Fourth Thoughts

Have a Fantastic Fourth of July, to everyone who is celebrating it!

It’s been several days since my last confession. Sorry about the silence. I’m honestly not sure exactly what I’ve been doing, since it has been a mostly fragmented set of things, coupled with a generally down mood of introspection over matters personal. Hmm… So nothing new there.

Physics-wise I’m a bit stuck. Not on a particular project this time, but stuck on which project I should be focusing my time on. I feel that I should drill down deeply into one or other project, to the exclusion of all else for a while, and I can’t decide which one. On the one hand there’s some fascinating issues to uncover in my project on non-perturbative low dimensional strings to dig up, with at least two overdue papers to craft on the subject. On the other hand, it has been almost a year since I’ve given some serious thought to how to move forward on my microscopic strings project. I’ve even had some interesting emails about my paper on the subject from people to stimulate me to think more about it (one or two I should still answer – sorry; email me again in two weeks if I have not yet responded). On a third hand I’ve a very clean idea I want to unpack concerning matters of string theory and quark-gluon plasmas, that might shed some light on what happens when you take into account how the quarks back-react on the rest of the physics. Decisions, decisions. And none of this takes into account other ongoing projects (in collaboration with students) such as holographic superconductivity and so forth…

Why am I not doing all of them at once? Why not work on one until stuck, then flit to the other for relief until stuck, and so forth…? That mode works well at times, but not when there’s a definite amount of time involved. Increasingly so, my time is very finite these days, and in recent times I feel I’ve been staying too much on the surface of lots of projects and running too many of them at once, partly out of necessity. This includes managing and collaborating with five students on various projects, between long periods of being distracted by a host of other things that do not pertain to research. I feel I need to pick a topic and drill down before the Summer is all gone and the busy semester starts up again. I certainly shouldn’t go a whole year without a good, deep, open-ended wallow inside a physics puzzle, and since I leave for a quiet retreat to the Aspen Center for Physics in a short while, I want to arrive there in a ready frame of mind to hit the ground running on a project I’ve firmly decided about.

So that’s what’s on my mind today, while I hide away from the 4th July stuff and set up some shelves in the basement, rearrange it all to give greater access to some plumbers to do some work, toil in the garden getting it ready to fend for itself during my time away, and reflect further on physics projects, and on life.

-cvj