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 … Click to continue reading this post
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 … Click to continue reading this post
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 … Click to continue reading this post
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 boyhood. 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… 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
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 … Click to continue reading this post
Spotted on Hollywood Boulevard:
Moonlighting Physicist?
(Click 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.
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 […] Click to continue reading this post
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: […] Click to continue reading this post
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.
You’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 eat immediately 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 […] Click to continue reading this post
Imagine my surprise the other day when I stepped out into the garden for the first time in a busy week and looked up and saw one of these large flowers staring down at me! They are huge. I have this giant cactus plant, you see, over twelve feet tall … Click to continue reading this post
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: […] Click to continue reading this post
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. 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 […] Click to continue reading this post
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 physicsâ€.
The host, Ira Flatow, turns to Brian (on telephone link) and says “what do you think of that, Brian Greene?â€
Brian says, “Yes, I agree. I have several students working on things outside of string theory.â€
…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 things I’ve heard said by him (or anyone else) in this largely-media-and-self-interest-driven “debate†spawned by his and Peter Woit’s books. Paraphrasing: A good idea has about ten years to come to fruition, and then if it does not, it is wrong and should be thrown out.
Lee does say some wise (if mostly obvious) things about the field from time to time – some of which are well worth remembering, and sometimes it comes from his knowledge of how things have worked in physics in the past. Yes, we should remember our history….. but this statement seems to spectacularly ignore history and ranks right at the far opposite end of the scale of “wise thingsâ€. Ten years?! And even if you could put a time to it… is this what we are telling the general public about the way we do science? By putting time limits on ideas?
Overall, this storm in a teacup -which will continue, because the media only wants to hear an “underdog†story right now, whether or not it reflects what is going on in the research itself- is simply poisoning the well for everyone, whether they do string theory or not. See here.
Lee and Peter, I agree that string theory is often over-hyped, and has been for some years now (let us not forget, by the way, that it is the same media who helped out with that hype who is helping to drive the new anti-string hype -classic bait and switch-) and that it has made some physicists working in the field a bit annoyed. But here is how not to fight against that: Counter-hype.
Remember:
* An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves everyone blind and sucking up their favourite meals through a straw.
*
Fighting fire with fire leads to everything burning.
-cvj
(* Thanks, Nick!)
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