HOLLY LARSON CAPELO: PLIES=PARTICLE INTERACTIONS
September 23, 2008
Its been awhile, I know. Unfortunately, my initial (overly eager) intentions of updating this blog daily degraded into an honest attempt to update it weekly, and now, well, I just check in when I can. But my absence has been largely due to the fact that my band is writing a new album, and we’re starting to record it tomorrow (!) under the wing of producer Thom Monahan, whom we hope will impart to our music a bit of his magic. Just a few hours ago, he arrived from LA with an arsenal of vintage keyboards at his side, and by noon tomorrow, we’ll have all our gear in place. The girls and I are VERY excited! We spent the weekend upstate at Erika’s family’s house, shooting the photos for the album cover and doing the final bits of tweaking to each song–rewriting lyrics, rearranging song structures, making ever more demos. So I hope the end result will justify my blog negligence!
I did, however, take a moment last night to attend the My Bloody Valentine show at Roseland Ballroom. I harbor a very nostalgic, stormcloud-colored soft spot for MBV since all of my memories of listening to “Loveless” involve a pathetic medley of teen angsty laden vignettes from when I was in a torturous, unrequited love affair with my best guy friend in high school. He was the coolest art boy in Jersey–I had braces and frighteningly knobby knees. But oh, how MBV could articulate all the latent passion buried beneath my flat chest! And though it was nice to be haunted by those subtle pangs of long-forgotten heartache last night, what wasn’t so nice was the very real, very un-subtle pangs of actual earache which accompanies a MBV show. Never before have I been forced to cover my ears with my hands while wearing snugly-fitting earplugs. That was a first. At one point, I pulled out the earplug just a little bit in order to hear what the show would sound like without them, and my poor eardrum was instantly raped by an incomprehensible screeching. I am now a bit more deaf in my right ear than I was before. And yet, once I put the earplug back in, I could hear the show for all its sonorous, bewitching perfection–I found myself dumbly swaying back and forth like a sailor at sea, so completely captivated by an ethereal siren song that the threat of drowning in a dusky dream-fog of guitars seemed certain. But take the earplugs out? Deafening, ear-splitting noise. I imagine that experience is probably the closest I’ll ever come to understanding the Babel Fish…
“HELLO HOLLY!”
“I live in New York and attend Columbia University. My twin sister, Heather Larson Teufel, lives in the Bay Area, and works in Passive Solar Architecture. Our sign is Gemini.”
My 2 links I’d like you to check out:
His work is a reminder both of our materiality and that visible light is not the only form of radiation available to us - in art or science.
The other link is of a group who ’sonify’ the solar wind.
http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/impact/sounds.html
I like how they translate the signal of particles into something we can register with our own senses. (this wind would be dangerous if we didn’t have a magnetosphere!)
Heather: (in italics from here on): Hi Holly! What are you doing right now?
Holly: (in bold from here on): I’m sitting in the computer room at Yale, casually working on research and eyeing the first edition of Percival Lowell’s book I found in the astronomy library here. He wrote about canals on Mars and popularized the idea…I’m a sucker for old books like that.
So you’re doing research and perusing the stacks…and I assume, also squeezing in a visit with your Yalie husband, Pedro? I need to know something– are you two like the Yale astrophysics department’s very own Brangelina?
…the even funnier thing is that I work on little black holes and he works on supermassive blackholes—we could just get matching polo shirts.
Please do!
(Pedro’s) philosophy is that we are not astronomers, but that we just ‘do’ astronomy. I think it’s one of those things that can easily consume someone’s life.
Seems to be the general consensus. So what do you get out of this whole endeavor?
I think it is a lot of things. On a personal level, I enjoy the process; I like the idea of getting to a level of technical proficiency and then hoping to go beyond technique…
Am I wrong, or do I hear your ex-ballerina-ness in that desire? A perfectionism?
Yeah definitely…maybe, I’m a little addicted to discipline. Physics requires a lot of discipline. But I think I can recognize that and at the same time enjoy the payoff from hard work.
Is that the only relationship you see between physics and dancing? Has one helped the other?
Yeah, I think so. This is weird, but I equate things in my head from my previous experience, like pliés= particle interactions = basic building blocks of artform/system.
So far has your proudest moment been in dancing or in physics?
I am still proud of earning a contract with Pittsburg Ballet Theater, it came after a moment when I had to step in for an older dancer (when I was a student) and I got noticed by doing a good job. My victories in physics thus far are all personal, relative gains. My contributions aren’t that important at this stage.
What are you researching right now?
I am still working on X-ray Binaries. I was exposed to an object consisting of a black hole and a stellar mass star, GRO-J1690 when I was working at Yale, and I became interested in them, so my project at AMNH is now on a similar type of object.
The primary way by which black holes are detected is when a star is caught in orbit around them. You can tell this is happening when the spectra of a star is repeatedly red shifted and blue shifted, meaning that the star is orbiting towards and away from the observer (and manifests as a double peaked spectrum). From these dynamics you can use Newton’s laws to infer the density of the object around which it rotates, and it turns out that that black holes in binaries are incredibly dense. Neutron stars are too. They are both referred to as compact objects because of how dense they are. When something falls into their potential well, it loses a lot of energy and lets out very high-energy radiation, so they are also detected by x-rays, thus the name x-ray binary. For my current project we are accounting for the known x-ray binaries in the Milky Way.
Are there many x-ray binary systems?
There are over 100 already identified.
That’s a lot of black holes. But are there any black hole suns? (Sorry, corny 90’s music joke…)
I’m looking at a number of x-ray binaries, and trying to account for those that are known and consider new ways of detecting them. We’re looking at infrared emission, which hasn’t been studied very closely yet for these kinds of objects, so there are good prospects for discovery. But I’ve spent a lot of time just trying to locate them, much less say much about them.
Is it kind of like trying to find a needle in a haystack?
Yes, that’s exactly how the project was described to me when I started…maybe someday I’ll be able to describe the needle to you! Our data was divided up into 1200 little cubes, each with millions of stars, it was a mess, but when I finally found the field that had the galactic center, I was so excited to have that image pulled up on my computer screen—it’s a rare view.
What does it look like?
Well, blinding…there’s so much radiation coming from that region that it was hard to get a good contrast on the images (in fact I thought there was something wrong with the contrast for a couple days before realizing what the heck was going on). It’s interesting that the filters are sensitive to light of other frequencies than optical, but when you compare the same space to images of different frequencies they often look different.
Is it only in the infrared that you can tell that you’ve found a black hole?
X-ray is the most commonly used bandwidth…
Like the same kind of X-ray photographs a doctor would take of bones?
Yes, exactly.
That’s kind of too weird to be true–an X-ray of the sky–showing black holes, you’re lucky you get to be privy to those pictures!
Yes, I know, it’s amazing. I saw a photo essay in Seed Magazine today that reminded me how cool x-rays are. There’s a guy named Nick Veasey who takes x-ray images and makes art out of them.
People are obsessed with black holes. Why do you think that is?
Hmm, yes, it’s a buzzword—it gets responses at cocktail parties, there’s the fear that the LHC will produce them. There’s something alluring about black holes in that they are by definition something that cannot be seen—we have inferred representations of them, we can tell when something is in orbit around one, we can tell when in-falling matter must be heating up, we can come close to describing them mathematically, but every description comes close to fiction. I suppose the act of imagining that which is impossible to see is what intrigues people. (As for the LHC, the speculation about that is just that- a fiction. Suggested and conceivable but not very likely)
Do you think that black holes are the link to other universes? Or is that sci-fi stuff?
Fiction too probably. I think a misconception about black holes is that they continuously suck up everything in their way. They certainly have a strong gravitational effect on everything (including light) within a certain proximity, but there is a radius at which they no longer influence the movement of other bodies.
With accreting black holes, it’s often approximated that the inner radius of the disk is at the Alfven radius, where it is supported by magnetic pressure of the black hole’s magnetosphere. But it’s already subject to gravity at this point. The Roche lobe is between two bodies, It’s the point at which material gravitationally bound to one object starts falling into the gravitational potential well of the other. So if you have a star with a large envelope of gas around it in orbit around a black hole nothing will get pulled into the BH until the Roche lobe overflows none of the gas, that is, but once it overflows, an accretion disk forms. But if you picture a black hole like a gravitational potential well, then you can imagine that within a certain radius, things won’t ‘fall in’ to the well. Just as we are gravitationally bound to the Sun, there’s no fear of the Sun eating up the rest of the solar system.
That’s lucky for us. Despite the obvious coolness factor of your work, do you ever miss dancing?
I don’t miss pointe shoes and tights. Sometimes I miss being around beautiful music and being active all the time.
Do you listen to music when you do research?
Yes, I listen to a lot of Classical music. Sometimes I go to the school radio station and play records while I work.
Any favorites?
Sibelius. Milhaud. Bach…none of which are actually “Classical.” “Orchestral”…
I had no idea there was a difference. My knowledge of classical music is even worse than my knowledge of black holes. My knowledge of chocolate however…I’ve nearly finished a box of Prestat mint thins during this conversation! So have you always been into Classical/Orchestral music, or does it just come with the ballet territory?
Well, ballet was always a part of my life, I was trained in the Balanchine style so I tend to have an affinity for the Neo-Classics. (Mmm. I like being able to do that and not worrying about how my leotard will fit the next day!)
Indeed. Who inspired you back then?
The cult of the Balanchine ballerina did, in my youth. And certainly all the big icons at New York City Ballet. But ballets set to George Gershwin’s music were always the most fun. The great thing about dancing to great music is that you get so wrapped up in it that you forget how hard it is.
Similar to forgetting how hard finding one of those needles is?
I guess it’s similar with great intellectual pursuits, exactly!
Who inspires you most now?
Fred Hoyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Einstein. (Why I like Fred Hoyle: he was a great scientist and I love his sci-fi; his book ‘The Dark Cloud’ is priceless).
What are you most excited about right now? What gets you up in the morning? Or is your peter-pan happy thought…
Besides cappuccino with extra vanilla soy creamer…I guess I’m surprised by how many turns my life has taken and I’m excited to see what the next one will be.
What is next for you?
Well, I’ll be spending more and more time up here at Yale. (I like it here, it’s where I did my first research project so I’m a little nostalgic and I feel at home in the department.)
I may take on a TA job in the spring…one of the astronomy courses. It should be fun and a good way for me to reinforce my own knowledge (it never hurts to revisit the stuff you zoomed by). I think they offer an Archaeoastronomy course too. I like history of science stuff as much as physics…
Have you taken an Archaeoastronomy class before?
No, the closest I came is the research on Jantar Mantar that I presented for Columbia’s public outreach this summer. This is a good Jantar Mantar website: http://www.jantarmantar.org/
I will definitely check that out after I learn how to pronounce it. Before I leave you to your research, I want to ask you what is your advice to people like yourself who maybe were involved in non-science stuff for most of their lives, but want to get into it now? Is it worth it?
Yes. I think it’s healthy to always be a beginner at something. It is a good way to keep your ego in check. It’s a good way not to settle. It’s a good way to uncover hidden talents and interests. And eventually, you get better.
