Author: Steve

 

That’s the amount of time Judy spends not thinking about her knee.  It gets stiff overnight and hurts in the morning after sleeping, but mostly it’s not even on her radar anymore.  Replaced less than four months ago, now it’s just a knee that works again!

 

 

 

Have you ever wondered why it’s so easy to drive across Alabama on Interstate 10?  Most of Alabama is a normally-wide state, but it only takes an hour to drive across it along the Gulf Coast.  Look at the map.  Beachfront is always the prime property, but Alabama didn’t get it.  Florida hogged it all.  Alabama got hosed!

 

 

You could look at this and figure “Well, Florida got there first.  They took the best part.”  Understandable, but no.  That’s not how this sad situation came to be.

 

According to Google, in the early 1800s, Georgia was a giant state including what are now Mississippi and Alabama.  Florida (and West Florida) belonged to Spain and spanned the Gulf Coast all the way to New Orleans.  New Orleans was already part of the U.S. as a result of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  The whole west end of then-Georgia was landlocked.  In 1812, the federal government got pissed at Georgia, and didn’t like Spain being in West Florida either, so they marched down and claimed the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Mobile as part of the United States, and partitioned off three equally sized states out of the previously giant Georgia state.  There still wasn’t much waterfront available for Mississippi and Alabama, but they split what was between the two new states.  Spain finally gave up Florida to the U.S. in 1821, but by then the state lines were already established, so the new state of Florida got to keep all that Gulf Coast!

 

Aren’t you glad you asked?

 

 

 

I’ve been tracking this same graph for months.

 

If the line for total cases stays straight, then we’ve got the same number of new cases every day.  For every little bit the line tips to the right, the virus is that much closer to being under control.  However, if the line starts to curve up to the left…

 

 

 

Here is a link to an amazing animation from the New York Times about the coronavirus spread.

 

How the Virus Won

 

Once the page loads, you can scroll down through the text to control the speed the story unfolds.

 

This thing is not done with us yet.  Please everybody, stay safe.

 

 

Today’s topic:  Macrocosm in the Microcosm: Analogies between Materials and Particle Physics.

 

“Echoing the multiverse of the string theorists, every material presents its own set of physical laws that may not have an analogy in the world of our experience.”  Uhhh. Yeah. Right.  Count me in!

 

Free access to this talk on the “Zoom Registration Link” below.  It’s not really a registration, It’s just a click to get there.

 

Steve

 

 

 

2020 Heinz R. Pagels Physics Talks Please join us LIVE ONLINE TONIGHT 5:30 MDT followed by an interactive Q&A     N. Peter Armitage Johns Hopkins University   Macrocosm in the Microcosm: Analogies between Materials and Particle Physics   One of the continuing, but remarkable themes in physics is that concepts and mathematical ideas are repeated in different contexts across vastly different scales of length and time. For instance, there are deep connections between the underlying equations that describe elementary particles and those that describe the physics of materials like superconductors and magnets. Examples abound. For instance, the Higgs mechanism that generates mass was first identified as the phenomenon that prevents magnetic fields from penetrating superconductors. The effects of electric and magnetic fields on a newly discovered class of materials called topological insulators is described by equations that may describe the dark matter that permeates the universe. We also find phenomena in materials that are “like” those of free space, but differ in essential ways. Echoing the multiverse of the string theorists, every material presents its own set of physical laws that may not have an analogy in the world of our experience. In this regard, insight into materials teaches us something deep about the space of possibilities of the kinds of physical laws that can exist.     N. Peter Armitage has been at Johns Hopkins University since 2006. He received his B.S. in Physics from Rutgers University in 1994 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2002. He is a physicist whose research centers on material systems which exhibit coherent quantum effects at low temperatures, like superconductors and “quantum” magnetism. Dr. Armitage’s principal scientific interest is understanding how large ensembles of strongly interacting, but fundamentally simple particles like electrons in solids act collectively to exhibit complex emergent quantum phenomena.   He has been the recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award, an NSF Career Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, was a three time Kavli Frontiers Fellow, the Spicer Award from the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, the McMillan Award from the University of Illinois and 2016 Genzel Prize. He was also the co-chair of the 2014 Gordon Research Conference in Correlated Electron Systems.   Introducer and Co-host: Jennifer Cano, Stony Brook University     Zoom Registration Link   Please register in advance by clicking the Zoom button above, then download and familiarize yourself with Zoom. You’ll be able to ask questions during the Q&A by clicking on the hand at the bottom of your screen. The moderator will call on you.   Join us next Thursday for The Black Hole Information Paradox: A Resolution on the Horizon? with Netta Engelhardt, MIT, introduced by Hong Liu, MIT.   Aspen Center for Physics | 970-925-2585 | patty@aspenphys.org   Donate       Connect with us ‌ ‌ ‌   Talks will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel.

 

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…and a fly lands on your leg.  You brush it off with your hand, but it comes back.  You swat at it to no avail.  It won’t leave you alone.  You pick up a dayglo plastic flyswatter and take a whack at it.  A swing and a miss.  You whack right next to the fly, but he escapes and never comes back.  Nothing else would do the trick but that just did.  The fly just learned. 

 

Another time, another annoying fly.  You pick up a dayglo plastic flyswatter and suddenly the fly is nowhere to be seen.  I suspect that fly has developed an innate sense to avoid dayglo plastic flyswatters.  Instinctive behavior.

 

I wonder about learned behavior and instinctive behavior.  Where does instinctive behavior come from; survival of the fittest; genetically encoded behavior that provides such a survival advantage that the flies that have that behavior outcompete/out-survive all the other flies and they all end up having that trait?

 

And learned behavior only applies to that one fly?  He’s not genetically encoded to be afraid of dayglo plastic things, but he is coded to fly away and not come back if something scary almost kills him?

 

So what exactly is the connection between learned and instinctive behavior; why one and not the other?  Does instinctive behavior always start out as learned behavior?  Given enough time would all learned behavior eventually become instinctive behavior?  Why not?  If you have to learn the same thing every generation endlessly, wouldn’t it be a lot handier if it just became instinctive?

 

You can’t create a hornless breed of cattle by chopping off the horns of every cow and bull before you breed them.  Experiences don’t get encoded in genetics.  Unless they do.  Are some people afraid of snakes, even if they have not had experience with them?  Is that an instinctive reflex?  How did it come about?  Was being naturally repelled by snakes a genetic mutation that provided such a competitive advantage that it replicated more in the people that had it than the people that didn’t?  Or is there a more direct way for experience to make its way into the genetic code?  Is there a path for fears and phobias that is not explained by survival of the fittest?