Mitt liv som Tobin

There's a cool photo tour of the Caltech 40m lab on Wired News!

The text is a bit confused at many points, but the photos are good.

Photo taken by Keenan (one of our summer students) at the 40m interferometer this summer.

There's an interesting interview with Kip Thorne [pdf, 4mb] in the November issue of Discover Magazine. Here's an excerpt:

A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time. It may have been created by an imploding star. But the star's matter is destroyed at the hole's center, where space-time is infinitely warped. There's nothing left anywhere but warped space-time.

A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado. It has time slowing as you approach the hole's edge, the so-called horizon, and then inside the horizon, time flows toward and into the singularity, dragging everything that's inside the horizon forward in time· to its destruction.

Looking at a black hole from the outside, it will bend light rays that pass near it, and in this way it will distort images of the sky. You will see a dark spot where nothing can come through because the light rays are going down the hole. And around it you will see a bright ring of highly distorted images of the star field or whatever is behind it.

For further reading http://www.black-holes.org/ might have some good stuff.

Today I went up on a demo ride with the Caltech Aero Club, which is based at the nearby El Monte airport (EMT), a cute general aviation airport a few miles from here. If I were staying in Pasadena I'd be mighty tempted to take up flying lessons with them. Here's a photo of the Caltech campus as seen out the window of Cessna 172 N19760 this afternoon.

The airport looks to have a pretty good diner too, Annia's Kitchen.

Another thing I wanted to tell you about is the steam tunnels at Caltech. Some undergrads took Korbi and me on a tour. The tunnels here are nothing like the Berkeley tunnels, which are cramped and dank and the steam pipes blast dangerous hot steam from leaks. The Caltech tunnels are pristine and luxurious, and, unlike the Berkeley tunnels, they seem to go everywhere. The undergraduates leading our tour went barefoot, which would be unthinkable in the Berkeley tunnels. The tunnels are haunted by relics of Ditch Day stacks, one of which involved a green laser, epoxied to the ceiling, its beam zig-zagging down a concrete tunnel, bouncing off mirror fragments epoxied to the walls, just like a laser breakbeam security system in some movie. We emerged in some hallway where the tech students bought ice cream from a vending machine that involved a robotic arm with a pneumatic suction grip. Outside, two girls in dresses frolicked in the "gene pool" fountain (so named for its tile mosaic of the double helix).

The movie Real Genius is essentially all true.

A couple weeks ago I announced to the summer students, "We should cook dinner together!" With Bree in New York and Jeff an absentee housemate, I'm left to fend for myself. But group cooking (and eating) sounds fun, whether at a co-op or among summer students.

"Okay, you first!" Sonia, one of the summer students, announced in reply. "Cook dinner for us on Friday!"

And so I was immediately roped in to my own scheme.

It went excellently. We departed work early on Friday (7:30 pm!) and quickly descended upon the Armenian grocery store, where, hungry, we eagerly filled our basket with everything that was conceivably related to making pizza. For the pizza substrate, we picked a big round piece of (presumably) Armenian bread--I think it was called "Pourri"--and a couple bags of pita for good measure.

The pizza turned out excellently. This mysterious annular bread made a delicious crust, and we covered it in tomatoes, artichoke hearts, zuchini, garlic, olives, mushrooms, mozarella, and I forget what else. We should have taken a better picture of it.

A view of about half of the Alpine Club's Bouldering Cave

It turns out that in the battlements of Caltech's gym, there is an awesome bouldering cave, maintained by the Alpine club. It's a plywood palace of rock climbing holds. Very fun. The summer students (Sonya in particular) are awesome for finding all of these activities and cajoling me into participating. On Tuesday they went skydiving--solo, not even tandem!--but I did not join them for that. It was very apropos, however, for our research group, which is, after all, researching gravity.

Tomorrow I am cooking dinner with the summer students. I'm not sure what. Crepes? Tabouli? It makes me so rampant-nostalgic for Camp CERN cooking in my former life as a professional summerstudent.

Last night (July 4th) I attended Rob's 30th birthday party, held at an awesome house in some hills above Huntington Blvd, from which vantage we took in several hours of awesome (illegal) fireworks, courtesy the various neighbors.

Today some summer science program for supergifted highschool kids came through our lab for a tour. I gave a tour for half of them and Alan Weinstein the other half. They were pretty awesome, and even sported awesome accents--I guess they were gathered from world-round--with which they asked me numerous questions, some of which I couldn't begin to answer (clearly they had heard some things about string theory) but about the LIGO stuff they caught on immediately. For instance, I told them about optical cavities and how they can be used to build up power, stabilize length, and filter frequencies, and they nodded enthusiastically and scribbled down notes. One girl found a screw on the floor and asked if she could keep it as a souvineer (baffled, I just took it away); one guy asked if we could keep in contact and got out a piece of paper to write down my email address, but their program leader person ushered them out the door so fast I wasn't able to give it to him--I felt bad about that. Overall their program was kind of ridiculous in trying to shove them through our lab so fast for a tour--I had like 10 minutes to explain all of LIGO, and they were very interested. I walked with their group as they went to their next destination, answering more questions. These kids could have spent a week at Caltech but they only had an afternoon. Apparently last year one of them asked, "With so much optical power, don't you have a problem with radiation pressure?" Rana beams when he tells this story. He says, he wanted to say, "quit high school and be my grad student." (Instead he has me!)

I kind of want to write "the cartoon guide to LIGO". (As my thesis?!)

Everything I know about Caltech I learned from the movie Real Genius and it is all true. Last night: Interhouse party. The four "south houses" all threw parties. University sponsored, I guess. The theme at Blacker House was "Soviet Russia." They flooded their courtyard, making a moat that glowed the color of antifreeze. Centered in this: the deck of a (life-size?) submarine w/ conning tower provide dance floor. Home-made snow machine to create authentic snow-stricken soviet landscape. Manequin of Lenin, in glass, forms bar, over which copious quantities of alcohol are served. War Games projected onto wall. Etc. Similarly elaborate constructions at other houses as well. At Dabney House I Saw Hawks In LA played. Danced.

Further notes:
* However, they should have had a hot tub.
* Is it still possible to see this comet?!
* Why can't I find any photos of this party? Don't Caltech students use Flickr?

Via their couchsurfing profile, I just found out about the Mentor House, which seems to be an awesome little pseudo-coop at Caltech. But it may have been demolished. Enquiries have been sent.

I met with Adrian today and he presented and I agreed to the whole Louisiana Plan. I wish there were some source of informed yet impartial advice on these things, because it's so hard to know what's right, what's best. But for now I'm moving to California in January and then to Louisiana six months later and the Girl is coming too. I've always had a Plan before but this seems so much a shot in the dark. It's an adventure that leads I don't know where and the plan may yet change before it is realized, but this is how it lays before us for the time being. I talked to the Girl on the phone tonight and she was excited, as am I, about the heading out, the packing up of the car and the heading out into the world. This is how it plays.