Physicists at Work and Play

Well, as the really sharp ones among you may have gleaned from a careful reading of my posts on this blog, I like to make sure that there's a bit of fun mixed in with the work whenever I can. Makes the work better, overall. For example, today I got up early, dashed to the top of neighbourhood geographic highlight, Mount Hollywood (ok, I used one of the upper trailheads), and back down, did some shopping at Trader Joe's, and then from 10:15am to 1:00pm brainstormed with three of my students (Arnab, Tameem and Veselin) on campus. (We think we have discovered a new phase transition! Hurrah! More later.) Then in the afternoon, I seem to have done nothing but laundry and floor-sweeping.... Ok, wait. Stop. That last bit's not so fun..... Day not ending well. Hmmm. It's Saturday night, so I think I'm off to either see a movie or go contemplate life (and maybe a bit of physics) in a local bar (probably scaring the clientele). Decisions, decisions. Well, while I figure that out, why don't you verify that I'm not the only one who likes to mix work and play. Happens all the time, you know. Here are hilarious pictures of Alice Shapley (Princeton Prof. of Astrophysics), Chung-Pei Ma (Berkeley Prof. of Astrophysics), and Alison Coil (Arizona Astro postdoc) showing how it's done, during a long night of a Keck observing run. (I found the link by accident while preparing an earlier post.) The Paris Hilton impressions are uncanny! Perhaps we can get them to come and tell us what they were up to, physics-wise? Looks like fun too! [Update: Alice, in the comments, says, "I should mention that in addition to wearing such "fashionable" observing clothes and napping on the sofa in the Keck Observatory Remote Operations room, we were trying to learn about the physical conditions in star-forming regions in galaxies 8-9 billion light years away. The galaxies we targeted were drawn from the DEEP2 redshift survey (a project led by University of California astronomers), which has mapped out a chunk of the Universe at z~1 and is telling us about galaxy properties at that earlier epoch. We were attempting to measure the relative strengths of rest-frame optical emission lines from Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen, which are produced in the regions of ionized gas in which stars form. In such high-redshift galaxies, the lines which have been targeted by traditional optical astronomy for decades get shifted to the near-IR region of the spectrum, and we then use the KeckII near-IR spectrograph (NIRSPEC) to measure them. The relative strengths of these lines can be used to infer the degree of chemical enrichment in the gas from which the stars are forming. But, in turns out that the line strengths we measure actually follow a significantly different pattern from those of galaxies in the nearby universe, which may tell us something very interesting about star formation in the early universe (we're still working on exactly what...)"] -cvj P.S. Looking at the dialogue (who writes that stuff? - It's great!) in the captions to the Astrophysics party linked from Alice and Chung-Pei's pages, I now realise I've been going to the wrong physicist parties all these years. Drat! P.P.S On a more serious side-note, and in view of our discussions of women in physics (see also e.g., here, and here) not so long ago on this blog, notice how more balanced the demographic is in this subfield. Refreshing, frankly. Here's to the future.