YouTube video by UC Santa Barbara

Well, I can now officially mention that I've been part of the filmmaking team (in a way) working hard to bring you an enjoyable and interesting Fantastic Four movie! I think it has been about two and a half years (?) since this all began. This was a nearly perfect model of how science consulting can work in film. I worked with everyone, wherever I was needed, with the director, writers, producers, director of photography, VFX teams, set design, and so on. They made me feel welcome and part of whatever creative team I was talking to, which was great. They were open to lots of ideas right from when they were starting out thinking about tone, story ideas, and so forth, right through to final (key) tweaks right at the end of the process as recently as mere weeks ago. It began early on with with having great conversations Matt Shakman and his writing team about the fact that Reed Richards is first and foremost a curiosity-driven physicist (and so quite different from the engineer we have in Tony Stark that we see RdJ bring out so well), and how things like his dedication to his work (and his outlook on things that comes from such work) might play out in terms of family dynamic, personal relationships, etc., - Without it turning into the tedious cliches about scientists somehow not being able to navigate the world of human relationships. Obviously, I could speak to this as a physicist who works on precisely the things Reed works on, as well as a family man, and as well as someone who remembers that it's still all about telling a story. And there are so many stories to tell at that intersection... Anyway, I think these early conversations (as well as suggestions I made in many sets of notes along the way) helped inform (even if only a little bit? who knows?) what Pedro Pascal brought to the character. This aspect of the film is one of the things I'm most pleased about seeing up on screen. Beyond that, you'll see lots of things I gave them that I'm also delighted to see made it to the film, in many scenes. This includes (but not limited to!): [...] Click to continue reading this post →

Some years ago I speculated that it would nice if a certain mathematical object existed, and even nicer if it satisfy an ordinary differential equation of a special sort. I was motivated by a particular physical question, and it seemed very natural to me to imagine such an object... So natural that I was sure that it must already have been studied, the equation for it known. As a result, every so often I'd go down a rabbit hole of a literature dig, but not with much success because it isn't entirely clear where best to look. Then I'd get involved with other projects and forget all about the matter. Last year I began to think about it again because it might be useful in a method I was developing for a paper, went through the cycle of wondering, and looking for a while, then forgot all about it in thinking about other things. Then, a little over a month ago at the end of March, while starting on a long flight across the continent, I started thinking about it again, and given that I did not have a connection to the internet to hand, took another approach: I got out a pencil and began mess around in my notebook and just derive what I thought the equation for this object should be, given certain properties it should have. One property is that it should in some circumstances reduce to a known powerful equation (often associated with the legendary 1975 work of Gel'fand and Dikii*) satisfied by the diagonal resolvent $latex {widehat R}(E,x) {=}langle x|({cal H}-E)^{-1}|xrangle$ of a Schrodinger Hamiltonian $latex {cal H}=-hbar^2partial^2_x+u(x)$. It is: $latex 4(u(x)-E){widehat R}^2-2hbar^2 {widehat R}{widehat R}^{primeprime}+hbar^2({widehat R}^prime)^2 = 1 .$ Here, $latex E$ is an energy of the Hamiltonian, in potential $latex u(x)$, and $latex x$ is a coordinate on the real line. The object itself would be a generalisation of the diagonal resolvent $latex {widehat R}(E,x)$, although non-diagonal in the energy, not the [...] Click to continue reading this post →

As PST ART winds down, join us for Open House, a free, day-to-night exploration of art and science presented by Getty. Highlights include the taping of a...