Splash Biography

JAMES SIMON, 2nd-year physics PhD student

Major: Physics

College/Employer: UC Berkeley

Year of Graduation: G

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I'm Jamie Simon, a grad student aiming to use ideas from physics to answer open questions about machine learning. I love to learn about other disciplines, though, and so my Splash talks have all aimed to answer weird questions needing a lot of general knowledge, like "what would happen if you made a planet out of fish?" Outside of research, I love running, puzzles, Mexican food, and balancing things. I aim to take the time to be curious about the world; as they say, the early bird may get the worm, but only the curious bird will discover worm farming.

Past Classes

(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

S757: A Modern Scientist in Ancient Greece: How to Kickstart Civilization in Three Easy Steps in Splash Spring 2021 (Mar. 13, 2021)

You probably know a lot about science and math that even the smartest ancient Greeks didn't. The ancient world's most academic civilization didn't know about electricity, evolution, or even algebra! This talk explores a deceptively simple question: if you were sent back to ancient Greece, how much could you advance their civilization, and what strategy should you take? In answering, we'll explore the surprisingly complex tree of technology underlying modern society, and explain how a clever time traveler could create some basic modern tech in an ancient world. Also, have any weird questions of your own you're curious about? At the end of the talk, we'll open the floor to audience questions, working out rough answers and explaining our reasoning. Also, have any weird questions of your own you're curious about? For part of this talk, we'll open the floor to audience questions, working out rough answers and explaining our reasoning.

S674: Can you power a rocket ship with sports equipment? Could we make the moon habitable by moving bits of the Earth there? in Splash Fall 2020 (Oct. 31, 2020)

We're back and continuing to apply real science to the most absurd questions we can think of. In the name of fun and also to illustrate the power of human scientific understanding, we'll take a look at a spaceship which moves around by throwing balls out the back and what would happen if we decided to terraform the moon by taking away half of the Earth. NEW: We're asking you to bring some questions of your own, which we will try to answer live and in real time. We're looking for questions of the form: 1. What would happen if you did X? 2. What would be the best way to do X? 3. How many X would it take to do Y? We're excited to see what you'll come up with! From the people who brought you such ridiculous questions as: What would happen to a planet made of fish? What would happen to a chicken egg in the Large Hadron Collider? Could you cook a fish with electric eels? and What if you could see x-rays?