Scientific Haute Cusine

The chefs Roca at the Science Center - Harvard

The new edition of some very interesting public lectures at the Science Center@Harvard started last week. A full auditorium today shows how the scientists can reach out and explain physical phenomena in simple things like cooking. World-class chefs cook and explain their cooking techniques and a scientist illustrates one of the ideas involved. If you are around you can see the upcoming events of Cooking&Science lectures. They prepared distilled chocolate ice-cream with liquid nitrogen for us today and we even got the chance to try it!

Mars relentless curiosity

In three hours the new robot Curiosity will land on Mars. This event will be broadcasted live on NASA's tv and other places like Times Square in New York City. 

Although humans have sent several robots already and we have a very good idea of its red hilly landscape there are many unknowns. The new US$ 2.5 billion robot will focus in trying to see whether Mars had the right conditions to support life.

Mars is smaller than the Earth, has its own atmosphere and is 6 months away for an astronaut to travel from the Earth. Therefore, if something interesting comes up maybe in 2030's we will put a step on it. For now, we can continue dreaming in buying a house and moving into Mars and if you are curious like me you can explore Mars in 3D directly with the really cool downloadable Google Earth program.

Theoretical Physics get's posh

While it is not true that "Physicists are rarely wealthy or famous[...]" as the NYTimes article
points out --  some of which include A. Einstein, A. Merkel and J.Simons -- it is true that rarely they receive a lump of millions just because.  This past week 9 prizes were awarded (each for a value of US$ 3 million dollars). The Leatures include: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Alan Guth, Alexei Kitaev, Maxim Kontsevich, Andrei Linde, Juan Maldacena, Nathan Seiberg, Ashoke Sen and Edward Witten.

Click to see the link.

If curious, check out the web-page of the Fundamental Physics Prize because this award will be awarded annually and it doubles the amount awarded with the Nobel prize.

I AMsterdam String Workshop 2012

During the last two weeks I participated in the 2012 edition of the Amsterdam String Workshop. Old and new faces were attending daily. A light format of two talks per day ( you can check the program here ) made it easy to interact and discuss with collaborators.

Traditions: the Cargese Summer School

Everyone working in high energy physics has attended at least once the Cargese Summer School held every two years since 1972 at the Institut d'Etudes Scientifiques in Corecega, France. I had the chance this year to attend and the lecturers included:

T. Banks (UCSC),  Z. Bern (UCLA),  E. Bergshoeff (Groningen),  H. Elvang (Michigan),  M. Gaberdiel (ETH), S. Grushevsky (Stony Brook),  A. Hanany (Imperial College),  R. Janik (Cracow),  Z. Komardogski (IAS and Weizmann Institute),  S. Minwalla (TIFR),  K. Schalm (Leiden),  A. Strominger (Harvard),  S. Vandoren (Utrecht).

During the traditional Gong show we  -- the participants -- had to explain in only two minutes what we are working on. I was first and this is my very compressed presentation on my latest paper arXiv:1204.1284   ---->



Can you guess who the person behind the camera is as well as who the moderator (on the right) and the chairman (on the left) are ???

Everyone has something to say on the Higgs. Also Juan Maldacena.

Early start for many and even queuing overnight to get a spot in the main auditorium @CERN as we could see throughout the internet. After a couple of hours the message was out: a new particle with a mass of 126 GeV had been discovered and everything hints that it is the spinless Higgs boson. We will have to wait for the complete analysis of CMS and ATLAS (both experiments @CERN) to know the details such as its spin to really declare that it is The Higgs. But the mass of this particle is a very good start! More details on the measurements will be presented -- 9am CMS and 9:15am ATLAS -- on Saturday in the conference in Australia that can be followed live: ICHEP2012 webcast. WARNING: the conference is in Australia EST-timezone so check your local time.

There was a lot of excitement after the talks and everyone had something to say. In our community the most famous person is Juan Maldacena and he had a newspaper article today in the argentinean newspaper La Nacion and as he says much remains to be elucidated. Check Juan Maldacena's newspaper article in spanish or this one translated into english.

Rumour Has It: Higgs spotted

There are not to many times in a physicist life in which a major discovery is made. Tomorrow at 9am (Europe) one of this onetime events is scheduled. As everything indicates a joint announcement between CMS and ATLAS of more than 5 sigma proclaiming that they have found the Higgs particle will take place. Everyone is invited to watch the LHC-webcast @CERN although as I have found out from the BBC there are also very special guests. These are the authors of the three 1964 theoretical papers where the existence of this particle was predicted. I had a look this week and this is how story was written:

1) on June 26 the first paper was submitted to PRL by Englert+Brout (published on Aug. 31)
2) on Aug. 31 the second paper was submitted to PRL by Higgs alone (published on Oct. 19)
3) on Oct. 18 the third paper of the saga was submitted to PRL by Guralnik+Hagen+Kibbles (published on Nov. 16)

The expectations are huge and the rumors do have it all: Higgs spotted @ the airport in his way to Geneva.

For me this is very special.  Many years ago, while bored reading about particles on a popular science book during summertime in Argentina I found out about the missing Higgs particle and decided that I was going to become a theoretical physicist.

London Black Holes Workshop

Three weeks ago I attended the Branes and Black Holes Workshop at King's College London in association with one of the Newton Institute programs.  It was a big workshop with around 80 participants (not many from the London/Cambridge area though). There were many interesting talks and judging from the different discussions during breaks the most popular ones were the ones by Andy Strominger on "Progress on dS/CFT" and Finn Larsen on "Conformal Symmetry for General Black Holes". Two of the talks were based on my current research on the role played by the black hole's inner horizons: "Black Holes Monodromy" and my talk " Universal properties and the first law of black hole inner mechanics" which you can browse here.

A+A- on Prezi

Keep tuned the Cargese Summer School report comes next!

Harvard Gra-dua-tio

With great curiosity I observed today the different rituals of Havard's Commencement Day (Graduatio in latin as in some of the traditional speeches I heard today) which started with a campus wide early breakfast at 6:45 am. There were speeches and music before and after each Diploma Awarding Ceremony of every School. Later, in the afternoon, walking through the Yard filled with now ex-alumni in crimson/black gowns and proud parents I could feel in the atmosphere their excitement and bitter sweet emotions.

Networking in Argentina

I came back yesterday from my trip to Argentina. 

At the Colegio Eucaristico
de La Plata, Argentina.

My inspirational "Horizons" talk (in spanish) on Friday at the Colegio Eucaristico of La Plata went very well. After the talk many students came to ask questions on black holes and scientific careers -- see the picture on the side. I made an emphasis on those careers in science, such as geophysics and astrophysics, that enjoy nowadays of 0% unemployment rate after graduation.  The article "Four careers with 0% unemployment" says the same thing!

On a social gathering on Saturday I met Dr. Julio Cesar Alak, currently Argentina's Minister of Justice and Human Rights (Ministro de Justicia y Derechos Humanos de la Nacion). He was curious about my academic trajectory and aware of the efforts of the government on attracting scientist living abroad back to Argentina. The main challenge in this task is to assure the research future of the returning scientists.