Hello Quantum Fans of Science,
I hope you had a great week of lunar stuff. I did manage to catch the Beaver Moon Eclipse through some openings in the clouds. It is always amazing to see natural phenomena that I would miss unless someone figured out when and where to watch it. I’d like to take a positive look at some of the wonders of science that we can be thankful for. Linn, a good friend of mine reminded me of how impressed he was by Postcards from Mars last week. I had missed it because I was checking out the Museum of the Moon instead. Today after another reminder I watched it. I really encourage you to watch it as well. It really covers a lot of what I love so much about science. 118 years ago humans finally got off the ground by harnessing some energy, and studying how birds used it. Now we have “tools” wandering the solar system making amazing discoveries and inspiring us to dream about what we might actually do in the future. This Dec 14 will be the 121st anniversary of the release of a study that earned a Nobel Prize in 1918. That was one point of discovery in the history of quantum mechanics. This started a revolution in science that along with replacing the slide rule, created the new tools we needed to get to today. Still, in 1970 it was a Pickett N600-ES that was used to do the math to figure out how to get Apollo 13 home!
Quantum isn’t a word only used discussing space science and travel, or engineering and math. For instance, some of the most challenging current problems in bioscience are being solved thanks to quantum mechanics. Though it seems new quantum biology has roots almost 100 years ago. It is thanks to quantum biology how quickly scientists were able to identify and figure out what covid-19 is and how to protect many of us from its’ ravages. It is truly amazing how far we have come and yet some still resist or haven't caught up.
It is a relatively quiet week for new learning opportunities at BayAreaScience but here are a few that look great to me… Imaging quantum materials with scanning SQUID microscopy - Livestream Mon @ 10:00, The Botany of Fall: Leaf Color and Deciduousness - Livestream Tue @ 1:00, and Black Friday Hike at Rancho San Vicente Fri @ 1:30
Of course the hot topic of the week is all of the food! Here are a couple of interesting articles to think about as you sit down to some amazing feasts! The Truth About Natural and Artificial Flavors and The Great Organic-Food Fraud
As with so many things today, there are many ways to look at what many, if not most are celebrating. I hope that you find some or lots of joy at least with the intent of these celebrations.
One more thing… Please don’t tell anyone that a quantum leap is big!
At least they make good straight edges!
herb masters
“If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.” Niels Bohr
Upcoming Events:
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Monday, 11/22/2021
What the Infrastructure Deal Means for Climate - Livestream - 11/22/2021 09:00 AM
Commonwealth Club - Online Event
The biggest piece of climate legislation in U.S. history has just been signed into law. To be sure, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework) got pared down significantly from what was first put on the table, but the bill President Biden signed still contains five times more money for projects aimed at mitigating the climate crisis than the best legislation the Obama administration could get through.
What did it take to get 19 Republican senators (not to mention Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema) to vote with the Democrats? And with the states being given great latitude over how to spend the money, will the billions available for highways negate any positive climate impacts?
Join Climate One in conversation with Carla Frisch, principal deputy director in the Office of Policy at the U.S. Department of Energy; Sasha Mackler, executive director of the Energy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center; and Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America, as we unpack the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework.
Imaging quantum materials with scanning SQUID microscopy - Livestream - 11/22/2021 10:00 AM
Stanford University
Novel quantum phenomena are often driven by cooperation or competition between different electronic properties with similar energies. Probing coexisting or competing electronic orders requires versatile probes which are sensitive to the multiple aspects of the system, such as magnetism, conductivity and superconductivity. In my talk I will describe two systems where our local view uncovered surprising mesoscopic effects. In the oxide interface LaAlO3/SrTiO3, we directly imaged a filamentary current flow near the metal-insulator transition, revealing a non- universal transition [1]. In the transition metal dichalcogenide 4Hb-TaS2 we uncovered a hidden magnetic order in the normal state, through its unusual effect on the superconducting state. We ascribe this behavior to the coupling between the two building blocks of this van der Waals material, the superconducting 2H-TaS2 and the candidate spin liquid 1T-TaS2.
Speaker: Beena Kalisky, Bar Ilan University
Missions to Near Earth Asteroids - Livestream - 11/22/2021 11:00 AM
Royal Observatory, Edinburgh
This talk will describe the two recent missions which have taken samples at Near-Earth Asteroids, Hayabusa-2 at Ryugu and OSIRIS-REx at Bennu. Hear about the scientific results from the orbital phases of the missions, the dropping of surface landers, and how the material is returned to Earth. The talk will be illustrated with amazing images from these missions.
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Electrically charged skyrmions and superconductivity - Livestream - 11/22/2021 04:15 PM
Stanford University
Skyrmions, first proposed in the context of nuclear physics, elegantly realize Kelvin’s dream of understanding particles as topological defects in an underlying field. When skyrmions arise in 2D materials with band topology, Berry-phase effects can endow them with an electric charge in addition to their magnetic moment, with intriguing implications for electrical transport. In this talk I’ll explain how skyrmions may even pair into charge-2 bosons, potentially giving a new route to electron-mediated superconductivity, and show how recent scanning tunneling microscopy experiments can “image” charged skyrmions in graphene.
Speaker: Michael Zaletel, UC Berkeley
See weblink for Zoom information
Tuesday, 11/23/2021
The Botany of Fall: Leaf Color and Deciduousness - Livestream - 11/23/2021 01:00 PM
UC Botanical Garden
Join professor Lew Feldman to learn the botany behind the celebrated plant changes associated with the fall season. We'll explore why (and how) some leaves appear to change color--exhibiting reds, yellows, and oranges--and the environmental influences that affect the brilliance of those colors. In addition, Dr. Feldman will explain the evolutionary benefits and processes for a tree to lose its leaves (deciduousness), the occurrence that gives this season its name.
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Moiré superlattices: a new Hubbard model simulator - Livestream - 11/23/2021 02:30 PM
UC Berkeley Condensed Matter Physics Seminar
The Hubbard model, first formulated by physicist John Hubbard in the 1960s, is a simple theoretical model of interacting quantum particles in a lattice. The model is thought to capture the essential physics of high-temperature superconductors, magnetic insulators, and other complex emergent quantum many-body ground states. Although the Hubbard model is greatly simplified as a representation of most real materials, it has nevertheless proved difficult to solve accurately except in the one-dimensional case. Physical realization of the Hubbard model in two or three dimensions, which can act as quantum simulators, therefore have a vital role to play in solving the strong-correlation puzzle. In this talk, I will discuss a recent experimental realization of the two-dimensional triangular lattice Hubbard model in angle-aligned WSe2/WS2 bilayers, which form moiré superlattices because of the difference in lattice constant between the two semiconductors.
Speaker: Jie Shan, Cornell University
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From Earth to Rocky Exoplanets and back - 11/23/2021 03:30 PM
Natural Science Annex Santa Cruz
Our galaxy is full of Earth-sized, potentially Earth-like, planets, yet we still barely know what these planets are actually like. I will use several examples to show how the rapid exploration of exoplanets offers unique opportunities for Earth Science, and how exoplanets are in turn helping us better understand Earth. Examples include how potential intensity theory from tropical meteorology played a key role in interpreting the first temperature map of a nearby super-Earth, how similar measurements promise to tell us whether the average Earth-sized exoplanet in our galaxy is an airless bare rock (like Mercury), and how Earth's persistently-linear radiative balance shapes our planet's future under global warming.
Speaker: Daniel Koll, Peking University
Deep Learning Hardware: Past, Present, and Future - Livestream - 11/23/2021 06:00 PM
SF Bay Association of Computing Machinery
The current resurgence of artificial intelligence is due to advances in deep learning. Systems based on deep learning now exceed human capability in speech recognition, object classification, and playing games like Go. Deep learning has been enabled by powerful, efficient computing hardware. The algorithms used have been around since the 1980s, but it has only been in the last decade - when powerful GPUs became available to train networks - that the technology has become practical. Advances in DL are now gated by hardware performance. This talk will review the current state of deep learning hardware and explore a number of directions to continue performance scaling in the absence of Moore’s Law. Topics discussed will include number representation, sparsity, memory organization, optimized circuits, and analog computation.
Speaker: Bill Dally, NVIDIA and Stanford University
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Friday, 11/26/2021
Black Friday Hike at Rancho San Vicente - 11/26/2021 01:30 PM
Rancho San Vicente Open Space Preserve San Jose
Join Peninsula Open Space Trust for a beautiful hike at Rancho San Vicente where you’ll explore the newest addition to Calero County Park, a beautiful oak woodland that POST recently helped expand! You will be guided by POST ambassadors who will share details about our contributions to the park, and the several other open spaces that make up an important area of protected habitat.
The hike is easy to moderate at about 5 miles round trip with about 650 feet of gradual elevation gain. The hike is primarily along a ridge on the Lisa Killough trail.
Register at weblink
Monday, 11/29/2021
Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival - Livestream - 11/29/2021 10:00 AM
Post Carbon Institute
Join Edward Saltzberg, Executive Director of The Security and Sustainability Forum, and Richard Heinberg in a free discussion about the urgent need to transition to not just a different energy regime but a different basis for human habitation on the planet. The conversation features Richard’s new book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival and is the second episode in SSF’s webinar series, Implications for the Future.
Developing Academic Software (CCPNmr) for the Analysis of Biomolecular NMR Data - Livestream - 11/29/2021 12:00 PM
California Section American Chemical Society
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a versatile technique for studying proteins and other biological molecules in a wide variety of different conditions. However, the field is predominantly confined to academia with the result that commercial software packages are not geared towards its needs and are usually inadequate for the data analysis required. There is thus a rich tradition of academics writing their own software but this brings its own pitfalls and downsides. Following nearly 20 years of working on a wide variety of different protein NMR projects, Dr. Higman joined the Collaborative Computational Project for NMR (CCPN). Their goal is to develop high-quality, user-friendly software for academics, enable easy movement of data between different software packages and collaborate with other academics developing new data analysis tools. As well as describing the challenges and successes of this work, Dr. Higman will showcase some of CCPN’s latest software. The presentation will be followed by Q & A.
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Speaker: Dr. Vicky Higman, University of Leicester
UC Berkley Theoretical Astrophysics Center Seminar - 11/29/2021 12:10 PM
Campbell Hall, Rm 131 Berkeley
Speaker: Rachel Patton
CITRIS People and Robots Seminar - 11/29/2021 04:00 PM
CITRIS People and Robots
Speaker: Marynel Vazquez, Yale University
See weblink for Zoom information
The black hole information paradox - whether information escapes an evaporating black hole or not - remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of theoretical physics. The apparent conflict between validity of semiclassical gravity at low energies and unitarity of quantum mechanics has long been expected to find its resolution in the deep quantum gravity regime. Recent developments in the holographic dictionary and in particular its application to entanglement, however, have shown that a semiclassical analysis of gravitational physics has a hallmark feature of unitary evolution. I will describe this recent progress and discuss some potential new avenues for working towards a resolution of the information paradox.
Speaker: Netta Englehardt, MIT
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Wonderfest - Can AI Know What It Doesn't Know? - 11/29/2021 07:00 PM
Hopmonk Tavern Novato
With increasing frequency, AI algorithms are making high-impact decisions: When should a self-driving car slam on the brakes? Can an MRI scan reliably detect a tumor? Will facial recognition software identify your son as a Most Wanted fugitive? AI algorithms need to be aware of their confidence level - to "know what they don't know" - in order to be reliable and safe. Fortunately, time-tested ideas in statistics are providing solutions. How are old and fundamental mathematical concepts blending with recent tech breakthroughs to create safe, uncertainty-aware AI?
Speaker: Stephen Bates, UC Berkeley
Tuesday, 11/30/2021
Coherent AC spin current transmission through antiferromagnetic CoO probed by X-ray detected ferromagnetic resonance - Livestream - 11/30/2021 02:30 PM
UC Berkeley Condensed Matter Physics Seminar
Healthy Society Series: The Brain Plasticity Revolution and an Impending Rebirth of Psychiatric and Neurologic Medicine - 11/30/2021 03:00 PM
Commonwealth Club San Francisco
Arctic climate change: the role of greenhouse gases, aerosols and ozone depleting substances - 11/30/2021 03:30 PM
Natural Science Annex Santa Cruz
Wednesday, 12/01/2021
Climate + Justice: Young Activists Speak Out - Livestream - 12/01/2021 09:30 AM
Commonwealth Club - Online Event
International collaboration to advance deep-sea knowledge - Livestream - 12/01/2021 11:00 AM
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Open Source Platforms and Mission Oriented Archaeology - Livestream - 12/01/2021 12:10 PM
UC Berkeley
Ask the Scientist - Allie Margulies - Livestream - 12/01/2021 02:30 PM
Estuary & Ocean Science Center
The Pursuit of Free Energies and Free Energy Relationships - Livestream - 12/01/2021 04:00 PM
UC Berkeley
Lost Landscapes 02021 Earth, Fire, Air, Water: California Infrastructures - 12/01/2021 07:00 PM
Herbst Theater San Francisco
Thursday, 12/02/2021
UC Berkeley Astronomy Colloquium - 12/02/2021 12:40 PM
Campbell Hall, Rm 131 Berkeley
SFBBO Birdy Hour Talk: Ravens, Wolves, and People - Livestream - 12/02/2021 05:00 PM
San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory
Hardcore Natural History: The value of ‘good fire’ - 12/02/2021 06:00 PM
Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History Pacific Grove
After Dark: GLOWing Science - 12/02/2021 06:00 PM
ExplOratorium San Francisco
Nightlife - 12/02/2021 06:00 PM
California Academy of Sciences San Francisco
Micromitigation: Fighting Air Pollution with Activated Carbon - Livestream - 12/02/2021 07:00 PM
Counter Culture Labs
NightSchool: Living Worlds - Livestream - 12/02/2021 07:00 PM
California Academy of Sciences
Friday, 12/03/2021
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics Seminar - 12/03/2021 12:00 PM
Earth and Marine Sciences Building Santa Cruz
Embracing Change, Everett in Transition: 3rd Annual Everett Student Showcase - 12/03/2021 04:00 PM
UC Santa Cruz Santa Cruz
Saturday, 12/04/2021
Help the King Tides Project photograph the highest tides of the year! - 12/04/2021 07:00 PM
The California Coast
A Royal Walk with the King Tide - 12/04/2021 10:15 AM
Bay Side between Pier 3 and Pier 5 San Francisco
GLOW Fest - 12/04/2021 11:00 AM
ExplOratorium San Francisco
Sunday, 12/05/2021
Help the King Tides Project photograph the highest tides of the year! - 12/05/2021 07:00 PM
The California Coast
Virtual Butterfly Walk - 12/05/2021 11:00 AM
UC Botanical Garden
Afternoon Hike at Mindego Hill - 12/05/2021 01:00 PM
Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve Los Altos
Monday, 12/06/2021
Black holes in the Universe: where, what, and why? - Livestream - 12/06/2021 11:00 AM
Royal Observatory, Edinburgh
UC Berkley Theoretical Astrophysics Center Seminar - 12/06/2021 12:10 PM
Campbell Hall, Rm 131 Berkeley
CITRIS People and Robots Seminar - 12/06/2021 04:00 PM
CITRIS People and Robots
Deciphering the prion code - 12/06/2021 04:00 PM
Stanley Hall Berkeley
An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now - 12/06/2021 06:00 PM
Commonwealth Club - Online Event
The Future of Filmmaking: AI for Volumetric Capture and Reconstruction - Livestream - 12/06/2021 07:00 PM
SF Bay Association of Computing Machinery