Strings are just everywhere. Have you noticed? Spooky isn’t it?
Spotted this two weeks ago one foggy morning outside my hotel window in Cambridge, and saved it for today to share with you (click for larger):
Have a spooky stringy Halloween!
-cvj
Archive for October, 2006
In these hard times for basic science research, scientists look elsewhere for supplementary financial support. It seems that the monolithic entity simply known as “String Theory” is trying to diversify its funding sources even more creatively than before! Some recently spotted* evidence in the Nashua Telegraph in New Hampshire:
“String Theory plays at barn dance”
WINDHAM – The Windham Recreation Committee will host a Family Barn Dance at the Town Hall from 8-11 p.m. on Friday.Live fiddle music will be provided by String Theory. Frank Woodward will be the caller. All dances are taught. Beginners, singles, families and children are welcome.
Donations will be accepted at the door.
-cvj
(*Thanks Michelle!)
Well, as you can tell by looking in the “environment” category here, I’m likely to be pleased to hear about the Stern report, released yesterday (Guardian article and links to report here) and also pleased to hear that the UK government is taking the report seriously…. more or less.
I’d have a lot more to say, but I’ve said so much about this already, and I’m not really up to a long post on this right now. But I could not let this excellent (and hopefully landmark) event go unmarked. The point, as has been said before:- Nobody is going to get going on this because it is “the right thing to do”, since it is difficult for individuals and businesses to act in a way that makes things less than convenient for yourself for a cause that seems so abstract. Pure market forces will not do it either. We need actual leadership from the scientists -which has more or less happened for a while now (see my earlier reports on the UCS here and here for example)- and action and structure put in place by the people who will really get things going: economists and then governments (because they follow the money).
Well, Stern is a major figure in the “economists” group, and so this is good news. I must admit though that it really did make me cringe every time I heard the announcers on BBC Radio 4, while trying to emphasise how significant the report’s findings were, saying things like “this is not a report from an environmentalist, it is a Continue reading ‘Government Gets Stern’
Post or pillar boxes. One in Ireland, one in England. Nothing profound, I just like the contrast, that’s all.
I am back from my hop around “the islands”. Thoroughly confused body clock. Health Continue reading ‘Pillars of Society’
Hopeful sign of the future*?
There could be other store names of this sort breaking out depending upon what is found at the LHC and the ILC. You could have the “Superpartners” dating agency, for one, and perhaps “Dark Matter” chocolate bars (made by same company that brought you “Milky Way”, of course), as another… the possibilities are endless.
-cvj
(*For the uninitiated, the Higgs particle is one of the things physicists will search for at Continue reading ‘A Promising Sign?’
Well, I’m not getting any sleep at all tonight, so might as well blog a bit. I’ve got to wake up in two and a half hours to catch a flight, so might as well give up gracefully, and usefully, by sharing with you:
Two spheres caught my eye around Dublin today, one familiar, one not. Both great.
(Click for larger.) The first is the “Tree of Gold (Crainn an Oir)”, by Eamonn Continue reading ‘Spotted. Round. Dublin.’
Hang in there, Rob! Keep up the good fight for a better climate for, (and representation of) women in your department, and in departments everywhere.
-cvj
At the (K)ITP the other day there was a journalist-led discussion/presentation on the largely-media-driven “controversy” about string theory. You know my opinion on this -it’s a largely made up story based on two inaccurate chariacatures (in book form) of research in the field- told by the same journalists and editors who some time earlier brought you the glossy stories about string theory that played up the excitement and promise, and played down the often-said but often-ignored cautionary remarks. The irony of all of this seems to have been lost on most. (I’m not saying that string theorists are entirely blameless in this, but I’ve seen how hard it is to get a balanced remark -about the basic process of seeing a complex scientific program through to its end- to survive next to a glossy one-liner).
The point is that the story being told now in the press is simply the one that journalists and editors want to tell now - a David vs Goliath story. It has little or nothing to do with what is actually going on in the science research. The journalist -George Johnson- does a good job of pointing out supporting evidence for this by going through a Continue reading ‘More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, V’
Here are the three young scientists selected in the Discovery Channel’s “Young Scientist Challenge”:
Coffee break.
Day two of the panel work. Locked in a room again, looking at proposals. Yesterday we deliberated over who passed to the next stage, and who did not - a painful process at times. Today there’s a final part of the process to be performed. We are writing feedback to each applicant to give a little guidance on their proposals for the future. This is an important service to perform, as you can imagine by simply putting yourself in the shoes of the person applying for the grant. In a room full of international people, all with some pride in their wordsmithing abilities, jointly crafting sentences that reflect the salient points of the panel’s deliberations is often an amusing task. Last time I did this (earlier this year) I learned a good algorithm for getting right the use of “that” vs “which” - useful when writing with eight hour jetlag. I probably should have known it before. In addition, I’ve learned several arcane uses of hyphens, “however”, and other modifiers, but I’m sure I’ll forget those.
The coffee is a bit weak. Not a good thing.
Well, better carry on.
-cvj
It was a long day on the Job. From 8:15am to 6:15pm, we were stuck in one room for more or less the entire time. Now…. a quick guinness on the way back from dinner. Conversation about the private vs public forms of university, funding in science in general, dark energy and dark matter, Borat…. all the big topics of the day.
-cvj
I’m still excited about the news that Branson has joined the fight to put money aside to lead the way in fighting global warming issues.
I blogged about it here a month ago, you’ll recall.
Well, of course the Onion has a take on this. It’s mean, but it is funny:
Analysts are predicting that the $3 billion Sir Richard Branson has pledged for developing energy sources to combat global warming could come close to matching the amount the entrepreneur, adventurer, and Virgin CEO has already spent on elaborate balloon-based excursions.
That’s the main joke, but to me, even funnier is the ending line of the artice:
Branson also reportedly plans to invest billions more on a time machine that would enable him to prevent the creation of Virgin Airways, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by some four percent worldwide.
-cvj
I’m always pleased to see this sign. It is at Heathrow, on the walk down the perpetually dingily lit underground corridors connecting the terminals, the tube, the extortion Heathrow express, and the parking lots.
For a start, I generally like the idea that the ground floor of a building (the one you walk onto off the street) is the “zeroth” floor. (I mean no disrespect to this splendid country I live in, that has largely chosen otherwise, although every now and again in older buildings you see it.) So it is just great to see a (-1)th floor, and all the more pleasing that it is not considered odd to have that. No worries about people being confused about what a negative number is. I know it sounds trivial, but when you see basic mathematics and science literacy seemingly getting worse all around -on both sides of the Atlantic, mark you- …when you think something shouldn’t or can’t possibly get “dumbed down” any further for the general public, and then it gets “dumbed down” anyway… seeing this sort of thing is a relief.
Every time I see it, once the above has flashed through my mind, you know what I think next, every single time? Wouldn’t it just be great if elevators went horizontally too?! Then we could have the imaginary axis as well! But that will have to remain just in my, uh, imagination.
-cvj
Well, it was only yesterday that I was telling the physics 100 class all about Special Relativity (lots of incredulous looks…. lots of reassurances, including: “You’re confused? That’s ok! It is one of the greatest pieces of science of the 20th Century… It’s not supposed to be trivial….”), but it seems like an age ago, and very distant. That’s because I’m in Dublin today. (Pesky wormholes.)
Just for a few days.
Guinness will be involved, I imagine (yeah!), although it will not be the primary focus. (The pint in the photo to the right is from a previous trip.)
I hope to have at least half a day to walk around in the rain. I miss that.
More later.
-cvj
Lovely and playful.
From one of Peter Goin’s “Narrative Photograms” on the Red Line subway stop Metro/7th in Los Angeles (click for larger image).
-cvj
(The title of the post is not the title of the piece. I don’t know what the title is. More in the series to come.)
(A relatively technical post follows.)
So imagine the following:
You’re walking along the street, minding your own business, and somebody walks up to you and tries to sell you a string theory. So you stop and examine the goods, since you’re in the market for string theories, on the lookout for any that might be novel, useful, bright, or shiny, etc. You never know when one or other property might come in useful.
Question: How do you know that it is a string theory? Let me be sure to point out that it comes with a lot of the defining path integral done for you. In other words, you don’t have to do the integral over string world sheet metrics and world sheet fields. This was done in the factory for you. What you have access to are parameters such as the coefficients of the operators in the theory, and you can also adjust the value of the string coupling.
So a lot of the stuff you would recognize as a string theory in your typical string theorist’s notebook have been cleaned up. They’ve been integrated over. The observable physics actually never cared about them (the technical details of summing over metrics - slicing up the moduli space of inequivalent metrics properly at each genus, etc etc…. all done), assuming you’ve done the integrals properly. The factory did it all for you.
So what criteria do you use to decide that it is a string theory at all? Actually, this is not an idle question. Think about the issue in the context of trying to understand some phenomenon or phenomena in Nature. How would you know you had a string theory description underlying the physics?
Well, what we might start doing at this point is start listing various things we’ve learned about strings that we think are rather spiffy about the theory that make them different from what we’ve seen before. I’m sure you have your favourites.
A word or more of caution though. From my new paper:
With a few notable (and highly instructive) examples in D ≤ 2, string theory still lacks a satisfactory and well–understood non–perturbative definition. It is fair to say that while strings have marvellous properties that may prove a great boon for studying Nature, we have not been learning about these properties systematically, but instead by following the theory into regimes which have become accessible to us by various techniques. As a result, it is not clear what the big picture is —certainly not clear is the complete list of phenomena we should expect from string theory.
My point? Do we really know enough about what string thory is to decide when to rule out something as being stringy or not. How do you know when to hand over the cash to the person on the street trying to sell you one?
Ok, so you’re thinking: What’s he getting at? What’s in this paper?
Well, one of the things of which we are all very proud -that we show off at theorist parties to all our theorist friends from other fields, you’ll admit- are branes, right? We’ve spent a huge amount of effort on them in the last decade or so expecially, and Continue reading ‘News From the Front, IV’
When I was a child, I was fascinated with a straight line of three stars that were evenly spaced. Whenever I looked up in the sky, I would be comforted by being able to find those stars, especially when I was about to embark on a long walk home at night. I later learned that they were actually known as Orion’s Belt, part of the constellation of Orion. So Orion remains my favourite constellation.
These nights, Orion takes centre stage in stargazing circles since the Orionid meteor shower will be originating from a point near the constellation. Of course, Orion has nothing to do with the shower. It merely marks the apparent direction that it comes from (see red dot in image below).
(Above is the view of the sky looking Southsoutheast from mid northern latitudes at 3:00am today.) We will be traversing a debris field made of stuff left over from Halley’s comet’s tail. That stuff will rain down into our atmosphere, glowing brightly as Continue reading ‘Finding the Orionids Tonight’
As part of the Freshman Seminar I told you about earlier (e.g., here, here and here), we went on a field trip to MOCA in nearby downtown LA.
We went to see the exhibition of drawings by Eva Hesse. Hesse is very well known for her sculpture, and among the things she did, I think that a rather splendid one in this context is the one below. It is an example of those that resemble three dimensional renderings of her interesting use of line on the paper.
This one (not in the exhibition) is called “Metronomic Irregularity” (I think it has a number as well… there are several pieces of this title done by her).
The group is standing in front of the sculpture I posted about earlier. There’s Ashley and Adam, left and middle. Jeff (on the right in the picture) -who is not a freshman, but a senior who does physics research projects with me- came along as well. We had a rather good time, taking the bus up from campus (the horror!) and then walking up through the city, looking at some of the public spaces and public art that nobody seems to look at after hours much. We got to the museum just as it was opening.
A great deal of the work on display was in the form of developmental drawings, some of which were still in her notebooks, or were clearly pages of notebooks. These I found fascinating, for the most part. (Click the following for larger view): Continue reading ‘Field Trip, I’
Down at MOCA for a field trip today. More later. Took a shot of this old favourite:
Nancy Rubins’ “Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s Airplane Parts, About 1000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, Gagosian’s Beverly Hills Space, at MOCA” (Can never really make out if that is the acttual title, but that’s the bit in italics on the plaque.)
-cvj
The hole in the ozone layer over Antartica was recently the biggest it has ever been, I learned from this Reuters article:
“From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles ,” said Paul Newman of
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington.If the stratospheric weather conditions had been normal, the ozone hole would be expected to reach a size of about 8.9 million to 9.3 million square miles, about the surface area of North America, NASA said in a statement.
(NASA image top right. More about it here.)
This immediately reminds one of the other story on the hole I mentioned not so long ago. There was good news there, since it was supposed to be stabilizing, as a result Continue reading ‘Not the Hole Story?’
During the course of a coffee break during Saturday’s all day conference in Cambridge, I looked out of the window to an intriguing sight:
(Click for larger.) They were doing needlework of some sort, and it looked like a lot of fun. They were happy to let the strange man (uh… me) take the photograph he asked Continue reading ‘Saturday Morning Fun’
You may recall that we were recently discussing stereotypes as a result of an earlier post. Particularly, I was talking about the effects those sterotypes can produce as a result of modifying the expectations of others, making it hard for some people to be taken seriously, and resulting in them having to go that extra mile (or several) as a result.
Well, I’d like to point your attention to a recent study about the direct effects of those stereotypes on the stereotyped. Quoting from an article by AP science writer Randolph E. Schmid:
[Steven J.] Heine and doctoral student Ilan Dar-Nimrod wanted to see how people are affected by stereotypes about themselves. They divided more than 220 women into four groups and administered math and reading comprehension tests between 2003 and 2006. Their results are reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
What they actually did was to provide the different groups with different images and reading materials before they did the tests. They seem to have found significant differences in the results that suggest that having a negative stereotype of yourself in mind actually makes things worse. In other words:
It’s a process psychologists call a stereotype threat, Heine explained. “If a member of a group for which there is a negative stereotype is in a position to test the stereotype, they are likely to choke under the pressure.”
So reminding them of the stereotype affects them.
Here’s what they found:
Well, I’m back from the visit to the preview of the Griffith Observatory that I mentioned to you I was going to. It was a rather good visit. They organised it well, and -boy!- have they done a great job on the restorations! I’ll try and assemble the several pictures that I took into some sort of narrative for you, and report soon. While you wait, here’s one of my favourites:
This is particularly poignant, in my opinion. The children are looking at the lovely Continue reading ‘The Lives Of The Stars’
Ah! The joy of new colleagues! I have somehow forgotten to tell you one piece of the great news that we had here at USC Physics and Astronomy recently. We got three new faculty, and one of them is here in action (I’ll tell you about the others later), telling us about the physics behind the 2006 Physics Nobel Prize. This is Cosmologist/Astrophysicist Elena Pierpaoli:
She’s one of those people who works closely on (among other things) the data from Continue reading ‘New Colleagues’
Well, here’s an amusing response to Weird Al Yankovic’s video* (see my earlier post on the issues I had with it). He makes his point with charming clumsiness, but… he makes the point.
Still here:
…and YouTube links here, and here. (Watch them in order for maximum hilarity.)
-cvj
(*Thanks CS Guy!)
So I heard something on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip just now. (This is the new show written by Aaron Sorkin that I instinctively started to watch a couple of weeks ago because I like his writing, and it is actually a drama about the process of writing, so what’s not to like? -Ok, I’m a bit bothered by the overall annoyingness of the lead actress’ performance, but I imagine she’ll get better.)
I caught a line that went something like “we’re not looking for a girl with a phd in… string theory or anything, ok? There’ll be at least half a dozen women there who’ve Continue reading ‘Strings on Sunset’
Well, here’s yet another discussion of Yau to gobble up. It is a New York Times article by Dennis Overbye on Yau, his life and work*. I’ve no idea why this was written, or what the timing was. I’d like to believe that it was just because it is a good subject -because it is- and that it is worthwhile to do an article about a Mathematician of considerable stature in the field, and about the ins and outs of the world of Mathematics -because it is. But I can’t help but wonder if this would have seen the light of day if there was not the big argument going on about the New Yorker article and Yau’s displeasure with its contents. (Image on the right -click for larger- was taken from this site. It is a slice of a Calabi-Yau manifold. There’s more in the article about Yau’s work on those.)
Well, I don’t care what the reason is. I love to see articles of this type written about this Continue reading ‘Manifold Yau’
So I actually had no idea that Weird Al Yankovic was still doing his, er, particular brand of music. (Singular, one might say.) I actually thought it stopped a long while ago, not long after the Thriller parodies. Well, not long ago he did a video/song called “White and Nerdy”. I looked at it*, and so can you, on Myspace video (wow, I had no idea they had a video service). Here is the link.
Among the things featured in the video’s visuals are Schrodinger’s equation, Stephen Hawking’s BHOT, M C Escher (It’s a rap video, so…) Here are some stills (click for larger):
I laughed, I’ll admit. I find his fresh-faced and cheerful style quite funny at times. But then I got thinking. I can’t decide whether I should be depressed at the potency of the stereotypes he is playing with, or just carry on giggling. For example, why did the guys who were representing the complete opposite of being nerdy (and into science, reading, and the like) have to be cast as black? Worse than that (or at least equally as Continue reading ‘The Yankovic Singularity’
Well, this arrived the other day:
It’s a rather highly-produced DVD of the “Uncertainty” event from August 31st event, produced by the people at the Annenberg School of Communication. (See description and discussion in this previous post.) Gosh. Well, since this might be my only appearance on a DVD of such vast distribution (i.e., I expect it was in a number of other mailboxes around campus), I imagine I should be breaking open a bottle of the bubbly. But instead, having just got back from the airport, I’ve got to go play catchup, such as introducing the colloquium speaker(s) in a few minutes.
Rather than wait for it to appear in a store near you, or on Amazon (a very long wait), if you are interested in seeing the event, I’ve heard that there is working video at this link. Apparently (I have not seen it) the sound is poor for the first several minutes, and then it picks up.
-cvj
Got to sleep at 6:30am after the post-memorial-conference banquet, and its aftermath…
Up again at 9:45am to rush around to get ready to go for a quick walk (how can one not do that when visiting Cambridge?) and then check out of the hotel.
It is always pleasant to go for a walk around here, no matter how short, so I did a quick jaunt around the alleyways near Trinity, and a little beyond.
Had the sudden urge to buy some handkerchiefs, as so many of mine seem to have disappeared off down one of those household wormholes that I know will be discovered one day. But there was just no time… No, I’ve no idea why I’m telling you this either. Must be the jetlag.
-cvj
I just checked the website of Yau just now, for more developments on the argument with the New Yorker. It seems that since Hamilton’s strong letter, there have been several more, from various luminaries in the field. You can find them all on the site.
-cvj
Spotted near King’s College:
Always funny how these things happen. Or maybe it is just how my mind works. During the lunch break, after talks by Gary Gibbons, myself, and Roberto Emparan, it sort of stands to reason that I would run into some scene on the streets of Cambridge that was string-themed in some way. 
These (click for larger) are two architecture students I met tangling up the model of the city with balls of knitting wool/yarn. I liked this immediately, and chatted to them about it. They said that it is for National Knitting Week (who knew?) and they were going to try to “string (or knit) together all of Cambridge” as part of their celebrations.
“And well, why knot?”, I asked myself*, as I walked on my way.
-cvj
(*sorry)
Nipped across to Cambridge to give a talk at the Andrew Chamblin Memorial Conference. Link here.
Speaker and participant list means that I should have some very interesting conversations, both about physics and other. The conference celebrates the scientific work of Andrew Chamblin, who died earlier this year. (See posts here and here.) It is a sister conference to the one held in Louisville earlier this year. This is a great loss to the field, and this will no doubt emerge in the talks from lots of his former collaborators, and in the private conversations. Andrew was so bright, creative, and enthusiastic about the physics (and so much of everything else) and so he was a wonderful collaborator.
I also hope to go and sit in a couple of the places where he loved to sit, and remember him here in Cambridge, where he was so happy.
I do so miss him.
-cvj
A couple of magazines showed up in the post the other day, unlooked for (as JRR would write). Spent a short (unfortunately) time lying on my bed in the sun flipping through them, and it reminded me of my youth. Do you remember something similar? You’d go out and get that next issue of that magazine you’d been waiting for and you’d just drink it all up in a general way for a while, lying on your stomach, legs kicking in the air: The smell of the pages, the glossy pictures and other juicy tidbits of writing and other stuff to digest more fully later on….
For me, when I was young it was mostly magazines about music, electronics, computers, science, photography… some crochet, macrame, and knitting (yeah, I know - I’ll tell you more later), and of course lots of comics (these latter I did not browse first… I would read Continue reading ‘Happy Flipping Memories’
Yep, another one for Caolionn:
(Just so the sign’s viewer is not in any doubt.)
I can’t remember whether I blogged this from last time I was in the UK. But yes, it’s always refreshing to be reminded so bluntly that I’m back home. This was from back in the Spring, but I just remembered it.
-cvj
Spotted on Hollywood Boulevard:
Moonlighting Physicist?
(Click here for detail.)
On a serious note… It is still scary to think that this might still be the most common sort of image of a scientist in many people’s minds… We’ve a lot of work to do.
-cvj
I forgot to tell you about this last week, so here goes. The colloquium last week was given by John O’Brien. One of the perks of the job of having to organize the department’s colloquium series is that you can use it (on rare occassions) as a blunt tool to find things out. I’ve always been curious about connecting the name I saw on one of the labs downstairs to a face. John’s lab, primarily part of the Engineering department, uses a little of the space in our building, you see, but I’ve never really made the connection between the face and the name. It certainly seemed that the USC Center for Photonics, of which he is part, was certainly up to some interesting and fun stuff, and so, egged on by another curious colleague, I sent him an invitation to give us a colloquium. He generously accepted, and here he is:
The talk -see the abstract here- was excellent. As you can see from the website listing the faculty in the centre, they are concerned with all sorts of fun things to do with very small scale devices which do rather clever things with light, such as nanoscale semiconductor lasers. The reason that the talk was excellent, in my opinion, was because it was not a standard device+engineering talk that you can often get from very good engineers who nevertheless don’t neccessarily appreciate what aspects the physicists care about. Those talks can often be pretty pictures and so forth of… well… lots of cool toys, without a sense of the physics that is going on. John took a different tack and grabbed our attention by starting out with the phsysics problems right at the outset…. reminding us of those condensed matter physics courses we all took as students, and then pushing us along to appreciate what he was doing with that physics, building up the complexity of the devices as he went. This is the way to do it.
Another reason I liked it was one of nostalgia. I think I might have been one of the last generations of undergraduates where, in your quantum mechanics class, the whole Continue reading ‘Lighting Up Your Quantum Class’
No. Not Brian, Freddie, and the boys. Some other time. I’m talking about a different Queen, and different hits. Late Friday night I suddenly got in the mood to go to Amoeba to pick up this music:
… and I’ve been listening to it exclusively since.
The giant still stands, at least for now. From the preprint site:
This paper is being withdrawn by the author due a serious flaw.
I would not be surprised to learn later that her work, even if flawed, has led the way to helping solve this long-standing problem.
-cvj
(Thanks, Say Lee!)