SpaceMika

Stargate: Atlantis, “Brain Storm,” is the last episode of the series for which I was a physics consultant for Props. That means anywhere you see science-scribbles is my handwriting, not that I vetted the script for science.

I need to watch the aired episode to find out which whiteboards ended up in the final cut before I can start posting photos & explanations, but my favourite two boards are the one in the control room (a long complicated process going from string theory to atmospheric science over 24 feet) and the atmospheric science problem-solving board in the herd of physicists (where the lady and the albert-einsteinian scientists are drawing on a diagram).

update: teehee, at least one person noticed! Maxwell graces the Hero-board (they’re pretty! and leave a hint to look closer), but a physics textbook wouldn’t even touch on most of this stuff. When playing with scifi, a gal needs to go farther afield.

update2: have gotten my grubby little paws on the episode, but with only a few days before departure I haven’t gotten to watch it yet. I have confirmed that my whiteboards of glory are present. Discovery likes the squabbling-scientists, but I stand by my prior claim that physics has ego, yes, but it also has a strong ethos of mentorship.

My interview/Q&A is up on Joe’s blog. For some reason his version of wordpress doesn’t play nicely with mine, so all my pretty formatting disappeared. Ain’t it always the way? I’ll post the pretty version here after he’s gone on to other interviews.

Questions fell into a few broad categories which oddly mimic elementary school interview guidelines:
1. Who are you?
2. What do you do?
3. What is it like?
4. How did you start?
5. Why does the science happen like that in this episode?
Although we skipped When and Where and instead finish with Category Six, the unclassifiable queries.

The most surprising thing about the Q&A is that I did not get a single question about women & science. I need to remember to pass that tidbit on and see if anyone else has observations or thoughts on the relationship between scifi and women-in-science that we could build into a hypothesis. It also leaves me curious about counting up the number of female scientist/engineers listed in various episodes — Atlantis always seemed more balanced than any department I’ve been in (even with geo- being way more female-friendly than -physics).

One of my cousins pulled me aside to interrogate me on CERN, particle physics, and why on earth people are making doomsday predictions. (In response to all doomsday predictions: Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth?)

I need to delay writing up a lay-cousins’ interpretation of CERN for the moment (thesis beckons!), but I can give you a scattering of links:

- the now-infamous CERN-rap for those who like getting their particle physics in a rhyming format.
- amazingly beautiful photos of the assembly that bring out my love of industrial art.
- the education comic for the folks who like getting their particle physics in an animated format, and the made-me-gigglesnort comic for those who already know their particle physics and like to snicker about quark innuendos.
- the formal technical info who don’t understand why anyone would go for all this cutesy stuff in relation to particle physics.

Today I hopped a fence to go on a particle accelerator tour.

I recently scored what is perhaps the coolest after-school gig ever: physics consultant for the TV series Stargate: Atlantis.

On the balcony of the control room overlooking the stargate in Atlantis.

And this is why you always do your orbital dynamics homework, kids.

update 8/17/09: okay, why is this particular post getting repeated hits from IP addresses in Hungary, specifically with referrals from webmail URLs? Is it in some sort of email forward? Enlighten me!