APS Meeting 2017

This weekend I'm in DC for the "April" meeting of the American Physical Society.  I thought I'd try a sort of slow-motion live blog of the various talks I attend.  I'll be updating this page with my experiences.

Tuesday
Final day of the meeting!  The opening session was on black holes, and I learned some interesting things about black hole entropy (which I've mentioned before).  One of the presenters, Raphael Bousso, emphasized that "This is how we do physics in the US – We have collaborators all over the world," and showed this slide of his colleagues:

 

 (The cat was a stand-in for someone he couldn't get a photo of).  Bousso had a few other quotes I enjoyed:

Physics is the process of describing more and more phenomena with fewer and fewer laws.

Put tea in the fridge, it cools down, while the fridge releases heat and increases entropy.  Same thing happens when you throw the tea in a black hole

I went by the "Contact Congress" booth and sent a copy of the APS letter to my congresspeople – I'm not sure how much effect it will have, since they're all Democrats, but at least they know we're behind them.

I gave my talk in the final session of the day, and it went great!  I got some nice suggestions for future directions from the crowd.  In the same session, someone spoke on using machine learning to identify "chirp" signals in LIGO.  He opened by saying, "Machine learning is not just a plot by Amazon and Google to take over the world.  It's also a data analysis technique."

I had a great time out here, and learned a lot, but I'll be glad to head back to Michigan tomorrow and get back to work on my PhD!



Monday
The opening talk today was on quark-gluon plasmas, and included a medieval-style map suggesting the large space remaining to explore (though I didn't get a very good photo):

I went to a group of LIGO talks after that, which included a demo of this nice tool to compare the sensitivity of different detectors. 

I also went to another series on physics education, this time examining the gender-gap in the field.  One particularly interesting study showed that despite female students scoring better on tests than their male counterparts, they rated their comfort with the material lower.

I finished off the day with a talk on how primordial black holes may explain the effects that are usually assigned to dark matter.  In another case of forced-acronyming, they are called Massive Compact Halo Objects, or MACHOs:

Sunday
Today opened with a speech by Robert Wald, winner of the Einstein Prize:

His talk was on black holes, and included something I'm definitely going to look into further.  You may have heard of Hawking Radiation, a process where a particle/anti-particle pair is created near a black hole, and one falls in, while the other flies off into the rest of the universe.  I didn't realize that the one that falls in is actually already inside the event horizon when it's created, so the escaping particle appears to come from nowhere.

I also went to a session on 21st century teaching techniques.  There was a talk by someone from Brookhaven National Labs advertising the National Nuclear Data Center.  They outlined the enormous searchability of the public database, which detailed possible decay states for nearly every isotope.  After the Fukushima nuclear accident, there was a noticeable uptick of page views.

During lunch, I manned LIGO's outreach booth, answering questions and showing off our tabletop interferometer:

One woman waved as she passed, then said to her friends, "That was a gravitational wave!"

For the afternoon, I took a trip out to Silver Spring, MD to visit my sister Rachel and her husband and kids.  I wish I hadn't been so worn down already, but I got to spend quality time with my niece, and by the time I left, my nephew no longer burst into tears on seeing me (though Rachel insists the tears had more to do with teething than my unfamiliar face).

This evening, I attended a staged reading of the play Reykjavik, about Reagan and Gorbachev negotiating disarmament:

One scene that was particularly interesting in the context of recent events was Reagan arguing for Russia to open its borders, and allow those to come to the US who wish.

Once again, I'm exhausted, but I'll try to be back tomorrow with more!



Saturday
The opening talks were about Science Policy, a depressing topic under the new administration, but one with many opportunities for action.  The first speaker was Cherry Murray:

One line of her speech was particularly resonant for me: "As we know, science is beautiful – That's not why Congress funds it."

Next was Rush Holt, a former Swarthmore professor, and former Congressman.  He spoke on the "erosion of the appreciation of science," and suggested "We should shift from providing the right answer to teaching the right process."

The final speaker in this session was Bill Foster, who had an interesting chart on the backgrounds of different groups of politicians:

He also had this entertaining slide on the different perspectives of scientists and politicians:

(For those too far on one side or the other, it's either "un-ion-ized" or "union-ized")

This evening had a talk by Lord Martin Rees on the future of astronomy and space-exploration.  To go with his noble title, he had a card signed by a variety of Apollo astronauts:

He also showed this "Kepler Orrery" of the huge variety of possible planetary configurations in other star systems.