Monthly Archives: July 2008

For Some, The Dark Side

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solar_eclipse_010808Don’t forget that there is a total solar eclipse tomorrow. Been wondering where the moon’s been, and why you’ve been having all those lovely clear dark nights perfect for star-gazing? Well, the moon’s been busy preparing for one of its big acts. It’ll pop in front of the sun and bring a little darkness to some regions during the day tomorrow. Put differently, the dark side of the moon will be stealing some of our rays on August 1st.

Who will get to see it? Well, full totality will be available mostly for the “midnight sun” […] Click to continue reading this post →

Humps

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Now playing: I’m Confessin’ (That I love You), Thelonious Monk [Solo Monk]

Well, I’m now beyond the halfway mark of my retreat and I’ve been on the one project all this time. I’ve made progress here and there, had some setbacks, and have got very stuck at times. It’s just one of those things with this sort of work. Par for the course.

humps in road warning sign, UKThere are times when you think that if you do just a bit more on the project, it’ll get over the hump, as it were, and then coast along. So far I worry that there may be simply an infinite set of equally spaced humps of similar height all the way down the road**, in that every now and again I discover a rather pretty little gem of a result that’s quite encouraging, but these gems don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. So it’s a little scattered gravel pit of gems as opposed to a lovely… Ok, cvj, enough with the gem metaphor.

Now playing: Totem Pole (Alt. take), Lee Morgan [The Sidewinder]

The issue here is whether I should jump ship and use the last of my quality time here […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry XXI – Another Go At An Einstein Film

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Well, since they’ve actually done a press release about it, I suppose I don’t have to be so coy as I was in the last post. This is about the film company I was doing some consulting work for on an interesting project with and interesting screen-writer.

The company is called Hero Pictures, and they have an interesting mission statement, and a rather splendid website (which I recommend… love the little hero guy) which tells you more. One of their projects is a film about Einstein. Working title is “The Private Lives of Albert Einstein”. They’ve bought the rights to a couple of books on him, brought in a screenwriter (see my thoughts on him and working with him in the previous post), Ron Bass, well known for his work on projects like Rain Man and The Joy Luck Club, Snow Falling on Cedars, among many other films.

It was fun to work with him on this, however briefly. He’s super sharp and gets the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Two!

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Asymptotia's Second Anniversary!Well, you know I almost missed it: Asymptotia, this little blog that you come to read from time to time, is two years old today! It has been a pleasure and an honour being part of this community we’ve formed, made up of you the reader and maybe sometime commenter, and me tossing up a few things to look at, consider, laugh at, and/or discuss from time to time. I really enjoy the kind of connections that are made, and seeing people brought together (both on- and off- line) using Asymptotia as a focal point. Have a look at what I said on this date last year, and in the inaugural post.

For those of you who are not regulars, assuming you’ve already read the about page, let me mention that I think of this blog as a bit like a gathering (a party, if you will) in a comfortable home, with people in several rooms carrying out (or just listening to) conversations of various sorts. Some rooms just have things to look at. Some people […] Click to continue reading this post →

It’s Not A Superhero Movie

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Ok. I suppose I ought to say something about “The Dark Knight”, since a lot of people are expecting me to, and well, I’d like to. Of the many (too many) big films of the genre that have come out this Summer, it is the one I’ve actually been waiting for, with high expectations, based on the excellent work they (Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, etc) did on Batman Begins. So, following is my verdict, after going to see it on opening night at a regrettably substandard theatre due to not being in Los Angeles.

I thought it was wonderful to see a big Summer blockbuster that is so successful that is entirely about ideas. Whether you think you have any interest in the genre (and see below), you should consider supporting it and going to see it on that fact alone, since it might encourage the big studios to green light to more projects that engage your brain. It is about ideas – the consequences of our actions, the use of power, the fabric of a society and what motivates us to behave well or badly toward our fellow citizens. In pretty much every scene. And it is not done in an unfortunately preachy and naively over-simplistic way that I think was the case for the highly flawed film version of “V For Vendetta” of a few years back.

Finally, the (big headline) movies of the graphic novels and comics have caught up with what the actual graphic novels and comics did ever so long ago – transcend the genre. It is not a superhero movie. It’s a movie about highly conflicted moral questions […] Click to continue reading this post →

On “Do-Overs”

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I love “do-overs”. Not because I want to change anything in particular about my life, but because they are so rare, and so interesting. On my way to Vancouver on Monday, I got to do one.

We (myself and the other passengers) boarded our flight at Denver. I usually get on the plane early, and so have the change to watch people go through their routines of boarding and all that entails. After that was all, the plane full of passengers waited for the plane to get ready, doors to close, and so forth. It did not happen. After a while, the pilot came on and explained that they were trying to fix the radio, and it would be another half an hour. So we waited. After another long while, the pilot came on and said that they did not expect that the radio would get fixed in a timely manner after all, and so they were going to try something else. We would “de-plane” (a word I hate by the way – what is wrong with the perfectly good word “disembark”?) and all make our way to another gate where eventually another plane would arrive, and we’d take that one. It would be exactly the same type of plane. We would keep our ticket stubs and just re-board an hour and a half later.

I wandered for a bit, found something not too repulsive to nibble on (seems to get harder and harder in some airports), was disappointed by the meagre bookstore once again, and otherwise killed some time. Then the boarding started again. A “do-over”. Everybody would be going back to the same seats, it would be exactly the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Sharing the Storm

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Here’s something I found rather unexpected. It all begins a little more than a year ago in Los Angeles. I was chatting with a friend, Aimee Bender, about our respective modes of work, and about how Summer fits into that in general. As you may know, Aimee’s a fiction writer, (and you may have picked up somewhere that I’m a theoretical physicist), and there are a lot of parallels to be found between professions that both involve lots of sitting around, crafting with symbols, folding fragments of inspiration together into larger nuggets, and so forth. So we chat about that from time to time.

A lot of how that works can be tied to the environment in which you do it, and so we got to talking about the long dry Summer in Los Angeles, with a particularly hot spell we were going through at the time we were talking. It affects how you work, what part of the day is most productive for you, and so forth. We agreed that a rather nice thunderstorm would be a good thing to have come along, even though that was highly improbable. Just the sound of a thunderstorm is a wonderful thing, and then there’s the relief it brings from the conditions before, and the smells in the air during and after. We carried on with the hot LA work cycle, stormless.

I left a week or two later for Aspen.

Shortly thereafter, Aspen went into a typical daily cycle of sunny for most of the day with a rainy downpour in the afternoon. Very refreshing. One of those days, that downpour turned into a long super-violent thunderstorm that lasted well into the […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Hop Over To Canada

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Well, as I said in the previous post, I’m leaving my hideaway/retreat mode and popping over to Vancouver for a short spell to help out at a Summer School. It’s the PIMS (Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences) Summer School on Particles, Fields, and Strings. I’m giving four lectures on some of the techniques in string theory that it helps to know in order to do some of the fun things we do to get at interesting physics (such as the topic of the post before). My title is something like “Perturbative and non-perturbative string theory”, and I’ve no clue what the level of the students really is, so goodness knows how far I will get in four one hour lectures. But it does not hurt to try. I’ll be laying the groundwork for several of the lecturers who will be talking about the more advanced stuff closer to their research work, and so I hope to at least help the students gain confidence with ideas and language that will show up all over the place in the two weeks following my presentations.

So what will I cover? Well, I’m going to tailor things to the responses of the students as […] Click to continue reading this post →

Atoms and Strings in the Laboratory?

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depiction of lithium trap from the Kastler Brossel lab in france

A depiction of a lithium trap from the Kastler Brossel laboratory, in France. Details here.

[Despite appearances, I did not choose the music in what is to follow. I just put on iTunes set to random, and started typing, reporting on what was playing as I went along. Nevertheless, there were some nice resonances.]

Now playing: Mr Day, John Coltrane.

So. I must put the Aspen time on hold for a short while, as I promised to give four lectures in Vancouver starting tomorrow. While I sit here in a lounge in Denver at 8:00am, wondering why I booked a 7:00am flight out of Aspen, and also wondering exactly what is in this muffin that I picked up to have with the (rather good) tea they have here this morning, I thought I’d tell you about a little bit of really nice physics that’s going on in the neighbourhoood of my world. Since I’m too cheap and too disinterested to pay for a connection to the web, this’ll only get uploaded quite a bit later when I get a free hookup. (This is a bit more technical in places than usual. Please don’t give up too easily. Oh, and you might have to read some things I point to from earlier to get everything I’m saying – I’m not one for endless repeating myself I’m afraid.)

You can think of this as another story in the line of development I’ve been pushing (and telling people about here and elsewhere) for many years now. Applications of string theory to a broader range of physics areas than the popular discussions of the topic seem to touch upon. I told you last year about the exciting work going on in understanding properties of new phases of nuclear matter being unlocked at the Brookhaven experiment RHIC (colliding heavy nuclei together to create a sort of hot quark-gluon soup). That work continues. This new work pertains to experiments as well, and this time, these are closer to the human scale bench top experiments we all get misty-eyed over (ok, I do, maybe no-one else). It is super-cute stuff. I should […] Click to continue reading this post →

Recovery Time

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Today’s going to be a slow day, with a bit of pottering about town (groceries, new novel), sitting at home (laundry, reading, writing), and working on some physics things here and there. It’ll be good to slow down. I went on another long hike yesterday, back in my more usual solitary mode. Last week’s to Willow (see a couple of earlier posts) was with my friend and colleague Albion Lawrence who I’d not seen for a long time, and so we spent a very pleasant time catching up on things (mostly sharing about books and film, as we do) as we walked.

on_west_maroon_trailYesterday’s hike, following (initially) the West Maroon trail, was taken up with conversations with myself, both internal and external, and that’s something I enjoy a great deal. I thought I’d spend a lot of time thinking over various issues in physics that I’ve been puzzling over in my work, or that I’d learned about from various conversations and seminars while here at the Center. But I did not, surprisingly. Or not much. It was a very physics-free day, even though I was out there struggling along in the West Maroon area for over five hours (out and back to the bus).

Part of this might be because due to the large amount of snow on the ground in places, I lost the trail, and so spent a lot of time following the river trying to pick it up […] Click to continue reading this post →

Chiropteral Mirror Symmetry?

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Spurred by the previous post showing M-theory’s possible relation to matters Chiropteral , Joe Polchinski (who I think, in 1995 or 1996, first drew the diagram that I messed with in that post) emailed me* to say that there is a quite striking appearance of batman-ology in the string theory literature. It’s from one of the classic Mirror Symmetry papers of 1990 by Candelas, De La Ossa, Green, and Parkes, “An Exactly soluble superconformal theory from a mirror pair of Calabi-Yau manifolds.” (you can find it via here). Here it is:

batman ish mirror symmetry diagram

What is this? It has to do with spaces in string theory called “Calabi-Yau manifolds”, which are important (in some approaches) as starting points for constructing models […] Click to continue reading this post →

Black Hole Battles

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lenny susskind, kc coleSomehow, I only learned about this today, and it is already standby tickets only, but you never know. If you’re in LA and interested in a different kind of conversation, consider taking in the event (part of the Aloud series) at the downtown Los Angeles Central Library tomorrow night at 7:00pm. It’s between two friends and colleagues of mine, the science writer K C Cole and the scientist Lenny Susskind! The event is entitled, “The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics”, and presumably will be about Lenny’s reflections on some of the exciting squabbles over various important issues in black hole physics that took place (and still take place) in our field of physics. The above turns out to be (I just learned from a Google search) the title of a book he’s written, so you might be interested in it for your Summer (or other) reading.

Some of you may recall her really great conversation with Alan Alda that took place at USC earlier this year. I reported on it here. K C tends to run these sorts of […] Click to continue reading this post →