Imaginary Potential

The undergraduates invited Stephen Wolfram last thursday to give the physics colloquium. It was very strange.

For those who don’t know, about five years or so ago Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, released a ridiculously large book called “A New Kind of Science.” This book is entirely too large, so I have not read it (see also “The Bell Curve”). So I will have to rely on others who have read, and on his colloquium it to summarize what I understand are some of his points.

The first one is that complex phenomena can be emergent from incredibly simple laws/rules. I don’t think this is a point that anybody really argues with. In fact, I think a lot of current condensed matter theory relies on precisely this fact. In his talk, he spent a lot of time (way too much actually) emphasizing this point. His shtick is cellular automata, some of which can produce ridiculously pseudo-random looking patterns based on very simple rules for how the cells grow. So he spent a lot of time showing very pretty pictures of these automata, which was fine enough.

At some point, the talk took a very weird turn, and he started blatantly advertising the newest version of Mathematica. It really was strange, because the features he was advertising (in real time, on his computer), had seemingly nothing to do with the talk he was giving. Then he said something like: “for the past few years, we have been working on a new piece of software which will accomplish what nobody thought possible. It’s going to be huge and possibly change all of your lives.” He did not elaborate.

After this point, I began to sense frustration from the audience, as it had been forty five minutes, and the man hadn’t actually said anything. All the while, he had been promising to elaborate on his biggest and most suspect claim of the very large book: the simple rules of cellular automata can somehow generate fundamental laws of physics. Finally, with about ten minutes left, he made a series of grandiose claims without elaboration; somehow with cellular automata, the theories of special and general relativity can somehow be derived.

Now, I don’t doubt that Wolfram is a very smart man, smarter than I will ever be. He got his Ph.D. in physics at 20 or something, he invented mathematica. But if you are giving a talk to a physics audience and you have a claim like “GR can be derived from cellular automata,” well, you’d better spent your entire alloted time justifying that claim instead of inappropriately shilling for your software program. Because, if true (which I think I, and most real physicists are very skeptical about), it is ridiculously interesting.

The talk ended with a bit of awkwardness; Wolfram had gone over his time, but was very interested in taking questions from the audience. After a few of them, the undergraduate host tried to get him to stop. Wolfram pleaded for more time, but eventually the undergraduate just cut him off, nobody came out looking well from the exchange.

Maybe yall remember when I was writing some conference proceedings last month. I finished them at the last minute (like everything else I do) and mailed in the LaTeX source, the original figures in eps and the resultant dvi/ps/pdf, just like the webpage said. I saw something about instructions for a photograph-ready hardcopy, and assumed it was a courtesy for participants who work in caves* and code on pre-RISC DECs with orange-on-black CRTs. I just got an email from the secretary who is gathering the contributions for the publisher. Everyone has to send in hardcopies. Like, mail in paper. Like, tree-paper. Like, physically. Like, with a stamp. …? I could see it if you submit via Word or some other format that intentionally discourages interoperability, but I used their LaTeX format with no additional (ie modern) packages.

This wasn’t my first rodeo, and I ain’t never had to do this before. I asked an olderwiser about it, and they said “Sometimes they ask you for it. Don’t.” I mean, I will do it, but man, that’s silly.

*no offense to folks at neutrino/DM experiments. Those are mines, not caves.

If, today, you feel as if you should be doing work, but don’t really want to do any, may I suggest a video of a Sidney Coleman Lecture: Quantum Mechanics in Your Face? You’ll learn and be entertained.

The lecture is fantastic and consists of the late, great Coleman discussing a version of Bell’s theorem (which is much easier to understand than the standard treatment), and then going on to discuss the “mysterious” “collapse of the wavefunction”. It’s great stuff. All that’s required for enjoyment is a basic undergrad QM course…

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. Keep reading →

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. Keep reading →

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…. Keep reading →