be a very short post just asking the question, but I got caught up in thinking about it, and it ended up being more substantial. And leaving room for further investigation in the form of, you guessed it, VPython simulations.
This one isn't terribly visual, so you don't get screen shots, just a link to the code at Gist. It's a simulation of a falling bomb, with air resistance, tracking the velocity as a function of time. Then it calculates a "Doppler shift" using the velocity as a fraction of…
drorzel | March 11, 2014In which Rhett and I talk about Cosmos. What, you thought there would be another topic? We have contractual obligations, you know...
Okay, there were some other topics like Battlestar Galactica (both versions), why so much of what's on Discovery Channel and TLC sucks these days, the flawed astrophysics of Firefly, speculation about how those little infrared thermometers work, and why some kinds of labs are hard.
And Cosmos again. Because, really, how could we not?
drorzel | November 30, 2013"Daddy, I wanna play with the robot dog!"
"It's not a dog, honey, it's an Imperial walker. An AT-AT. A fearsome armored assault transport used to overwhelm the Rebel defenses in the battle of Hoth."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"OK, fine, you can play with the robot dog."
We came down to my parents' for Thanksgiving this year, because both Kate and I are really busy with work at the moment, and didn't need the additional stress of planning and hosting a big dinner. On Friday morning, my dad went up into the attic and dug out the bags containing the vast collection of Star Wars toys my sister and I…
drorzel | October 15, 2013I'm doing a bit of work on an idea for physics outreach, which would involve tying a discussion of modern physics to science fiction stories. I have Opinions about this sort of thing, of course, but I also have readers who might think of things I don't. So, let me throw this out to you all:
What is your favorite example of a science fiction story (here meaning print, movie, or television) making use of ideas from quantum physics? What's your least favorite?
My favorite stories invoking QM ideas are probably Robert Charles Wilson's brilliant "Divided by Infinity" (which I will draw heavily on…