I had quite a marvellous brainstorming session today. You’ll recall I was preparing a presentation for the February 15th symposium at the AAAS meeting the other day. Well, all of us concerned (the four of us presenting as well as various Brookhaven staff who will take part in the symposium discussion as well) got together over the phone for a teleconference today. It took almost three hours (but happily I was sitting in the sunshine while doing it, as you can see). We wanted to chat about the distribution of ideas and results that will be presented.
There are four of us presenting at the event, with only a short time each to get across some of the key ideas and so we need to make sure that we don’t do too much repetition of each other, get across all the material we’d like to, and as clearly as possible. So we were comparing notes on what we thought we’d be doing, adjusting based on what we learned from each other, and incorporating comments from all present.
This of course gave us a chance to actually talk together about the physics itself, and I had a very good time chatting about heavy ion collisions on the one hand and cold atomic gases on the other, with Barbara Jacak, Peter Steinberg, and John Thomas. The techniques that are being used are quite remarkable, along with the ingenuity being employed to extract properties of the new phases of matter seen in these experiments. It is really quite wonderful to see these disparate bits of physics (extremely hot and dense and extremely cold and relatively dilute) end up yielding similar physics – strongly coupled fluid behaviour (with extremely low viscosity/entropy ratio. See my earlier posts here and here). That string theory techniques seem to be connecting these two types of experiments is quite exciting as well. There’s something marvellous about speaking about higher dimensional black holes and their quantum properties to people who do experiments on very concrete things in these mere three (plus one) dimensions of ours, and have them listen and discuss the physics as it pertains to what they’re doing. Just marvellous.
I suggested that even after the symposium we should just continue, meeting weekly to talk about our three physics areas and the connections between them. I doubt that will happen, but it was nice to hear that we all agreed how much fun it was to talk about the physics and learn from each other.
This is a great way to do physics! Exchanging ideas, collaborating, brainstorming. Great!
-cvj
