Why Physicists Need the Large Hadron Collider

Meteor blogging

Massive fireball lights up Prairie skies in western Canada.

It wasn’t a bird, and it sure as heck wasn’t a plane, but whatever was in the sky over western Canada on Thursday night was very exciting for the people who saw it.

Was it the lost tool bag?

UPDATE:

No, it was not, says Space Weather

On Nov. 22nd, veteran satellite observer Kevin Fetter video-recorded the backpack-sized bag gliding over his backyard observatory in Brockville, Ontario: 900 kB video. “It was easily 8th magnitude or brighter as it passed by the 4th magnitude star eta Pisces,” he says. Spaceweather’s satellite tracker is monitoring the toolbag; click here for flybys.

UPDATE: Ed Light of Lakewood, NJ, saw the toolbag on the same night. He observed it using 10×50 binoculars and estimates its magnitude at +6.4. “It was a favorable pass, elevation 70 degrees,” he says. “Lower apparitions would be fainter.”

Olympiad round 10 tactics

Black to play and win

Pictures, pictures and more pictures!

~ 2 million of LIFE Magazine’s nearly 10 million Photo Archive, dating back to 1750s, is now available online, hosted by Google. Rest of the images will be added as they’re scanned over time, according to the official Google blog. 97% of them have never been seen before. You can buy a framed picture of each image from Time Warner, Life Magazine’s parent company, and a link is available right next to the image. That, obviously, is a good motivation for Time Warner to open up the archive. At this moment, there is no direct monetary benefit for Google, or so it seems. According to Time Inc press release

LIFE’s Photo Archive will be scanned and available on Google Image Search free for personal and research purposes. Copyright and ownership of all images will remain with Time Inc

Not bad.

This is a treasure trove. Try Gandhi and you can see 200+ pictures, including several family photos.
Look for Famous Pictures and get inundated with images of Actress Betty Grable’s famous legs. But don’t get carried away. This category also has it’s share of horrors, like an image of 1946 communal riots in India. There are only 11 Bobby Fischer pictures. Well, at least it is 6 more than doughface James Buchanan. Searching for Carnatic brings up 2 pictures of illustrations of Anglo-French Wars in India. 🙂

Solo in Carnatic and Jazz

Carnatic concerts are interspersed with solo displays of improvisations from percussionists known as Tani Avartanam. Thiruvarur Bhaktavatsalam (Mridangam), G. Harishankar (Kanjira), E. M. Subramaniam (Ghatam) are the performers.

Here is Ray Mantilla performing a percussion solo at Bitonto Jazz Festival.

Olympiad round 5 endgame

Black to play and win

Olympiad round 5 tactics

White to play and win.

In Memoriam: Yutaka Taniyama

Today (11-17-2008) marks the 50th year of the passing of a great, albeit troubled, mathematical genius Yutaka Taniyama. He is linked to one of the most famous problems of mathematics, Fermat’s last theorem, which states that there are no whole number solutions for the equation for . This problem remained unsolved for nearly 350 years and it took centuries of mathematical advancement to crack it’s innocent looking statement. Significant mathematical bridge building, between branches of mathematics that operated as islands, was crucial to finding a solution. One of the first steps in this bridge building was taken in 1955 when Taniyama started playing an inspirational role in connecting the two key branches of mathematics – topology and number theory. Loosely speaking, an elliptic curve is a type of cubic curve whose solutions are confined to a region of space that is topologically equivalent to a torus. A modular form is the most symmetrical of mathematical objects – it can be subject to transformations in infinite number of ways and still remains unchanged. Taniyama hypothesized that every modular form could be matched with an elliptic equation. He was creative and ahead of his time, but his ideas were criticized as unsubstantiated. Shortly after his 31st birthday, lacking confidence in his future, he committed suicide. He left a detailed note, stating among other things, the books he had borrowed from library and friends, how far he had reached in the courses he was teaching and concluded with an apology to his colleagues for the inconveniences this act would cause. Second act of the tragedy occurred few weeks later when his fiancee also took her own life. Goro Shimura and Andre Weil developed Taniyama’s work and formulated Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture within an year of Taniyama’s passing. Establishment of link between Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture and Fermat’s Last Theorem took another three decades. In 1986 Frey and Ribet established that if Fermat’s last theorem were false, then Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture would also be false. So to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem it was enough to prove Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture. Andrew Wiles proved Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture for special classes of elliptic curves sufficient enough to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. Full Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture was proved in 1999.

Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma provides the best popular account of the history of the problem and the solution. If you are interested in learning more of the number theory around this problem Paulo Ribenboim’s Fermat’s Last Theorem for Amateurs is an excellent resource.

Chess Olympiad, Round 4

Interesting matches and several interesting games. Nine teams went in with 3/3, only 2 teams came out with 4/4 – Germany 1 and Russia. Carlsen won, after a terrible late blunder from Adams, to level the match for Norway against England. All games in Ukraine – Armenia match ended in a draw, but there was plenty of fight. Ivanchuk and Aronian took it till there were only Kings left in the board. Russia beat India narrowly – Harikrishna was left on the losers side despite a brilliant win over Svidler. One of the frustrations of the new match scoring is that 1.5 amounts to nothing in a 1.5-2.5 defeat, unless tie breakers are required to decide final positions. US lost to Azerbaijan – both Kamsky and Nakamura went down to defeat. Nakamura tried hard to hold the opposite color bishop ending, but Mamedyarov prevailed. Kamsky and Nakamura have to fire for US’s fortunes to improve.

Harikrishna played a beautiful game, that culminated in a wonderful sacrificial attack against Russian champion Peter Svidler.

24…Red8??

Svidler

Harikrishna

25.Rxe6!!+-
Accepting the sacrifice leads to a colorful defeat.
25…fxe6 26.Bxe6+ Kh8 27.Qf3

Svidler

Harikrishna

with the threat of queen invasion via h3.
25…Rab8 26.Qf3 Nc4 27.Re7 1-0

The final position – guarding f7 with Rf8 leads to loss of material after Rc7.

Svidler

Harikrishna

This theme of a rook leaving a file and shortly thereafter, a pawn that this rook “guarded” being attacked mercilessly by an opponent’s piece is not that uncommon. Here is one from Bobby Fischer’s My sixty memorable games (which, by the way, has been recently reprinted with algebraic notation)

14.Rfd1?
In a classic choice of wrong rook, Byre decided to put his f rook to the d file, leaving f2 vulnerable.

Fischer

Byrne

14…Nd3 15.Qc2

Fischer

Byrne

15…Nxf2! 16.Kxf2 Ng4+ 17.Kg1 Nxe3 18.Qd2 Nxg2 19.Kxg2 d4 20.Nxd4 Bb7+ 21.Kf1 Qd7 0-1
Byrne resigned leaving Fischer bitterly disappointed. He had hoped for this finish –
22.Qf2 Qh3+ 23.Kg1 Re1+!! 24.Rxe1 Bxd4

Fischer

Byrne

Fischer won a brilliancy prize for this game, played in 1963-64 US Championship.

UPDATE:
Full round 4 open results
Full round 4 women results
Chess Base Olympiad Reports
Round 4 open games in PGN
Round 4 women games in PGN

Cartoon of the week

Mike Keefe @ The Denver Post