Category Archives: science

25 July 2015
english, Noble drawings, science, science life

Crisper

The other day, I had the chance to stumble on Jennifer Doudna in Stanley Hall… And I asked her for a drawing !

Jennifer Doudna's drawing

Jennifer Doudna’s drawing

Jennifer Doudna is well-known for her discovery, with her postdoc Martin Jinek and Emmauelle Charpentier, of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology, that allows live gene editing.

It might not seem that crazy, but it’s a total game changer (Radiolab had a good story about it recently). The thing is that until now, to modify the genes, one had to change the germ cell and create a new living being : an already existing being could not have its DNA reprogrammed. But now, you can cure genetic diseases and target specific genes that you would like to change (I don’t know if you can change the colors of your eyes by that process, but who really cares ?)

This of course brings a lot of ethical questions that they try to tackle— I can’t help but to  imagine how terrible a biological weapon targeting a population through specific would be.

For her work, DouDNA and Charpentier were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Science, a prestigious prize put together by Yuri Milner and others. She will probably be promoted to my Nobel Prize list soon:)

edit November 10th :

No Nobel Prize this year, but another Breakthrough prize, from optogenetics !
Watch the related Breakthrough Symposium talks
And another piece in the New Yor Times : the CRISPR quandary.

19 April 2015
english, science life, traductions

Fun to imagine

I’ve received this very kind email, related to a transcript I’ve made a while back :

Dear Antoine Wojdyla,

By chance I have just come across your excellent English transcript of the Richard Feynman ‘Fun to Imagine’ episodes and I thought how wonderful it is that you have gone to the trouble of doing this. I produced the programmes back in 1983 and it’s great that they are still out there and people seem to enjoy them.
Anyway, I thought I’d write and say thank you!

Best wishes,

Christopher Sykes

nice_treeHere’s an excerpt from the transcript “fun to imagine“:

The sun is shining, and this sunlight comes down and knocks this oxygen away from the carbon, so it takes some light to get the plant to work! And so the sun, all the time, is doing the work of separating the oxygen away from the carbon, the oxygen is sort a of terrible by-product, which it spits back into the air, an leave in the carbon and water to make the substance of the tree. And then we take the substance of the tree to get the fireplace. All the oxygen made by these trees and all the carbons would much prefer to be together again. And once you let the heat to get it started, it continues and make an awful lot of activity while it’s going back together again, and all those nice light and everything comes out, and everything is being undone, you’re going from carbon and oxygen back to carbon dioxide, and the light and heat that’s coming out is the light and heat of the sun that went in, so it’s sort of stored sun that is coming out when you burn it.

15 March 2015
english, epistemology, projects, resources, science

Information in optics

Dear reader,

I’ve compiled here, just for you, three old article that I’ve OCRed and revamped a little bit. They are article with a lot of style and insight, that people sometimes cite without ever reading them… mostly because they’re not readily available. That’s the silly situation I wanted to fix.
– Enjoy !

Zernike – Physica IX, no 7 (1942)
“Phase Contrast, A New Method for the Microscopic Observation of Transparent Object“

Gerchberg and Saxton – Optik Vol. 35, No.2 (1972)
“A Practical Algorithm for the Determination of Phase from Image and Diffraction Plane Pictures“

Gabor – Progress in Optics Vol. 1 (1951)
“Light and information” (still under revision)

Here’s a blissful excerpt from Gabor’s piece :

Light is our most powerful source of information on the physical world. Anthropologists have often emphasized that the privileged position of Man is due as much to his exceptionally perfect eye, as to his large brain. I was much impressed by a remark of Aldous Huxley, that we owe our civilization largely to the fact that vision is an objective sense. An animal with an olfactory sense or with hearing, however well developed, could never have created science. A smell is either good or bad, and even hearing is never entirely neutral; music can convey emotions with an immediateness of which the sober visual arts are incapable. No wonder that the very word “objective” has been appropriated by optics. But on the other hand it is probably the peculiar character of vision which is chiefly responsible for one of the most deep-rooted of scientific prejudices; that the world can be divided into an outer world and into an “objective” observer, who observes “what there is”, without influencing the phenomena in the slightest.

Tukey – Annals of Statistical Mathematics
“The future of data analysis” (1961) — still working on it

Zernike – Physica I, pp. 689-704 (1932)
“Diffraction theory of the knife-edge test and its improved form“,
translation by Anthony Yen (who went all in by redrawing all the figures !)

gabor_perpetual

A gedankenexperiment by Gabor, to discuss the nature of information contained in light

 

— Thanks to Martin Burkhardt for sharing some of these pieces !

Continue reading →

14 December 2014
english, science, skepticality

Shiftings : from electronics to photonics ?

Photons and electrons like to play together in atoms, but much less so in computers…

Like EUV lithography, people have been talking about optical computers for a long time, and that still hasn’t materialized.
Like EUV, it seems that we’re on the verge of a major shift !

north-laserLet’s review some of the differences between electronics and optics !

Continue reading →

14 November 2014
english, science, science life

Seeing small

I don’t know how to do this on a small scale in a practical way, but I do know that computing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can’t we make them very small, make them of little wires, little elements – and by little, I mean little. For instance, the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in diameter, and the circuits should be a few thousand angstroms across.
– Richard Feynman (1959)

Being  a researcher, all my friends and family have very little idea of what I’m work on. The trouble is that when I try to explain, I need to resort to notions such as wavelength or transistor, only to discover that most people have no clue of what this is, expect to joke about being on the same… wavelength. But very small wavelength.

To put it straight : I look at small things.

Yet, I was just awarded a prize for best research at the EUV lithography symposium in Washington, D.C., and it’s only fair of me to explain what I’m doing for a living!

sharp_photo

The SHARP EUV microscope I’m working with

 

Continue reading →

12 September 2014
art & science, english, science life

Beautiful SEM pictures

I had the chance to help my friend Sylvie to get scanning electron microscope pictures of the MRI contrast agent she synthesizes, and we collected gorgeous data thanks to my colleague Farhad.
He told me that he had TONS of failed experiments that still yielded great pictures…
We should start a journal of the failed experiments… art+science mag !:)

Islands...

SEM picture that looks like an aerial view of Dog Island (Anguilla)…

I guess there is some wabi-sabi in science…

Continue reading →

4 July 2014
français, resources

Les avancées technologiques à surveiller

Dear English-speaking readers :
I wrote a piece in French about upcoming consumer technologies

Je viens de publier un article sur les avancées technologiques à surveiller (sur silicon-valley.fr)

Bien que ces derniers temps la tendance dans la Silicon Valley était plutôt du coté des applications, des API et de réseau sociaux, nous avons très récemment eu droit a un regain de créativité en terme de hardware, et je vous propose ici de faire un petit tour de ce qui fait friser les neurones des ingénieurs du cru.

On s’intéressera essentiellement aux innovations qui sont susceptibles de déboucher sur des produits de consommation, laissant de coté pour le moment d’autres secteurs très actifs comme celui des énergies renouvelables et les biosciences.

suite

15 June 2014
english, epistemology, science life, skepticality

Love and Confidence in science

Recent events in the scienfic community – I’m thinking of the detection of primordial B-mode signal in the CMB polarization by BICEP2 (probable), the discovery of Higgs Boson (Nobel-prized) and of the faster-than-light neutrinos (ruled out as an experimental error) – invite us to draw a line between what is reasonable science and what is not.

Saul Perlmutter talking about exotic theories in astrophysics

Saul Perlmutter talking about exotic theories in astrophysics

Continue reading →

5 May 2014
epistemology, resources, traductions

La deraisonnable efficacité des mathématiques

Hi peeps !

Dear English-speaking readers :
this post is about a French translation of Hamming’s
“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics“
You can readily enjoy this text in English language!
C’est un texte que j’affectionne et qui reprend le question thème épistémologique abordé par Eugene Wigner dans “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” (dont la traduction par mes soins est en cours)
Voici un extrait du texte :
C’est ainsi qu’il y a des odeurs que les chiens peuvent sentir et que nous ne pouvons sentir, des sons que les chiens peuvent entendre et que nous ne pouvons entendre, et encore des couleurs que nous nous ne pouvons voir et de saveurs dont nous ne pouvons nous délecter.
Des lors pourquoi, compte tenu de la façon dont nos cerveaux sont câblés, la remarque “Peut-être y a-t-il des pensées que nous ne pouvons pas concevoir” vous surprendrait-elle ? L’évolution, jusqu’à présent, pourrait nous avoir empêché de penser suivant certaines directions ; il se pourrait qu’il y ait des pensées impensables.
N’hesitez pas me faire part de vos commentaire, quand aux erreurs de typo éventuelles ou sur des problèmes de style.
Si le coeur vous en dit, vous pouvez faire un tour sur la partie “traduction” du blog pour retrouver d’autres textes  (dans le même esprit, vous trouverez “La relativite du faux” de Isaac Asimov)
Enjoy !
Principia Mathematica (theorem 54)

Pas si efficaces, les mathématiques…. Démonstration en logique formelle de “1+1=2” par Russell.

 

31 March 2014
art & science, Noble drawings

A cool atom

Hi peeps,

Today, I had the chance to be there for a talk given by Steven Chu.
It was a strange talk, with two topics : superresolution imaging and climate change.
I didn’t really get the picture, but I made one :

Steven Chu and George Smoot

Two Nobel Prize winners in the same frame (Chu and Smoot), taken from an handheld smartphone.
And the lab director, Paul Alivisatos

As usual, I’ve asked him a for a drawing.
Since he did a lot of work on laser cooling, I asked him for a “cool atom” :

chu_alivisatos

Steven Chu’s and Paul Alivisatos’s drawings

Since Paul Alivisatos was around, I also asked him for a contribution.
I thought a quantum dot would do the work !

check-out the other drawings I’ve collected here !

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