Just Great!

I’ve no idea why I’m writing a blog post about this, since I can’t really explain any of the details in a way that won’t sound tediously technical. I’m just pleased since I had a sort of perfect workshop moment for a couple of hours after the weekly picnic at the Center today. I’d been talking a bit last week with Lincoln Carr, an excellent condensed matter theorist at the Colorado School of Mines, and had also been talking with Allan Adams, another excellent physicist, from MIT. Allan and I seem to be on the same page as theorists and so I really enjoy talking with him. We work on string theory, but are not fussy about where the physics that it can be applied to might come from. As long as it is good physics. We both seem to love the idea that there’s so much rich physics, that might be accessible with string theory, turning up in condensed matter systems such as those Lincoln works on. (See previous post, and also the post I did on cold atom systems some time back.) So I had the pleasure of introducing Allan and Lincoln to each other, and we chatted for a good long while about a range of interesting things (strongly coupled field theories, the very idea of gauge/gravity duals, ultra cold atomic systems, quantum phase transitions, etc). There’s something marvellous about talking over topics, finding points of commonality, puzzling over how to translate between bits of each other’s language, exchanging information about techniques or ideas from each other’s fields, etc. Everybody learns something valuable.

It is just a huge amount of fun when this sort of conversation happens.

-cvj