Imaginary Potential

I’ve been spending a few evenings at the lab in the last two weeks, and eating a lot at the on-site bistro. While the change in management of on-site food services to Sodexho a year ago has actually increased quality*, its also increased the corporate cheeze-factor by an order of magnitude. Lots of dishes in the bistro have baseless names like the “PETRA** Burger” (just a burger, but it comes with onion “Rings”***). If you’re ever in town, might I recommend for a digestif, the Beschleuniger (Accelerator):

They won’t tell you what’s in it, but it tastes to me like crème de menthe and apple liquor. This doesn’t explain the opacity, but at 2 €, it aint bad.

*In my opinion. Canteen bashing is still a popular method of winning trust among DESY folk.

**Local Synchrotron, but the same tunnel where gluons were discovered in 3 jets by the TASSO collab.

***Get it? Get It? Man, I hate quotation abuse.

A few weeks ago, while I was in a discussion about young academics and why they choose to stay in science or not, I made a point which I think is perfectly obvious, but which was snorted at by the older academics present.   I said that when a postdoc looks at the people ahead of them in the system, they see stressed tired people who regularly work evenings and weekends, who have to fight continually for their funding (i.e. their job security), and who not make a lot of money for their effort.   This is not something that most people want to look forward to.    The people my age in the group remained quiet and listened to the older ones there pooh-pooh the idea.   The more senior academics asked me, “do you personally see that problem ahead of you?”.  And I said “yes”, and described the unhealthy work ethic that I sometimes see around me.   And the discussion stopped there.   Because the loudest snorter of them all actually said “well, you’re from Britain - you’re not used to working as hard as we do here.    You don’t have money for the really big projects.   And you stop for tea three times a day!”.   I pointed out that it’s only twice a day, but my serious point about the work was no longer taken seriously.

This annoyed me.   So when I went back to my office, I looked a few things up.   Thomson (the academic publishers) publish tables every year of the total number of scientific papers published by each country and also the “Total papers among the one per cent most cited in all fields”.   I then looked up the current populations of each country and so got to the numbers of papers per capita.   Here are the results:

Total papers per capita:    USA:  9.6 per thousand people per year     UK:   10.9 per thousand people per year.

Papers in the top 1%:  USA:   0.18 per thousand people per year.   UK:   0.17 per thousand people per year.

Now, I’m happy to admit that simple statistics may not tell the whole story.   But I’m also pretty confident that this is a strong indication that taking two 15 minutes breaks a day to consume cups of tea and eat biscuits is not doing us any harm at all, thank you very much.   And next time anyone tries to snort at my view of working hours on that basis, I will politely share these data with them and offer to induct them into the world of the tea break.   If they’re nice, I might even give them a biscuit.

A few weeks ago, I wrote the first script of what I hoped would become a pop-sci podcast. Since this podcast, if it ever happens, will not happen for a rather long time, I figured it’d be fun to make it a series of blog posts. Many apologies if the post seems too simplistic or condescending….

The subject of false vacua is fascinating in its own right, but also nice because it brings together many different areas of theoretical physics. The discussion encapsulates many current areas of beautiful physical research such as quantum field theory, gravity, cosmology, supersymmetry and string theory. There is also a science-fiction like quality about the subject; After all, we’ll be talking about the possibility that at any second a bubble might form out of nothing and eat you. Hopefully, after these podcasts/blogposts the viewer/reader will appreciate that nowadays science fiction is somewhat superfluous; some of the craziest ideas are found in modern physics.

The fusion of Einstein’s special relativity and quantum mechanics under the heading of “Quantum Field Theories,” which describes things that are both very small and very fast. (more…)

Before a seminar last week, I was discussing a colleague’s masters thesis, and she told me something I’m fairly jealous of:  She gets to invent her own physics words.  You see, this colleague comes from Ukraine, and her University has recently changed its thesis requirements from Russian to Ukrainian.  The two languages are closely related, but have significant differences in alphabet, vocabulary and grammar.  Ukrainian has been the official language of the Ukraine since 1991, but it was suppressed to varying degrees during the Soviet Era, and the CIA Factbook lists currently at 67% of the population claim it as their native language.  Since it has only recently been officially used at the university level, there are many technological words which are currently loaned from Russian or English.  This isn’t really unique to her situation, as that anyone who studies physics in any language has solved a problem by an ansatz, and heard of bremsstrahlung*.  What is unique is that there is pressure to develop Ukrainian, and therefore pressure to remove these loan words.  She was vague about how many loan words would be officially tolerated, but indicated that some technical vocabulary could be naturally adapted, but some would need to be basically invented from scratch to make them genuinely Ukrainian.  That’s got to be 50% fun, and 50% intractable.

*Bremsstrahlung is in firefox’s En. spell checker.  Thats awesome.  Ansatz isn’t, but ersatz is?

I’m part of a collaboration that built and operated a particle detector at a collider which finished taking data in July of last year. I wasn’t here to build it by a long shot, but I did run and repair part of it during last two years of data taking. Now I’m only analysing data for my thesis, not doing any hardware work anymore, and I’m finding its a mixed blessing. (more…)

Last friday, Mauro (a fellow CTP graduate student) gave the grad student pizza talk about financial derivatives. It was a little bit of a change of pace from the usual (the talks are usually about physics), but was appropriate since Mauro is graduating and currently contemplating what to do for the next phase of his life; financial derivatives are a standard alternative option (as it were) for physics Ph.D.’s.

I’m happy to report that the talk was excellent. The more I learn about financial derivatives, the more interesting I find them. It’s comforting to know that there exist interesting things outside of theoretical physics. It’s more than comforting to know that some of these things can make you money.

Without further adieu, with his permission, here is Mauro’s CTP lunch club talk.

Ever hear the quip that a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into proofs? Well, maybe if you up the input, you up output…. (more…)

I had a Eureka moment this week. Fortunately I was not sitting in a bath at the time and so I did not have to decide whether to suppress the urge (apparently written into the laws of physics for moments like this) to run around the streets naked, shouting happily about my discovery. Thinking about it though, if I’m ever going to try that, it should be while I live in southern California near the beach. In my neighbourhood, such behaviour would probably just count as part of the social background noise rather than anything significant.

The Eureka itself was to do with how bubbles behave acoustically when fragmenting in turbulence (for example underneath a breaking wave). It turns out that some bubbles are disguising themselves acoustically as other bubbles (because the dominant resonance is not at their natural frequency). This explains a gap in the data which was previously unexplained, and I am very happy because my model matches the data pretty well. Or, it matches it pretty well up to now. There are still lots of things to be tested, but the fact that it explains this major feature is very encouraging. So I worked all this out, plotted most of the relevant stuff and hopefully this is sufficient for the time being to exorcise the bubbles-on-the-brain demons. Just before I worked out what was going on, piles of ideas were sitting untidily round in my head, overflowing into corners that they really didn’t belong in (for example, the ones associated with eating yogurt and inventing cocktails). They jostled each other and squeaked and squawked and squeezed and generally wouldn’t leave me alone. So now they’ve been put in order and I can get on with some other things. Good ideas. Sit. Stay…

I have no one good thing to blog about, so I’ll blog about a bunch of random things…

Random #1:

Last friday I gave the graduate student lunch talk at the CTP on linear sigma models and extra dimensions in string theory; my goal was to include lots of pictures and make the talk accessible to a wider physics audience than such a talk would normally aim. I don’t think I succeeded (my officemate was refreshingly honest and told me he didn’t understand but liked my pictures). I think it went ok though and got some compliments. I was quite excited to record an audio track to the presentation, make a podcast out of it and post it on the blog. Unfortunately, I spent an hour doing that (it’s quite exhausting to give a talk, even to yourself), only to find out that from 13:01-21:00 for some reason my sound goes out and it sounds like the apocalypse is upon us. Also at various points my hard drive starts spinning RIDICULOUSLY LOUDLY (it’s about to die), and you can hardly hear me. Oh well, guess I’ll have to give it a try again tomorrow.

Random #2:

Here’s a fact. Let’s suppose that one has broken up with one’s long term girlfriend several months ago. Let’s also suppose that she starts seeing someone else and then you decide you’ve made a huge mistake. Let’s further suppose that all one is trying to do is forget about said women. It turns out it DOES NOT HELP to go to what you think will be a relaxing lunch talk only to have her intermediate black hole results cited in the slides! Was it really necessary to cite her t=0.05 s result, sir? Was that integral to your central point? I gave the graduate student speaker (whom I do not know) an earful after the talk. He looked confused. 

Random #3:

Joe Polchinski gave a talk today at MIT whose central theme was the black hole information paradox. If one believes Ads/CFT (which one should, it’s awesome), then it’s really not a “paradox,” because the Hawking radiating black hole can be described as some unitary evolution in a (strongly coupled) gauge theory (living on the boundary of AdS). But this isn’t entirely satisfactory, because one wants a reason why the semiclassical gravity reasoning of Hawking breaks down. His talk reviewed this and talked about some toy models, it was very interesting.

But I was mostly afraid that’d I’d have to meet the guy sometime during the day and that he’d recognize my name. Old time Worldsheet (mostly my grandma, I think) will remember that blogging dave had a little bit of an embarrassment with the famed Dr. Polchinski here (be sure to check the comments!). In the intervening time, actually, I’ve read quite a bit more of Polchinski’s two volume series. At the time of the complaint, I think my mind was just not ready to handle it. But it turns out that given (a lot) of time to ponder over the pages, the book is actually excellent (in a lot of ways it’s like Weinberg’s QFT books). After long sessions with the books, I feel like a Talmudic scholar: exhausted, and like I have seen the face of God. Ok, that’s a bit dramatic….

I went to a discussion about women in science last week. I don’t normally do things like that, since such events have been known to bring on side effects such as the Horrified Hiccups and mysterious aches in the Being Patronised (or should it be Matronised) Brain Cell. When compared to women throughout the ages, I am very privileged in the attitude that my co-workers have to my gender, i.e. that it is a non-issue. I recognise that there are not as many women doing science as men (for reasons which are many and complicated), but I really don’t think that it’s due to prejudice any longer. There may well be isolated cases when this is true, but I can’t quite believe that they are at all representative. However, this change in attitudes is still newly hatched, and this is my only explanation for the persistance of “Women In Science” workshops when I was a teenager. I felt patronised at all of them. And I felt that women were almost being told to have problems, when really the issues being discussed could apply just to much to men as women. Not all men are assertive and confident and they will have problems when dealing with over-assertive and excessively confident co-workers, just as shyer females might. The problem is with the way people are, not their gender.

So. I have not been to any of these events since, and I thought it was about time to see how things have changed. And it was very interesting. The women there found it extremely difficult to come up with instances where they had been discriminated against, even though they were being actively encouraged to talk about them. Now, there is obviously one very important difference between men and women. Women can bear children and men, however much they want to help, do not have to go through the physical process associated with this. The point where the number of women in science really drops off is at the point where they have a family and have tended not to come back to science aftewards. I believe that this is the only time period that really matters in the gender debate. I also have a theory on this, based on talking to other female scientists. Institutions no longer stand in the way of new mothers coming back to work as they once did. But science itself has problems for researchers at that stage that apply both to men and women. Ask any postdoc. We look at the PIs in our departments and we see very stressed people, who work far too many hours on weekdays and on weekends, who have to struggle for funding, fight for lab space and also deal with teaching responsibilities and committees and so on. It’s not just women who look at this mess and question whether their love of science is enough for them to carry on. Men do too. No-one wants a permanently stressed lifestyle and a guaranteed heart attack at 55. But I think that partly because of having some time off to have children and getting some perspective on it all, and partly because they are used to talking about problems more than men, women look at it and decide to do something else. Men still have a bit of a macho attitude to problems and tend to deny them and just keep struggling along, feeling as though it would be failing to admit to the struggle. Women tend to be a bit better about admitting problems. And science shouldn’t be like this. The system should not punish enthusiastic and intelligent people for being enthusiastic and intelligent. So I think that the gender split during the postdoc years has more to do with
the big problems in how science works and the unfair pressure that researchers are often under, at least until they get tenure. This is not to do with prejudice against women in science. This has to do with women identifying the problems in science and refusing to play by those rules. You only have one life. Why should you be miserable in it, just because someone else defines that misery as success?

So I think that women here are in a position to help both themselves and the men in science. Let’s face up to it and sort it out. Let’s change this system where the only security comes with tenure, when the best years of your life are behind you. It’s not a “gender” issue. It’s right at the core of how science is organised. We should find ways to fix it. Systems are huge, but their rules are not written in stone. There is hope.

Right, I’ve made my political point. Back to the cheerful flippancy next time….