Tags: Frank Wilczek ·
Nobel
December 3rd, 2004 · Comments Off on Most of my letter to Mia
Hi Mia!
It’s a tradition that the Swedish ambassador to DC invites Nobel
laureates to dinner and arranges White House reception for them
beforehand. The date is set by the White House and you can see (it was
Dec. 1) they put it off until the last possible moment. Six laureates
and spouses in turn shook hands with Bush–we had all* made up our
minds to be polite, because being otherwise wouldn’t help anybody but
could embarass the Swedes, who have been so nice.
Ambassador Jan Eliasson is very impressive, with a background in
diplomacy and mediation:
http://www.swedenabroad.se/pages/general____7038.asp
The announcement that he’d be President of the UN General Assembly is
very recent:
http://www.swedenabroad.se/pages/news____29882.asp&root=6989
In person he is charming, a good speaker, thoughtful, etc. His wife
Kerstin is Deputy Minister for Culture–she comes over from Stockholm
to be part of the DC event each year–he joked that this was one of its
many benefits.
He is also so modest that we didn’t hear about his new UN position
until Justice Sandra Day O’Connor congratulated him in an after-dinner speech.
I also met the more-palatably-politicked Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg–for some reason she was wearing tiny black crocheted gloves. Let’s see, other DC gossip–Condi Rice should
buy bigger or better shoes; she was very trimly dressed but with little
white “ouch” pads peeking over her high heeled shoes where they rubbed
the back of her ankles.
I wish the US had the good luck to be led by somebody like Jan Eliasson.
Love and xxx
Betsy
* I think at least one laureate
supported Bush. Other points of view expressed by “Nobel Laureates
Other Than Frank Wilczek” (NLOTFW): “It’s the office, not the man. It’s
the office, not the man.” “I’ll be polite but I’m not making any small talk.” As it turned
out, small talk was not required. See my next post for more…
Tags: Nobel
December 2nd, 2004 · Comments Off on Frank and Betsy “stuggle” in DC
Why is theoretical physics like like Dungeons and Dragons?
I was picturing basic
levels of understanding as a series of dungeons–you fight your way through one, hoping to find the next.
The 19th century: science was looking at atoms, molecules, periodic
table, yadda yadda…
Then Rutherford
kicked open a hidden door–tiny indestructible atoms turned out to be tinier nuclei under a
fluffy cloud of electrons. A new world to explore, a whole new level.
And so on, yadda yadda, protons to quarks to gluons…of course the
best find, on any level, is the hidden door to the next–like figuring out how the strong interaction works.
Anyway, thanks to Scripps Howard reporter Rebecca Trela for including
me with her Nobel Prize interviews yesterday. Even if she did claim my
husband disagreed with me and found pictures and (non D&D)
metaphors “his biggest helpmates.”
Tags: Nobel
December 1st, 2004 · Comments Off on Republican neckties
Tags: Life, the universe, and everything
November 30th, 2004 · Comments Off on One-party Washington, DC
Elephant neckties but no donkey neckties are for sale in the Wyndham Hotel gift shop. Ninety-nine kinds of George Bush buttons or cute little heart-shaped buttons with Laura Bush on them.
Well, I guess Democrats don’t have much reason to come here unless, for example, the Swedish Ambassador asks them to drop in for dinner.
I realized something on the tiny plane that bounced us from Boston into Ronald Reagan Airport. The reason Republicans were “conservative” for years was that they were out of power. Democrats were running things and spending government money on programs Republicans didn’t want.
Once Republicans started running the country, after 2000 but with power-ups in 2002 and 2004, they used their new power to make some big changes of their own.
Now it’s Democrats wanting things back the way they were.
Tags: Life, the universe, and everything
November 30th, 2004 · Comments Off on We are in a metastable state
Physicists know about lots of phase transitions–“an
abrupt sudden change of one or more physical properties,” says
Wikipedia–for example, ice melts into water–water boils up into
steam–some supercooled substances turn into superconductors….
I’m getting ready for the phase transition from pre-traveling-Betsy to Betsy-in-transit.
I just finished putting our garden to bed for the winter–I know I won’t have another free minute before December 18.
Pre-traveling-Betsy is wearing blue jeans, with one sneaker dripping
water all over the floor. (As I coiled up a garden hose, it soaked my
hosiery.)
In-transit-Betsy, I hope, will look cool and serene. She’ll be wearing a suit in shades of black,
silver, and gray, plus her favorite red
walking shoes. She’ll definitely have dry socks on both feet.
Now, to get past the intermediate state, which seems to be blogging-Betsy….
Tags: Nobel
November 28th, 2004 · Comments Off on “A heavy hand and a foot for pie crust”
Pie crust was one of the few things my mother admitted she couldn’t do.
Old New Englanders called it “a heavy hand for pastry.” She said that
in her case, one foot must be heavy as well.
Harold McGee to the rescue! From today’s New York Times:
“The goal of pie crust is to create
thin, even layers of fat and flour,” he said. “That’s what makes them
flaky. But the usual method isn’t really optimal for that.”
Instead of using his fingers to rub globs of fat into flour, then
dribbling in ice water, Mr. McGee starts with square chunks of cold
butter and a pile of flour on a board. With a rolling pin he presses
and rolls the butter into the flour, flattening it into thinner and
thinner flakes. Occasionally he scrapes the mixture into a bowl and
freezes it for five minutes, to keep the butter from melting. Since the
gluten is not activated until the water is added, there is no worry
about overworking the dough, even though the process can take some time.
Finally, to add the water Mr. McGee fetched a plant mister. “I always
found it was hard to get the water evenly into the dough” he said. “So
I measured how many sprays of the mister it takes to get half a cup of
water it’s 150, by the way…”
McGee is promoting the new revised edition of his scientific cookbook, On Food and Cooking. I definitely want one!
In recent news, PR blogger and newlywed Steve Rubel
says that 15 bloggers were hired to do “product placements” for various
companies. FWIW, I’m not that kind of blogger. When I blog about books (or boots) it’s for fun, not profit.
Tags: Life, the universe, and everything
November 27th, 2004 · Comments Off on My Swedish language emergency kit–and Frank’s
My Swedish* “language emergency kit” covers essentials like finding bathrooms or an Internet cafe. Frank will be facing a much, much bigger challenge.
I just found out this morning he’s agreed to give a “little talk” to
some schoolchildren, ages 7 and up. I’m sure he’ll come up with
something interesting to say–in English, that is. The challenge will then be to
extract a few key words or a sentence that he can also say in Swedish.
Translating “gluon” or “asymptotic freedom” wouldn’t make the words any less Greek to a bunch of young Swedes.
At the opposite extreme, Frank could memorize a Swedish version of Churchill’s “Never give up speech“.* *
One can never go wrong with “thanks very much”, but it isn’t very surprising.
I look forward to seeing what Frank comes up with!
* We spent time in Uppsala last summer, thank heaven–so I already got past my original Muppet-Swedish-chef-Swedish.
* * According to legend, Churchill’s speech to the students at Harrow
School ran as follows: “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, give
up. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up.” Then he sat down
again.
Tags: Nobel
November 26th, 2004 · Comments Off on Prelude to the Arctic
Once Nobel Week is over, Frank and I will head north for a week of auroras and anti-midnight non-sun. Swedish physicist Sverker Fredriksson
has been sending us fascinating email about what to expect–today I got
permission to post some. So here he is, my first-ever guestblogger.
Hi
Betsy and
Frank,
I
am mailing you from the Gothenburg airport while waiting for the bus to
Boras. I missed the previous one because we arrived one hour late due
partly to the snow yesterday, partly to the ice today. There is only
one shuttling aircraft between Lulea and Gothenburg, and it collects
delays during the day. And this time even overnight. The last one
yesterday was so late that they had to let the crew sleep this
morning, and took off one hour late. Then they had to de-ice the wings,
which normally takes just a few minutes. However, 7am is rush-hour from
Lulea, with four airlines, so we had to stand in line for another 30
minutes, waiting to be sprayed.
The good thing is that this
brought me one hour at the airport internet café. The bad thing is that
this gives me one hour less with my wife.
Anyway, we “dog people” seem to have the same view of our darlings. My wife always jokes that Qrispin
is reading the newspaper’s gossip column when he checks out which dog
has done what since he read it last time. Qrispin is not the least
interested in a shoot-out on TV, or someone making a noise in our
apartment house. But he can stand still for minutes to sort out all
details around one spot on the lawn. And that is even if he can clearly
see the other dog 50 meters ahead.
As you know dogs have some 250,000 times better “noses” than we
have. It is even claimed that they can detect one single molecule. I
try to train Qrispin to tell one single free quark, but he probably
knows that they are only asymptotically free, and not worth the effort.
I am amazed that your dog is 16 years old, and still so cute! My
wife and I are a little depressed over Qrispin’s 12.5 years, because in
the books most races are predicted to live only until the age of 14. We
hope that these predictions are as wrong as the one we heard when we
bought a little rabbit 20 years ago (Stumper). We counted on “5-7
years” but he became 12 until he died of high age. We think this had to
do with his habbit of eating bacon chips, After Eight mints, art books
and electric cables.
I have seen balloon launches* only on TV,
but sometimes we see them in the northern sky from Lulea, when they
have reached their operating altitudes of some 35 km. There they look
like very bright stars. Every time they are sent up, people phone the
authorities and report UFOs. I do not know yet who owns the balloon of
mid-December, but there is a fair chance that it is NASA. They have
decided to use Kiruna for scientific balloons that will fly to Alaska.
Normally
the wind here blows to the east, so that balloons are taken down just
before the Ural mountains. I guess that NASA balloons have to wait for
specific weather types.
About weather: We had a one-week period of unusually cold weather in both
Lulea and Kiruna
– down to -22C where I live, and even -27C in Kiruna. Now it is up to a
more normal -3 to -5. Here on the west coast it is +8 just now, which
is comparable to a cold summer night in northern Sweden. The year my
wife and I moved to Lulea, August had a mean temperature of +8C, which
was the coldest summer for decades. On the other hand, two years ago we
hade a week of more than +30C, with a record +35C one day. Remember
that this is as far north as northern Alaska or northern Greenland. An
advantage is that the air here is always dry, which is a comfort both
with cold and warm weather. In other words we do not have New York
weather.
That’s all for this internet café!
Best regards,
Sverker
* We are hoping to see a stratospheric balloon launched from Esrange during our visit.
Tags: Nobel
