Gamow lecture

Vint Cerf, co-founder of the Internet, to speak on ‘digital preservation’

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 00:10:47 +0000

Vint Cerf, co-founder of the Internet, to speak on ‘digital preservation’ Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/23/2018 - 17:10

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist to give Gamow lecture at CU ��«��Ƶ Feb. 10

Having a commercial email address in the early- to mid-1990s — from America Online (AOL) or Compuserve, or perhaps Prodigy or Earthlink — marked a user as an “early adopter” of Internet technology in the United States.

But the origins of the Internet go much further back. Indeed, it was all the way back in 1973 that Vinton G. Cerf and Bob Kahn — known today as the fathers of the Internet — created the fundamental architecture, known as the TCP/IP protocol, that makes the Internet what it is today.

Vinton G. Serf had a vision in the past and has a hope for the Internet's future.

Cerf, who now serves as Google’s “Chief Internet Evangelist,” will speak on “digital preservation” at the 52^nd George Gamow Memorial Lecture at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 10 at Macky Auditorium on the ��«��Ƶ campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The George Gamow Memorial lecture series honors the eminent Russian-born physicist, who joined the faculty of the CU ��«��Ƶ Department of Physics in 1956. Speakers have included 26 Nobel Prize recipients and such notable figures as Jane Goodall, Robert D. Ballard and Linus Pauling.

“We are delighted to have Vint Cerf as the 52nd Gamow lecturer,” says Paul Beale, professor of physics at CU ��«��Ƶ. “In 1974, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published the protocol that first allowed computers to exchange digital data across phone lines. Today, that same protocol is used by billions of users and devices to connect across the internet.

“Our technological society has been built on their invention. Vint has been an international leader in the development of the Internet throughout his career. He remains an innovator and visionary in the field and is a leading proponent for an open Internet that is equally accessible to all. Vint’s leadership in the field and his ability to communicate exciting ideas to the public make him an ideal Gamow lecturer.”

Preserving digital knowledge — everything from photos and video to spreadsheets, documents, databanks and games — isn’t as simple as it may sound.

“Humans produce trillions of photos and countless exabytes of complex digital objects every year,” Cerf says. “But formats are constantly changing, and all this data is potentially ephemeral. We need to find a way to store all that data in a way that will remain accessible 100 years from now.”

Humans produce trillions of photos and countless exabytes of complex digital objects every year. But formats are constantly changing, and all this data is potentially ephemeral. We need to find a way to store all that data in a way that will remain accessible 100 years from now.”

But there are numerous obstacles to preserving digital media for the long-term.

First, the media used to store digital content, whether VHS tapes, 5 ¼-inch floppy discs or CDs, are fragile and degrade over time or the readers may no longer work — even just finding a working VHS player can be difficult.

Even if you can access historical data, there’s no guarantee you can interpret it with current software, hardware or operating systems. And there are legal issues: if a company has disappeared, obtaining access to source or executable code might prove impossible. Finally, there is a question of sustainability — who is going to create and preserve such archives for 100 years, or 200 or 500?

“How many organizations and businesses last that long?” Cerf asks.

Cerf proposes what he calls “digital vellum,” a system that could “run old software on top of emulated hardware, old apps on top of old operating system hardware, possibly in the cloud.” He also would like to see laws changed to allow archives and libraries to access proprietary source code for the purposes of preservation.

As for who will do the preserving, he argues that we should study organizations that have withstood the test of time not just for centuries, but millennia, such as the Catholic Church, Islamic institutions, which played a critical role in preservation of knowledge through the Middle Ages, and universities.

“These are institutions that have lasted a long time,” he says. “We should examine what has allowed them to survive and imbue new institutions with some of those properties.”

Cerf and Kahn were working for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, when they created the TCP/IP protocols, a two-layer system of conventions, formats and procedures that allow communication between different kinds of software, hardware, operating systems and heterogeneous networks.

To illustrate the concept, Cerf offers an old-school analogy: postcards.

“A postcard has a ‘to’ and ‘from’ address and some content. But the postcard doesn’t actually know how it’s being carried. Neither does an Internet packet” — a formatted unit of data — “whether it’s being carried by optic fiber, radio link, a satellite channel,” he says.

“The postcard also doesn’t know what it’s carrying, which means the post office doesn’t care, either. That’s also true of packets: The network doesn’t care, and the content is being interpreted at the edges of the network, where computers are.

We knew we didn’t know what new technologies might come along, so we wanted to create something that could work long term on a non-national, global scale.”

“This ‘ignorance’,” Cerf says, “is important.”

But packets are like postcards, and if postcards are all you have to work with, you face certain problems: If you want to send a book to a friend through the postal system, you would have to cut up pages to fit on a postcard. They might get out of order, some might not arrive, your friend’s mailbox might hold fewer postcards than you send, and you wouldn’t know he received them until he sent you a postcard back, which might itself be lost.

The TCP/IP protocol is essentially a method of flow and error correction control that circumvents such problems. It was created, Cerf says, to be “ignorant” so that it can “run on top of everything else,” which means software developers can adapt any new communication technology to mesh with the Internet. In essence, it allows divergent computer technology and networks to operate as if they are all part of a common network.

Because of that flexibility, the Internet, launched on Jan. 1, 1983, triumphed over numerous other networking approaches created in the 1970s and ‘80s.

“We wanted to future-proof the protocol,” Cerf says. “We knew we didn’t know what new technologies might come along, so we wanted to create something that could work long term on a non-national, global scale.”

TCP/IP has allowed the Internet to grow organically, with little centralized oversight except for such things as the issuance of unique domain names and allocation of unique numerical Internet addresses.

Cerf and Kahn also advocated to ensure that the public would have access to the Internet. By the late 1980s, U.S. government agencies had created numerous “backbone” networks for electronic communication, but none allowed public use.

“Why let the unwashed public into our playpen?” was the prevailing sentiment, Cerf says. “I realized that if we didn’t do something, the public was never going to get access to it. But there was no commercial traffic allowed on government-sponsored backbones. I wondered, ‘How do I break that rule?’”

Kahn by that time had founded the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and Cerf was working for MCI Communications. They asked the Federal Networking Council for permission to connect MCI’s private electronic mail system, MCI Mail, to the Internet mail system, just to see if it could be done. The agency reluctantly agreed, but limited the experiment to one year.

As soon as they connected the two systems and traffic began to flow between MCI and the Internet, other private email service companies recognized the potential and went to the networking council to demand they be allowed to do the same. Within a year, the first commercial internet service providers were doing business with the public.

“We said it was a test. But the true purpose was to break the barrier against commercial traffic. I just thought the public would benefit from the Internet,” Cerf says, perhaps understating the case.

If you go

What: Vinton G. Cerf, co-founder of the Internet and Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, will speak on “Digital Preservation”
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 10
Where: Macky Auditorium, ��«��Ƶ campus
Info: www.colorado.edu/physics/gamow or call 303-492-6952
Tickets: Free and open to the public

Decades on, Cerf and Kahn’s innovations allow some four billion people around the world use the Internet, which has so far proved “future proof.” But there are issues that concern Cerf, including recent moves by the Federal Communications Commission to undermine “net neutrality,” the principle that service providers must treat all data on the internet the with the same set of rules and not discriminate or create differential pricing to customers based on content, platform, destination or any other factor.

In December, the FCC eliminated net neutrality in a rather arcane shift, by moving regulation of the Internet from one framework — which was created for telecommunications, not the Internet — to another, unregulated scheme.

A side effect of the move, Cerf says, is that the Internet now has been deregulated and there is “no barrier to potentially abusive behavior by current” Internet service providers, who could, theoretically, limit or make very expensive customers’ access to some content. Cerf opposed the move, but acknowledges that advocates of the change argue that the previous framework opened the door to potential regulatory overreach by some future “rogue FCC.”

“I’m very disappointed by the tack taken by the current FCC,” he says. “My preferred outcome would have been to leave the (previous regulatory framework) in place until Congress could pass new legislation specific to the Internet.”

A member of the National Science Board and National Academy of Engineering, Cerf is also concerned about the promotion of “alternative facts” and what he sees as a decline in critical thinking among many Americans.

“If we are going to do anything useful for future generations, we have to start teaching both children and adults to think critically about information, regardless of the source,” he says. “But that takes work and I confess that I’m afraid American society tends to be a little lazy when it comes to intellectual thinking.”

Vint Cerf also will give a free, public talk at Silicon Flatirons’ “Regulating Computing and Code” conference at 8:45 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 11, Wolf Law Building, CU ��«��Ƶ campus. Info: http://bit.ly/2BT4HTO

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Warped factors

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 17:38:22 +0000

Warped factors Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/13/2017 - 11:38

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Kip Thorne, pioneer in gravitational waves, creative force behind ‘Interstellar,’ to give 51st Gamow lecture at CU ��«��Ƶ April 27

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of “gravitational waves” in 1916 based on his General Theory of Relativity, but it took a century to prove him correct.

On Feb. 11, 2016, a team of physicists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, Scientific Collaboration announced that the decades-long search had come to fruition with the detection of gravitational waves in September 2015.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Kip Thorne has been an indispensible connection between those two momentous events in the history of physics.

“Beginning about 50 years ago, I started to target the goal of using a new kind of radiation to explore the universe, gravitational waves, which are ripples in the fabric of space and time,” says Thorne, 76, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology.

Ever since, Thorne has dedicated his life to unveiling the secrets of what he calls “the warped side of the universe,” including black holes, wormholes through space and the fifth dimension, as a scientist, author and contributor to two of Hollywood’s most scientifically accurate science-fiction films.

Kip Thorne with an image from CalTech of two colliding black holes.

On April 27, Thorne will give the 51^st George Gamow Memorial Lecture at Macky Auditorium on the CU ��«��Ƶ campus on the topic of, “Probing the Warped Side of the Universe with Gravitational Waves: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.” The 7:30 p.m. lecture is free and open to the public.

The lecture, presented by the Department of Physics, is made possible by an endowment honoring Gamow, a former CU ��«��Ƶ physicist who pioneered the concept that would become known as the Big Bang and authored many much-loved books popularizing science.

“We are honored to have Kip Thorne give the 51st George Gamow Memorial Lecture. Professor Gamow would have been enthralled by the recent discovery by LIGO of gravitational waves from colliding black holes,” says Paul Beale, professor of physics and chair of the Gamow Memorial Lecture Committee.

“Like George Gamow, Kip has made many seminal contributions to astrophysics, and he has demonstrated great skill at communicating the excitement and relevance of science to scientists and the general public. Most of the current generation of physicists and astrophysicists learned general relativity from the textbook Gravitation by Charles Misner, Kip Thorne and John Wheeler. Kip tells me that George Gamow inspired him to study physics. Many current and future scientists can say the same about Kip Thorne.”

The nitty-gritty of the universe’s “warped” side may lie beyond the ken of most lay science enthusiasts, but there is a nifty metaphor for black holes and gravitational waves: In Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, the force of gravity results from the stretching of space and time by mass and energy, much like how a bowling ball will stretch a trampoline. Space and time near a black hole are stretched so much that not even light can escape.

If you go

What: 51st George Gamow Memorial Lecture
Who: Kip Thorne, professor emeritus of physics at the California Institute of Technology and creative consultant for the film “Interstellar,” speaks on “Probing the Warped Side of the Universe with Gravitational Waves: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.”
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 27
Where: Macky Auditorium, CU ��«��Ƶ campus
Tickets: Admission is free and open to the public
Info: colorado.edu/physics/gamow-lecture or 303-492-6952

Gravitational waves are like vibrations of the trampoline caused by motions of bowling balls, and the stretches and compressions of space and time propagate at the speed of light. Thorne long theorized that the collision and coalescence of two black holes would emit energy in the form of gravitational waves.

Thorne has spent more than half of his career focused on gravitational waves. In 1984, he co-founded LIGO with physicists Rainer Weiss from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Caltech’s Ronald Drever, to “open up gravitational waves as a tool for exploring the universe.”

Five years later, the three scientists successfully persuaded the National Science Foundation and Congress to fund the instruments for a search they were well aware might take decades. LIGO began its search when it became fully operational in 2002.

LIGO simultaneously operates two observatories more than 1,800 miles apart, in Livingston, La., and Richland, Wash. Using mirror arrays, a laser interferometer, and quantum entanglement, scientists searched for signs of gravitational waves.

“As the gravitational waves go by, they push the mirrors back and forth … and the lasers go back and forth,” Thorne says. “The mirrors are moving by just 1/100^th of the diameter of a proton. … That is the very smallest, most accurate measurement of tiny, tiny motions and times that go back to the birth of the universe.”

Researchers concluded that the “ripples” detected by LIGO were produced by the collision and merging of two black holes, creating a single, more massive spinning black hole.

“We are now observing black holes in the flesh like they have never been observed before. We are learning observationally how black holes behave when they collide in the veritable storm of space and time,” Thorne says.

“What the team did is analogous to when Galileo turned his telescope to the sky for the first time and discovered the moons of Jupiter, which opened up astronomy. We’ve done this with a completely different kind of radiation and, just as Galileo’s discoveries had an impact many centuries into the future, this way of exploring the universe will continue to have an impact for a long time to come.”

Gravitational waves should also carry information about earliest moments of the Big Bang. “They are a tool to observe the earliest moments in the universe, almost back to the Planck time,” Thorne says. The Planck time of 10^-43 seconds is the earliest moment when gravity became distinct from the other fundamental forces.

Described by Caltech physics colleague John Preskill as “a visionary scientist,” Thorne has received the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the Karl Schwarzschild Medal of the German Astronomical Society and the Albert Einstein Medal of the Albert Einstein Society in Berne, Switzerland, among other awards. In 2004, he was named California Scientist of the Year.

Thorne stepped down from his illustrious career at Caltech in 2009 to focus on continuing research, and writing books and movies.

The Wall Street Journal called his 1994 book for lay readers, “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy,” “Deeply satisfying … (an) engrossing blend of theory, history and anecdote.”

Thorne’s first brush with Hollywood came when he suggested to his friend, the late Carl Sagan, that he use a wormhole to transport scientist Ellie Arroway through space and time in the novel and film “Contact.” In 2005, after being introduced through a blind date arranged by Sagan, Thorne and Lynda Obst, then science editor at The New York Times Magazine, began writing the film treatment that would eventually become “Interstellar.”

Obst went on to become a film producer, and after years of typical Hollywood wrangling, the Christopher Nolan-directed movie was released in 2014. Much of the science was on the “warped side,” but scientists applauded along with a majority of critics and audiences.

“We built the science into that film,” says Thorne, who also served as executive producer. “That’s really only been twice before, with Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘2001’ and Carl Sagan’s ‘Contact.’”

Thorne recently met with a writer about writing a screenplay from a film treatment he co-authored with Obst and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, his close friend of four decades. Whatever comes of it, he expects this will be his last dance with Hollywood.

“I can’t imagine not creating or trying to understand something new, but I’m interested in trying new things,” he says.

Kip Thorne, pioneer in gravitational waves, creative force behind ‘Interstellar,’ to give 51st Gamow lecture at CU ��«��Ƶ April 27.

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