johnkemeny.com

Again.  So Shiva ma Timbas, http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ and buysteal the book.

What is simultaneously the coldest place in the Universe and 100,000 times the temperature of the Sun?  It is also the largest machine ever built – the Large Haldron Collider (LHC) – scheduled for first light beam tomorrow.  Check out the popular rap.  

It will take months to tune the beam to full power, but the LHC’s ATLAS detector should definitively answer the question of whether the Higgs particle exists or not.  Higgs is the famous “God” particle which would explain the reason for mass.  It is the only particle in the Standard Model of Physics yet to be observed. The Atom Smashers is a documentary film of the competition to discover Higgs before the LHC came online.

Equally interesting is the ALICE experiment, pictured above being inserted into the Time Projection Chamber (this is not science fiction!). Instead of smashing protons, ALICE will look at the quark/gluon soup created from smashing something heavier (lead), a recipe that hasn’t existed since shortly after the Big Bang. It may answer questions like why we find the Universe is mostly matter instead of matter/antimatter, and what is that mysterious Dark matter.

You can participate with LHC@home. The voyage begins tomorrow with live video from CERN.

Yesterday Google released their web browser to beta.  It is called Chrome, and, from what I’ve seen, it is great.  Like Joss Whedon’s Serenity, Chrome has an online comic book.   But unlike Whedon’s Firefly-class ship, Chrome is fast – very fast.  And it uses a process per tab instead of a thread per tab – providing better firewalls to thwart security bugs and memory leaks.  This should compete well with IE8 and Firefox 3.

P.S. Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is now available in hi-resolution for free on Hulu.

In a surpreise move, the nominial Republican Presidential candidate, John McCain, choses Washington outsider Palin as his running mate. And I thought you had to be a US citizen.

Leonard Bernstein would be 90 years old today. The best popularizer of music in his day, with the Young People’s Concerts, and, of course, a highly noted conductor, Bernstein was also a great composer. From the amazingly lively Candide composed early in his career (a late recording), to the incredibly rich Mass he created for a commission by the Kennedy’s after his retirement from conducting, his work will live on. Mass was roundly derided by the critics after its opening at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. I saw it at Lincoln Center in New York shortly thereafter and predict it will go down in history as one of the great works.

In 2004 he was the first high school teacher to be an invited speaker at the MAA’s MathFest.  Steve Sigur also co-wrote a book with arguably the most famous mathematician of our time, John H. Conway.  Aside from being a gifted mathematician - as the many testimonies of his students attest [1][2][3][4], Steve Sigur was, for nearly 30 years, a gifted teacher.  When stricken with the same deadly brain cancer that recently afflicted Senator Edward Kennedy, he underwent experimental procedures at Duke University that enabled him to continue teaching for over a year; and incidentally, finish his triangle-shaped-full-color-with-software-included-book, The Triangle Book (not available yet).

As Philip Davis’ 1995 paper (pdf) points out, triangles have a long and rich history, from Euler’s Elements to the work of Emile Lemoine.  To understand beyond 1995 The Modern Geometry of the Triangle you must read Sigur’s paper (pdf).  His web pages are chock full of triangle math and other delights.  But the crown jewel is a set of interviews the Paideia School did with him.  Here he discusses his love for life.

Steve Sigur died last month.

At 5:30 AM 63 years ago today, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brainchild was first tested at the Trinity site in what is now White Sands missile base in New Mexico.  The device, code named “the gadget,” was Plutonium implosion based, because the Uranium version was a sure thing.  Indeed, as President Truman decreed, the next 2 “tests” were over Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and ended WWII).  The ball on the right illustrates the amount of Plutonium 239 needed for the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.

MIT’s “Doc” Edgerton, the father of high speed photography, used his Rapatronic cameras (note the plural – one shot per camera!) to capture the event at microsecond intervals with exposures as short as 10 nanoseconds.  The cameras were based on a sandwich of 2 polarized plates at 90 degrees to each other – blocking 100% of the light; with a filling of a cell that could polarize light at 45 degrees when energized.   Due to the strange nature of light polarization, adding a 45 degree filter between two 90 degree filters actually lets 50% of the light through.  Go figure!

They probably explain it well at the Exploratorium, the best science museum in the country, founded by Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank.  Go read Lawrence and Oppenheimer by Nuel Pharr Davis for the Trinity backstory.  It is a great read.

P.S.  A photo of the initial tenth of a microsecond of the Trinity blast has been on display by Doc Edgerton’s old office in MIT forever.  But, until recently, for security reasons(?), unlike the milk drop crown, it has had no label.  If you go see it, it is unlikely you’d mistake it for a bullet through a balloon!

Simon Plouffe has a new Inverter containing over 2.459 BILLION constants.  A few of the most interesting ones are named after mathematicians.  Can you match the constant with the name(s) without looking?