To The River

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to the riverGot 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.

punting

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

Cambridge Entanglement

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Spotted near King’s College:

knitting cambridge

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. knitting cambridgeThese (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)

Meeting in Memory

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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

Happy Flipping Memories

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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….

flipping magazines

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 Click to continue reading this post →

Very Specific

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Yep, another one for Caolionn:

danger sign

(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

Lighting Up Your Quantum Class

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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:

john o'brien

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 Click to continue reading this post →

Jammin’

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fig emergencyYou’ll recall that I had a fig emergency not too long ago. Too many figs from my tree and (despite commenter Moshe’s suggestion to just eat them all) no inclination to eat them all in one sitting. Recipe ideas were considered (and thanks all of you!), and I made a decision. I was looking for a way to preserve them, not how to immediately eat them, and so sadly I did not take up all the lovely suggestions of things to do. By a day or two later I had several more, and so it became urgent. As hinted at by the post entitled “Jam Tomorrow” (which I took a while to deliver on – sorry) you can guess what I decided to do: Fig Jam, of course!

So I bring you the first of what I expect to be several trips to the kitchen on Asymptotia, where we go through all the steps together (remember the Taiwan-inspired Beef Lo Mein that I did on CV?). So the thing to do is chop up those figs into smaller chunks -roughly eighths (keep halving three times):

jam making

I looked at various sources for an idea of the proportions of ingredients, and eventually settled on a few that I decided to hybridize. I’ll leave it to you to google on “fig jam” and find your own ideas, I found that there is a popular Epicurious recipe, which first appeared in Gourmet magazine some years back, that uses roughly the following (I did not do the rum and sesame seeds mentioned elsewhere):

1 cup sugar
3/4 cup water
2 lb firm-ripe fresh figs
2 strips fresh lemon zest
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

… proportions that I rescaled (see below).

This meant that I needed an idea of the actual weight of the figs. I don’t actually have any scales in the kitchen or anywhere in the house. (I usually use volume measurements in my cooking.) So this meant that I would have to rush out to the shops to get a scale. This did not appeal to me, and after a short while I remembered that I’m actually a physicist, and so can use other means to get an estimate, fashioning some scales from Click to continue reading this post →

More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, IV

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Finally we get to some real substance in the program! (See earlier notes, and thoughts.) Jeff actually mentions all the effort going on string theory and experiments at Brookhaven, and asks that question I keep asking everyone… “why oh why is this never mentioned by the press in these discussions?” I’ve asked this of Peter Woit on his blog a lot too, for example, and have never got much of an answer. Peter and Lee want the world to believe -by reading their books- that the entire field of string theory is just people sitting around discussing the Anthropic Principle and lots of different universes, and blah blah blah… It serves the purpose of the books in question to completely distort the view of what is actually going on in the field. They claim that there is no experimental support (true) or hope for experimental support (how can they know that?) for string theory… but they ignore the fact –they intentionally don’t tell you, dear reader– about the interesting work going on by a huge percentage of the field to use string theory to study the structure of nuclear matter. It is still in its early stages, and may not work, but it is rather interesting. As Jeff put it, about the new form of matter that is constructed in these experiments, string theory is “the only approach that I know of” that currently seems to be able to explain the observed properties….

Lee, about the omission of this huge effort in string theory research from his book: “At least it is alluded to…”

That’s just lame.

He then proceeds to rather poorly attempt to claim that such contact with experiment Click to continue reading this post →

More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, III

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Poor Jeff!

I’m listening to the program now, and 40 minutes into it, there’s been long sections of completely pointless waffle by Lee and the presenter (the latter keeps reading long and largely peripherally relevant quotes from philosophers), broken up by breaks to shout the name of the station at you…. then long musical ditties… then back to more waffle…. and then the few times Jeff gets to come in, he is interrupted again by the presenter with more irrelevant stuff about philosophy. Jeff managed to say at one point “I’d rather talk about what can be measured, what we can calculate…”, but this seems to have been ignored. (Here and later I am not giving the exact words of what was said… you should listen to the archive.) He is given a little time to start to explain what strings is about….

A bit later…. Lee is just going on and on and on and on about…. uh…. crap and utter irrelevance. The battle between Liebniz and Newton. Relational vs absolute. Sigh. I just don’t get it. Why is this happening? Another music/station reminder break…

A bit later…. Jeff finally manages to get a bit of a word in. He has to jump in at one point when Lee starts actually redefining on the spot what his book is about… Click to continue reading this post →

More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, II

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I just heard* that at 9:00pm Chicago time, there will be a discussion between Lee Smolin and Jeff Harvey, presumably about string theory, and you can listen to it live on radio station WGN, here.

Thinks:

  • I wonder if it will be as utterly content-free and pointless as the one that took place between Lee Smolin and Brian Greene on Science Friday some weeks back? That one was so annoying in places that I never finished the blog post I was writing about it. It was mostly of the following structure (I paraphrase):

    Lee says wise and learned things like “there should be a diversity of effort in approaching problems in fundamental physics”.

    The host, Ira Flatow, turns to Brian (on telephone link) and says “what do you think of that, Brian Greene?”

    Brian says, “Yes, I agree. I have several students working on things outside of string theory.”

    …thus blowing a bit of a hole in the claim that string theory is this cult/monolith that somehow blinds us all to other great ideas.

  • I wonder if Lee will bring out what I consider to be one of the most ridiculous Click to continue reading this post →