Too cool to pass up - A photo of another solar system!

Check out this article in Science News, where astronomers have a photo of a Sun-like star with two gas giant exoplanets orbiting. Way cool!! 

Being Black in America: UIUC Chancellor Robert Jones

Dr. Robert Jones is the current Chancellor at the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which is one of the largest public universities in the country and one of the largest and most prominent research universities in the world. He recently gave an interview about being black in America. He thinks our approach should be one we don't hear discussed a lot, which is as a public health crisis.

That would be an interesting mindset and approach to take as a nation, just as many suggest we should treat gun violence as a public health crisis...big, important issues that become politically and emotionally charged in a hurry when taking them on head-on, could be looked at in a different light, as public health, which is something that invites working together because public health is more inclusive and doesn't care what color one's skin is; just as a virus or bacterium doesn't care who its host is, the public as a whole must figure out how to handle the disease.

Women in Physics - Nadya Mason

I want to spotlight every so often, underrepresented groups in the sciences, especially fields like physics, math, computer science, and different areas of engineering, which are the big fields that still have the largest gaps in diversity - meaning lower numbers of women and people of color who take on those disciplines as majors, and who end up working in those fields. The situation is a little better since I was in graduate school in physics nearly thirty years ago, where professors were certainly predominately white and Asian men, but let's celebrate progress when we see some.

One of the rising stars in physics works at my alma mater, UIUC. Nadya Mason is an African-American woman who is a world expert in quantum mechanical nanocircuitry and is heavily involved in getting more minorities into the highest levels of STEM work, and was recently interviewed for an alum publication. She also has a TED talk outlining her work, and I recommend watching it since she talks about our gap and fear between the technologies we use everyday and our near complete ignorance of how they work.

Wholeness - the possibilities to a deeper, unforeseen part of Nature thanks to Quantum Mechanics

An American physicist, David Bohm, who Einstein once called his "spiritual son," got into science because he thought it was enough to help humanity solve its worst problems. Bohm thought poverty was the world's single biggest problem. But after years of doing science, he concluded science was not enough for the human race to find a new reality of happiness and being rid of its biggest problems. This thought, plus the bizarre reality of quantum mechanics/quantum field theory, as well as more strangeness of general relativity, led him on a quest to also determine what consciousness itself is.

These are all pieces of the human quest to figure out answers and reasons for the most fundamental questions: how and why did the universe begin, why are we here, what is the meaning of life, what is our connection to the universe...

Bohm took an approach to find out what was beyond the reaches of science, and actually came up with a scientific way of thinking about the "hidden variables" in quantum mechanics. This was perceived as a realm where we could not observe those variables, but that realm was responsible to a true interconnectedness, or wholeness, of the universe. Our consciousness is connected to the collective consciousness of humanity, which is connected to the universe as a whole. His 1952 paper on hidden variables was looked at by world experts in quantum mechanics, led by Robert Oppenheimer (the 'father of the atomic bomb' since he led the Manhattan Project during WWII), and they could not find anything incorrect about Bohm's theory...but Bohm was then sent into scientific exile from the U.S. when McCarthyism ramped up at the start of the Cold War.

It is a fascinating and intriguing story, where one must think in terms of science, philosophy, religion, and mysticism (Eastern mystics have thought about this interconnectedness and wholeness for millenia). A really well-done movie about Bohm's quest is below, with very well known physicists being interviewed, as well as the Dalai Lama.