Posts Tagged ‘Pi Day’
“You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”*…
The quest for room-temperature superconducting seems a bit like the hunt for the Holy Grail. A superconductor is a material that will transmit electricity with no resistance– thus very quickly and with no loss. (Estimates of loss in the U.S. electric grid, most of it due to heat loss from resistance in transmission, range from 5-10%; at the low end, that’s enough to power all seven Central American countries four times over.) Beyond that (already extraordinary) benefit, superconductivity could enable high-efficiency electric motors, maglev trains, low-cost magnets for MRI and nuclear fusion, a promising form of quantum computing (superconducting qubits), and much, much more.
Superconductivity was discovered in 1911, and has been the subject of fervent study ever since; indeed, four Nobel prizes have gone to scientists working on it, most recently in 2003. But while both understanding and application have advanced, it has remained the case that superconductivity can only be achieved at very low temperatures (or very high pressures). Until the mid-80s, it was believed that it could be established only below 30 Kelvin (-405.67 degrees Farenheit); by 2015, scientists had gotten that up to 80 K (-316 degrees Farenheit)… that’s to say, still requiring way too much cooling to be widely practical.
So imagine the excitement earlier this month, when…
In a packed talk on Tuesday afternoon at the American Physical Society’s annual March meeting in Las Vegas, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, announced that he and his team had achieved a century-old dream of the field: a superconductor that works at room temperature and near-room pressure. Interest was so intense in the presentation that security personnel stopped entry to the overflowing room more than fifteen minutes before the talk. They could be overheard shooing curious onlookers away shortly before Dias began speaking.
The results, published in Nature, appear to show that a conventional conductor — a solid composed of hydrogen, nitrogen and the rare-earth metal lutetium — was transformed into a flawless material capable of conducting electricity with perfect efficiency.
While the announcement has been greeted with enthusiasm by some scientists, others are far more cautious, pointing to the research group’s controversial history of alleged research malfeasance. (Dias strongly denies the accusations.) Reactions by 10 independent experts contacted by Quanta ranged from unbridled excitement to outright dismissal…
Interesting if true– a paper in Nature divides the research community: “Room-Temperature Superconductor Discovery Meets With Resistance,” from @QuantaMagazine.
* Richard Feynman
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As we review research, we might pause, on Pi Day, for a piece of pi(e)…
… in celebration of Albert Einstein’s birthday; he was born on this date in 1879.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
“It’s exact and indefinite. It’s like pi– you can keep figuring it out and always be right and never be done”*…
It’s Pi Day! What better way to “prove” 3.14 than with that most perfect of pies– pizza!
Via the ever-illiminating Boing Boing.
See also: “Pi Day: How One Irrational Number Made Us Modern.”
* Peter Schjeldahl, quoting the painter John Currin
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As we celebrate the irrational, we might recall that it was on this date in 1958 that “Tequila” hit the top of the pop charts (sales and radio plays, both pop and R&B).
“All numbers are by their nature correct. Well, except for Pi, of course. I can’t be doing with Pi. Gives me a headache just thinking about it, going on and on and on and on and on…”*…
It’s Pi Day!
In celebration, a few amusing– and illuminating– links:
10 stunning images show the beauty hidden in pi
How to Memorize Pi if You’re a Word Person (from whence, the image above)
* Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
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As we enumerate endlessly, we might pause for a piece of pi(e)…
… in celebration of Albert Einstein’s birthday; he was born on this date in 1879.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
“To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all.”*…
Douglas Coupland, “Slogans for the 21st Century”
… Evangelical Christians look to the book of Revelations for clues as to what’s to come next; the secular world looks to contemporary art, which seems to operate in a world that has calcified into a self-propagating MFA‑ocracy as orthodox as any extremist religion. But when did making art and foretelling the future become the same thing? What’s the rush? The rush is already coming at us quickly enough. The future of art has to be something that will give us bit of slow. And I hope that it happens quickly…
From an essay by artist and novelist/essayist Douglas Coupland, “What is the Future of Art?”
* Pablo Picasso
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As we celebrate, on 3.14.16, both Pi Day and Einstein’s birthday, we might send ontological birthday greetings to Maurice Merleau-Ponty; he was born on this date in 1908. a phenomenological philosopher who was strongly influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty wrote about perception, art, and politics in the service of understanding the constitution of human experience and meaning. He served on the editorial board of Sartre’s Les Temps modernes. His work has been widely influential, from Hubert Dreyfus’s use of Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the seminal What Computers Can’t Do, to the rise of French, then European feminism. At his death (in 1961) he was working towards an understanding of “Ecophenomenology,” suggesting in notes left behind the need for “a radically transformed understanding of ‘nature'”: “Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother… Nature as the other side of humanity (as flesh, nowise as ‘matter’).”
“It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen”*…
The 70s began with a wave of dystopian sci-fi and culminated with Star Wars and the birth of the modern blockbuster. The British Film Institute has collected some of the decade’s most stunning posters; see them at “The Best 70s Sci-Fi Film Posters.”
(Then move into the 80s here…)
* “Alex” (Malcolm McDowell), A Clockwork Orange
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As we prop our eyes open, we might spare a thought for Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon– or, as he was better known, Val Lewton; he died on this date in 1951. Having washed out as a journalist as a young man, Lewton wrote a best-selling pulp novel No Bed of Her Own (later used for the film No Man of Her Own, with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. He parlayed that success into a job at MGM, where he got close to David O. Selznick, working as Selznick’s assistant (and as an uncredited writer on Gone With the Wind).
But it at his next job, as head of RKO’s horror department (from 1942-46), that Lewton made his mark. The job was well-paid, but came with three conditions: each film had to come in under a $150,000 in cost, each was to run under 75 minutes, and his supervisors would supply the film titles. His first feature was Cat People, released in 1942 (and rooted in Lewton’s own gatophobia). Directed by Jacques Tourneur, who subsequently also directed I Walked With a Zombie (loosely based on Jane Eyre!) and The Leopard Man for Lewton, Cat People cost $134,000, but earned nearly $4 million– the top moneymaker for RKO that year.
Lewton’s early horror films were artistic as well as commercial successes; they are now widely-admired classics– almost Jacobean in their skillful cultivation of tension and powerful use of off-screen menace and violence. But he was a victim of his own success. Pushed to move on to A films, Lewton floundered, never recovering the artistic (nor the box office) success that he achieved in the looser world of B movies.
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