PHYSICS FLASH
    News from the Department of Physics ~ February 2008

ASU PHYSICS
Department of Physics
Arizona State University
PO Box 871504
Tempe, AZ 85287
480.965.3561

Fulfilling a Childhood Dream
Professor receives hometown award

On September 26, 2007, the National University of San Antonio Abad in Cusco, Peru (UNSAAC) bestowed a prestigious honor on Dr. Fernando Ponce, Professor of Physics at ASU. Dr. Ponce received the Tricentennial Medal of UNSAAC. This year, the medal commemorated UNSAAC's 300 years as a university. The medal recognizes "exceptional contributions to knowledge and to society".
   The citation lauded Professor Ponce, already an honorary professor at the university, for "high recognition in his field of research and for his cultural and scientific productivity". The citation also noted his "exemplary dedication to the development of science and technology in Peru." Past recipients include Valentin Paniagua - former president of Peru and Mario Vargas Llosa - celebrated Peruvian novelist and candidate for president.

 
 
PF: I know you feel very honored by this award. How does this differ from other awards or honors you have received?

 
 
PONCE: I grew up a short distance (2 kilometers) from this university.  As a child, I used to ride my bike to go buy fresh bread from a bakery just in front of the main entrance of the university. I used to look up to the students and professors and wished someday I could be like them.  It is wonderful to notice that my childhood dreams have come true.
 

PF: There are a number of gifted scientists who have come from Central and South America. How is the future of science - particularly physics - impacted by Latin America?

 

PONCE: There is a large number of Spanish- and Portuguese- speaking scientists in the US who are labeled "Hispanic".  With a couple of exceptions, they are all born and educated abroad.  These colleagues came to study in the US and stayed here.  A similar situation happens in Europe. 
  Many children in Latin America grow up dreaming of becoming scientists and engineers, and the desire (exists) within an atmosphere of tranquility and simplicity that allows their intellect to develop in a peaceful setting.  But most of those countries do not have the scientific traditions, and so it is difficult for young people to grow up and fulfill their dreams in their native communities.
 
PF: Latin American/Hispanic students appear underrepresented in physics departments in the U.S. Is there anything American universities can do or are currently doing to help foster an interest in physics or science in general in Latin American/Hispanic youth today?

 
PONCE: First we must become familiar with the continent (Central and South America). The United States currently plays a passive role in the continent.  In comparison, the European countries actively recruit and facilitate the incorporation of the best into their societies.  We should open up our borders to the intellectuals of the continent, and also learn to appreciate their culture and contributions to our fields of research.

 

PF: Do you have any plans for the future which stem from or relate to this award?

 
PONCE:   In accepting the award I gave a talk entitled: "Science, Technology and Innovation - Their Role in the Development of the Cusco Region, and A challenge for the University". 
   In this talk, I proposed a number of steps for developing science and engineering in the Cusco region.  The University stopped classes on that day, and the biggest amphitheater in Cusco (was) completely filled to hear my talk.  The Physics Department took the proposals wholeheartedly, as well as the rest of the university.  I have promised to be there to help when they are ready to act.  There are so many opportunities and much room to grow. It will be very exciting to be part of the adventure.
 
For more information about Fernando Ponce's research,  please visit http://physics.asu.edu/faculty.php?name=ponce.

Physics professor to participate in Sally Ride Science Festival

ASU Physics Assistant Professor Cecilia Lunardini will conduct a children's workshop entitled "Exploding stars!", in collaboration with Professor Frank Timmes of the ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration.
The workshop is part of the Sally Ride Science Festival and Educator Institute to be held at ASU on March 1. Sally Ride was America's first woman in space and the keynote speaker for the event.
  During the workshop, both professors  will illustrate the basic physics of a core collapse supernova - a star that dies into a catastrophic explosion. Timmes will cover the astrophysics of a supernova.
  Lunardini will talk about the emission of neutrinos that accompanies the explosion.   She will show how the neutrinos undergo the recently discovered phenomenon of oscillations - a periodic change of their properties as they fly in space. 

 
 
To explain how oscillations appear in a neutrino detector, she will use pasta in a colander, a hands-on approach she hopes will captivate the children.
  
 For more information on the Cecilia Lunardini, please visit her bio page.


For more information on the Sally Ride Science Festival and Educator Institute, please see the ASU Insight article HERE

BOOK REVIEW

"The Indian Clerk" by David Leavitt
(Bloomsbury, USA 2007)

 
Every discipline has its own rules and approaches, with mathematics being the most rigorous. When told that the numbers 31, 331, 3331, 33331, 333331 and 3333331 are prime, and asked if 33333331 is prime, most of us would probably answer yes. But it fact it is not and illustrates that nothing in mathematics can be taken for granted; surprises are everywhere.
  In the years around the first world war in the early part of the twentieth century, G. H. Hardy was probably the greatest pure mathematician... CONTINUED ON PAGE TWO

 From the Chair
Building a collaborative environment- The Physics Advance

Winter, in my days in the Midwest, was a time to reflect and plan (or shovel snow). Following this tradition, the ASU Physics faculty came together on a Saturday in January to discuss collaborations and partnerships that enable us to address some of the most significant questions in our field. 

  Other organizations might call this type of a meeting a 'retreat,' but in the words of Professor Mike Treacy, "ASU Physics does not retreat, we advance." Thus our meeting was the second annual Physics Advance.
  The Advance focused on building collaborations with national facilities, international research centers - particularly in the Americas, and extending our initiative on Emergent Phenomena.
  During the meeting, Professor Jeff Drucker described some of his interactions with the Department of Energy Nanocenters. Other faculty joined the discussion to express the opportunities at the Nanocenters. Examples included Argonne National Laboratory where the x-ray synchrotron presents unique capabilities for materials characterization and Oak Ridge National Laboratory which has a highly advanced electron microscopy facility.
  A very novel collaboration is developing between scientists interested in research laboratories placed deep in the Earth.  Professor Ricardo Alarcon described some of the research topics to be explored in the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) which is now planned to be developed in South Dakota.  It would appear that experimental programs on neutrino physics would be of particular interest to ASU faculty.   Other programs on microbial life, fluid flow and rock deformation are also proposed for this truly uniquely interdisciplinary facility.
  Professors Dave Smith and Fernando Ponce organized a detailed review of the capabilities of numerous laboratories in Mexico and South America.  Fernando focused the discussion which ranged from building connections for student exchanges to identifying potential collaborators for new types of research teams.
  In our Advance last year, Professor Tim Newman captured everyone's interest as he described how complex interactions that occur between many particles and physical entities can lead to a whole new class of phenomena.  This year, he expanded on this vision by describing how this class of Emergent Phenomena would involve collaborations across the University.
  It was truly amazing to see the range of opportunities presented during this day.


 
Robert J. Nemanich, Professor & Chair
ASU Physics
BOOK REVIEW (continued)
around, and Trinity College Cambridge was the center of a rather gay group called the Apostles which included luminaries such as the mathematicians G. E. Moore and J. E. Littlewood, the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the poet Rupert Brooke.
  They talked mainly not about issues of war and peace so much but about things like Goldbach's Conjecture that all even numbers greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes. Try a few examples for yourself, for example 40 = 11 + 29. This was a worthy problem for discussion they felt (it is still unresolved; to become really famous - solve this problem rather than protein folding!).
  One morning in 1913, Hardy received a rambling letter from a poor Indian villager, Srinivasa Ramanujan, on poor quality paper and poorly written, but his eye was taken by an usual infinite series for π of a kind he had not seen before - which rapidly converged. He summed the first few terms and it appeared to be correct and so began one of the most interesting sagas of collaborative research in the twentieth century. After an exchange of letters, each of which took ~ month by boat to get to India, Ramanujan arrived at Trinity College in Cambridge. He finds the life awful - he hates having to wear shoes, the food and weather awful (hard to argue with any of that) but Ramanujan on his own and in partnership with Hardy produces some of the greatest pure mathematics of the twentieth century.
  Ramanujan became interested in highly composite numbers which he defined as "a number that is as far from a prime as a number can be." A sort of anti-prime. Hardy and Littlewood asked for an example. 'None of the numbers up to 24 has more than 6 divisors, 22 has 4, 21 has 4, 20 has 6. But 24 has 8. 24 can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 or 24. So I define a highly composite number as a number that has more divisors than any number that comes before it. What a strange raging mind!  I have listed every highly composite number up to 6,746,328,388,800" And have you drawn any conclusions? "Well yes, you can work out a formula..."
  What we glimpse here is an unusual mind a work - one that lay in the hinterland between an arithmetic calculator and a trained mathematician. He could manipulate large numbers mentally but what pushed him into mathematics was his ability to produce algebraic formulae. He was not a typical mathematician in that the concept of a proof was alien to him and remained so despite Hardy's best efforts. Today we would call this interdisciplinary research perhaps.
  "Proofs in mathematics have their own elegance and economy, as illustrated by Euclid's proof that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. This is a reductio ad absurdum proof, and so we begin by assuming the opposite of what we want to prove: we assume that there are only a finite number of primes, and we call the last prime, the largest prime, P. We must remember that, by definition, any non-prime number can be broken down into primes. To choose a random example 190 breaks down as 19 x 5 x2. Assuming than that P, is the largest prime number, we can write out the primes as a sequence, from smallest to largest, and the sequence will look like this:

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23...P

 
  Then we can propose a number, Q, that is 1 greater than all the primes multiplied together. That is to say

 

Q = (2 x 3 x 5 x 7 x 11 x 13 ... x P) + 1

 
  Either Q is a prime or it is not. If Q is a prime, this contradicts the assumptions that P is the largest possible prime. But if Q is not prime, it must be divisible by some prime, and that cannot be any of the primes leading up to and including P. So the prime divisor of Q must be a prime bigger than P, which again contradicts our original assumption. Therefore there is no greatest prime. There is infinity of primes." We can all enjoy the sparse elegance and beauty of such a proof, but how many of us could come up with such an argument?
  Parenthetically, I note that a similar style of proof can be given to show that all numbers are interesting. Suppose the lowest uninteresting number was U, then of course that in itself would make it interesting. Therefore as there can be no lowest uninteresting number, all numbers are interesting. Does this bother you - it should - if it prevents you from sleeping - email me!
  This book is well enough written, but lacks the sharp focus that its subjects demonstrated in their mathematics. But the story is a good one and it holds one's attention - good beach reading. I would have preferred more mathematics for my own taste, but of course it is aimed at a wider audience.
  What can we learn from this?  For one thing that innovation does not need to come through formal training. Knowing what everyone else knows is usually good, but can also be confining sometimes. I once wasted an afternoon with a builder from Michigan who could show that π = 3 - but he was no Ramanujan! But I still glance through those crazy emails - just in case.
  Finally the old must give way to the young which is where the truly new ideas come from - Hardy provides a great example of an unselfish mentor.
 
Reviewed by Michael Thorpe, February 2008

 
Michael Thorpe is Foundation Professor of Physics, Chemistry & Biochemistry and Director of the Center for Biological Physics. For more information about his research, please visit http://physics.asu.edu/faculty.php?name=mfthorpe.

 

Physics Flash welcomes your feedback. Please send comments, questions, and article suggestions to  margaret.stuart@asu.edu. Keep in touch with ASU Physics by visiting http://physics.asu.edu/alumni/welcome.php.

Distinguished Lecturer Series hosts renown string theorist for lecturers and luncheon

For this semester's Distinguished Lecturer Series, ASU Physics welcomed Professor Michael Duff for a public lecture, department colloquium, and student luncheon.
  Duff, the Abdus Salam Chair of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London, is a renown string theorist and fellow of the Royal Society. His public lecture - "A Final Theory of Everything in the Universe?" - was held Wednesday, February 13 and drew a large crowd comprised of faculty, ASU students, and local high school science students.
  Another highlight of his visit was a graduate student luncheon held on Thursday, February 14. Physics and astronomy students were invited to an informal round-table discussion of any topic of their choosing.
 
  

   ASU graduate students with Professor Michael Duff

 
  The visit marked the department's eighth consecutive Distinguished Lecturer Series which has previously featured such noted scientists as Nobel Laureate Gerard 't Hooft, Templeton prize recipient Paul Davies, and National Medal of Science recipient Mildred Dresselhaus.
  Scheduled speaker for the Fall 2008 Distinguished Lecturer Series to be held on September 24/25 is noted biophysicist Carlos Bustamante.