It’s been super-busy here in my universe, coupled with turmoil of various sorts. This has kept me away from doing some of the sorts of posts I’ve wanted to do. I hope to tell you a bit about what I’ve been up to when I get a chance. I managed to squeeze in some time for a movie last night, and I’ll do a post on that shortly, since I thought it was wonderful. In the meantime, I thought that while I do a quick breakfast before diving into the day, I’d mention the following.
Alternative Title: A Physics Blind Date
A couple of weeks ago, I got an email out of the blue from a lawyer from out of town. He explained a bit about the type of law work he does, and then went on to say that this was nothing to do with what he was emailing me about. He was emailing me about physics. Turns out that in their spare time, he and his law partner spend time discussing and arguing about physics concepts such as General and Special Relativity, and Cosmology. They’d got to a point where they were confused about various details. The popular level books that they were reading did not really do it for them in terms of getting them past certain concepts and they thought that they’d just contact a physicist and ask.
Hence the email. He wondered if I’d be able to take some time to answer questions. He was terribly apologetic for bothering me, and knew that I might decline since I’m probably very busy.
Well, my response you can guess. Of course I’d find the time! Learning of members of the general public being interested in discussing physics just out of general interest is music to my ears! I consider explaining physics to members of the general public as part of my job – my duty as a scientist. He suggested that since they were coming into the city for a meeting soon, would I be interested in meeting them for lunch, and we can chat for a while, and lunch would be on them. I could pick the restaurant.
Gosh. Well, it sounded all quite reasonable, and happily they were in town on a day which was a bit more flexible than others. The free lunch thing was not a big deal to me. The real attraction is the opportunity to explain some fun physics concepts to an interested and willing audience. What a fantastic arrangement!
So I picked a nice lunch place downtown (Warung Café, on 4th between Spring and Main, which is excellent and reasonably priced by the way) and we arranged to meet. It is perfect for me to get to quickly since there’s a subway stop 3 minutes away, and also has the advantage of having Lost Souls Café in the alleyway nearby for me to retire to after if I wanted to get back to thinking about research projects for a while.
So I arrived at the restaurant, a bit in a rush, having left my desk at a pace after being delayed by various things. I realized on the way that I’d forgotten the name of both guys I was supposed to meet (I don’t carry Blackberrys or iPhones or other distractions like that with me to allow me to check email) and nor had I written down a phone number. So it was one of those good-old-fashioned meetings which seem so rare these days now that everyone has mobiles to constantly modify the parameters: You pick a time and a place and, gosh, you just have to show up there at that time. Quaint.
Due to my not writing down names, there was, however, that blind-date-type moment of wondering whether you’re going to recognize each other, and that hesitant approach with a “Hi, er, are you, er…” But it worked fine. (I’d mentioned that they should look online at my picture to identify me, which is just as well, since pink carnations are out of season, I think.)
We chatted for two hours actually. Almost non-stop. It was fantastic. They emailed me afterward to thank me and say that I helped clear things up, and so that was very worthwhile, I’d say.
You know, this gives me an idea. I (like many of you I presume) regularly go on actual dates (the potentially romantic kind) which are arranged in not so different ways: referral from a friend, random email, meeting online, random awkward suggestion to someone you half know, and so on and so forth. There’s this lottery-like feature about whether the actual conversation aspect will work out, and this (at least for me) will destroy the entire enterprise if it is not right. (Uh, don’t get me started on the topic of regular disaster dates where the conversation is just dull as dishwater. I could write a book on this year’s bumper crop alone.) This chat with these two guys about physics -two total strangers off the street, as it were- was fun, relaxed, good humoured, and a real pleasure. Partly this is because the situation is not laden with expectations about the future. We chat, say goodbye, and that’s it. So it is different from dates of course, but I wonder whether something could be borrowed from the one to use in the other. Such chats are a success also because there’s a shared strong interest in the topic of conversation, and the topic is sort of on the agenda at the outset. Not a guarantee of a “good time had by all”, but certainly a major contributing factor. (And no, in case you’re wondering, it was not just me sitting there pontificating while others listened – it was a real conversation, with exchanges of information and ideas.)
So perhaps this is a basis for a new (?) idea for a dating plan for those who seek interesting and engaging conversations along with all the other stuff: People meeting on a one-off basis to chat about particular topics that interest them. It can be one person wanting to know more about a topic from the other, or two people bringing equal amounts of expertise or curiosity to the table, etc. That becomes the main purpose of the dinner or lunch, and at the very least you get a good conversation, and walk away. Anything else is a bonus. There’s no pressure to make things work, since it is primarily about conversations one-to-one over a meal. In fact, you can just do it for the conversation alone, and leave it at that. Since conversations between interesting people will eventually drift off to other topics as common interests allow, sparking the whole getting-to-know-you aspect, it’s as good a basis as any (perhaps better) for meeting people you ultimately might want to get to know better. For those of us who highly value interesting in-depth conversations in our personal relationships, this is maybe more preferable a starting point than several dating situations. And certainly a good way of filtering out the dead-in-the-water type dinners.
The bottom line is that there’s no expectations of anything other than an interesting conversation, and so at least you both walk away knowing more about quantum mechanics, or bubble sort algorithms, tort law, propagating succulents, fluxed-core arc welding, the Thai film industry, or whatever agreed topic floats your boat. Hmm…
Anyway, guess what. Tonight I’m off to dinner with a couple of film-makers to chat with them and explain certain equations they want to incorporate into a documentary. Dinner’s on them. Should be fun…
-cvj
HSM Coxeter created a special helmet, fitted with periscopes, one for each eye, which allowed him to experience double paralax (up and down, as well as side to side) and so, in some sense, see in four dimensions. This and other ways in which he investigated higher dimensional spaces and yet developed a profound visual intuition are described in Siobhan Roberts’ ‘King of Infinite Space’.
A Physics Blind Date
Little bangs & Big Bangs
Bubbles Galore.
Will explain physics for food …
Sounds like a perfect evening!
Gosh, feels like I’ve been missing all the fun of the fair
Clifford,
True, true and I should have said as much myself. I think what I mean to say is that in my mind I can picture a 3D object, say a cube, and rotate it around and do all sorts of things to it. I can get snapshots of higher dimensional things in my head and use that to intuitively guess some physics (this brane squeezes this cycle here, etc.), but I can’t really play around with something like a Calabi-Yau manifold in the same way that I can lower dimensional objects.
To be fair, there are lower dimensional objects I can’t really picture perfectly either. For the life of me I can’t visualize a Klein bottle in any really good way.
Hey Tommy….
“we don’t know how to visualize in more than three dimensions! ”
Hey, speak for yourself! Ok… kidding. What you say is sort of true, but we can do a bit more than you say we can. I’d say. Actually, we can’t visualize more than two dimensions, if the truth be told, but we have a very good intuition for three, don’t we? With our eyes, we only see two-dimensional snaps of the three-dimensional spatial world at any time! We use various tricks to get used to the idea of the third…combining several two-dimensional snaps is how we do it. And it works pretty well. (It also helps that we can move as easily in the third as we do in the other two.)
In the same way, by using snapshots of 2 and three dimensional slices of higher dimensional spaces, we can get on pretty well with visualizing higher dimensions. What I am saying is that we don’t stop at just adding another coordinate mathematically… we can do a bit better on the visualization side. Never as good as for three, since we don’t have the additional feature of being able to easily move in the extra ones and get a feel for them.
Cheers,
-cvj
Faith,
Quick note, we don’t know how to visualize in more than three dimensions! That’s why we use the mathematics. At that level its certainly doable, you start with x,y, and z and then you add another coordinate, say w, and voila there’s another dimension.
The human brain has evolved to be able to think and process in three dimensions (and time, but non-relativistically). If you meet someone who can do that, let us know since I’ve been working in higher dimensions for ages but can’t see the pesky things.
By coincidence I was at a Chinese restaurant this evening waiting for my partner, and the couple seated behind me were discussing physics. It was a bit rocky because neither were physicists (they might be some day–they looked about 20), and they could have used someone just like you, Clifford, to help them figure out what exactly went wrong with the LHC and how you visualize more than three dimensions.
Hi,
A question: when setting up special relativity from physical principles (as opposed to mathematical axioms), where do you get the linearity from (Of the Lorentz transformations – Wikipedia says the homogeneity of spacetime?)
-Jim
I really don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. I am a physicist. Mathematics is the language I use to describe nature and extract results and predictions about nature. But ultimately, I am not a mathematician. I mostly leave it to the mathematicians to publicize their work, and I stick to the physics. (Actually, that is not quite correct… I often talk a lot about specific mathematics to members of the public… usually in the contexts of patterns, interesting numbers, and so forth.) But when I am explaining a concept in physics to someone, I try to stick to the physical principles. I talk about Einstein’s Special Relativity in terms of the consequences of the Principle of Relativity and the constancy of the speed of light for all inertial observers. I can derive all the effects of relativity as consequences of that. I need not invoke the mathematics of the Lorentz group and so forth. It is the language that describes the physics, not the other way around. Similarly for General Relativity. I talk about the physics of the Principle of Equivalence, and what that leads to – warped spacetime and so forth…. I don’t focus on the Reimannian geometry. Sorry. This is the way I do it, and people seem to respond well to it. You are free to do it your way.
-cvj
But clifford, why should it be that much effort is made to explain very complicated physics such as string theory to the public, yet mathematics of the same complexity doesn’t get the same attention?
For example, you mentioned that on this occasion you enjoyed teaching some aspects of general relativity on a general basis without the math on your date, but when it comes to mathematics, one cannot teach (say) group theory, without actually doing it and one certainly could not leave out any of the technical details since much of math is about proof.
I don’t think it’s fair to be frank. I think it’s slightly hypocritical.
Hi. Thanks all. Just one note: Spyder, this is not about salons. Those are great, and more power to them… but this is something else entirely: One on one unstructured conversations.
Cheers,
-cvj
As I was reading this post I suddenly thought, “Ooh! Great idea. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this yet!”, and then I remembered that someone has! Boingboing had a post a little while back (that luckily I’ve dug up), about something called “School of Everything“. It’s a free online service where you can advertize things you would like to teach/learn, and it helps set up meetings between people to spread the knowledge of pretty much anything.
I don’t know how “formal” this is. I assume it can be as (in)formal as you like… (I like the idea of discussing physics over a coffee :D). The only thing I’ve found depressing is that in its tour, it showed a lot of categories of knowledge (music, language, food…) but no science category… hmm.
It’s also based mainly in the UK, but apparently there are plans to expand. I think I might just sign up now…
This is great to hear that somebody else is getting in on the act! I’m heavily involved with couchsurfing, which has bought many wonderful new dimensions to my life, but these days I regularly get e-mails from people saying things along the lines of:
‘I already have somewhere to stay in your city, but I’ve never met a real physicist and have a bunch of question I’d love to ask you! Any chance of a coffee?’
I’ve had this half a dozen times over the last few months and every time it has been a wonderful experience, with people who are genuinely interested in life, the universe and everything.
Hope to hear whether you have more good experiences like this soon.
More salons with better munchable morels, morsels, and other goodies; yes i am all for it.
No, I stuck to the physics. No mathematics.
Re: the (only semi-serious) dating idea: The idea is that you arrange the topic beforehand. You let people know what topics you want to (or can) talk about and people get together to chat on that basis. (Or you can get together and compare notes on how much you both don’t know about a topic! That can be fun too!)
-cvj
Did you actually explain the mathematics of relativity theory to them and if so did they understand the technical details?
Regarding the new basis for a new idea for a dating plan, the trouble is I am no professor so my kmnowledge of anything does not go deep and I doubt I’d be able to keep it up for even an hour.
Its a nice idea but what if I have very narrow interests or the other person has no interest in (say) quantum theory?