Greetings from sunny Palo Alto, California, where we’re having the 2005 incarnation of the SLAC Summer Institute, Gravity in the Quantum World and the Cosmos. It’s an annual two-week school, aimed primarily at graduate students in physics, covering topics of interest to SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). Until recently, gravity didn’t qualify as something of interest to anyone working at a particle accelerator, but times have changed — gravity was the subject of SSI in 1998, and again this year. These days, considerations of dark energy, extra dimensions, and string theory are of direct interest to particle physicists.

I got to speak first, giving a three-hour General Relativity Primer. For lecture notes, we handed out my No-Nonsense Introduction to General Relativity that’s been on the web for a while; the online transparencies were scanned in from the actual lectures I gave. The idea was to give a complete intro to GR (metrics, geodesics, tensors, covariant derivatives, curvature, Einstein’s equation, some solutions), aimed at physics graduate students who hadn’t been exposed to GR. (Sadly, there are still plenty of physics grad students who have never been exposed to GR.)

I really wanted to give a blackboard talk, but the organizers talked me out of it, claiming (correctly, as it turns out) that blackboard in SLAC’s lecture hall is practically unreadable. But I didn’t want to use powerpoint, as it’s nearly impossible to move at a pedagogically appropriate pace when you speak from pre-made slides. As a compromise, I wrote the transparencies in real time as I lectured. It worked okay, although I realized that the main test of endurance wasn’t talking for three hours, but rather staring into the light of an overhead projector for three hours as I was writing the transparencies. In the afternoon I fielded questions for another two hours at a discussion section, so the organizers squeezed their money’s worth from me.

Yesterday morning we heard from Alessandra Buonnano on gravitational waves and Gabriella Gonzalez on actual gravitational-wave detectors, such as the LIGO observatory. All seems to be going well at LIGO, and Gabriella mentioned that they’ve even detected something — but it turned out to be an airplane flying overhead. We’re still waiting for the direct detection of an honest gravitational wave.

In the afternoon, we had Ken Nordtvedt talking about testing GR by bouncing lasers and radar signals around the solar system, and Shane Larson talking about the LISA mission. LISA will (assuming all goes according to plan) consist of three satellites flying in formation five million kilometers apart, measuring passing ripples in the geometry of spacetime by bouncing lasers back and forth. What’s that you say? You think the satellites should feature more powerful lasers, and be located twenty million kilometers from each other? Shane has set up a sensitivity curve generator, allowing you to determine how the noise limits of the satellite will change as a function of such parameters. Once you’ve hit on your favorites, it’s up to you to convince NASA to go along.

You know how, when you take snowboarding lessons, they teach you to look in the direction you want to go, not at obstacles you want to avoid? Well they do, and it’s good advice — keep looking at that tree and your subconscious will steer you right into it. Works for driving, too.

I’m not sure if it’s the same psychological phenomenon, but this is what I was reminded of when reading a post by Chris at Mixing Memory about some puzzling psychology experiments. Apparently, just being exposed to words expressing the concept of rudeness is enough to make people behave more rudely.

Bargh, Chen, and Burrows set out to demonstrate the existence of “automatic social behavior.” They conducted three experiments, each targeting different behaviors. In the first experiment, they first gave participants a scrambled sentence test, which involves presenting five scrambled words and asking the participant to form a grammatically correct sentence out of four of them as quickly as possible. They developed three different lists of scrambled words, one of which primed the concept RUDE, another that primed POLITE, and a third that was neutral with respect to rudeness/politeness. The primes in these lists included adjectives, adverbs, or verbs that were associated with the concepts (e.g., brazen, aggressively, or disturb for RUDE, and considerate, patiently, and respect for POLITE). While the participant was completing the scrambled sentence test, the experimenter left and began talking to a confederate (an experimenter posing as another participant). When the participant finished, he or she came out of the room to look for the experimenter to receive instructions for the next task (as the experimenter had instructed). However, the participant always found the experimenter talking to the confederate. Bargh et al. then measured the time it took for the participant to interrupt the conversation between the experimenter and the confederate.

Guess what they found. Of the participants who did the RUDE version of the sentence test, more than 60% interrupted in under ten minutes (they cut it off at ten minutes — can you imagine how frustrated some of those participants were after standing there for ten minutes?), whereas fewer than 20% of the POLITE-primed participants interrupted in that time. The neutral list participants were in between at around 40%. The RUDE participants also interrupted a full 3 minutes sooner than neutral participants, and almost 4 minutes sooner than the POLITE participants.

As Chris says, it gets weirder. My favorite was how people move more slowly after reading words associated with older people. So how do you think our personalities are affected by reading too many blogs?