Preparation

Yes, I’ve been a bit quiet of late, I know. I’ve so many things on, both professional and personal that it sometimes keeps me occupied from when I wake up just before sunrise right through to falling asleep a bit after midnight. And yes I know that means I’ve been not getting the traditional full nights of sleep, but if my body insists on getting up at 5:30am, who am I to resist? I thought it was due to jetlag from the trip a couple of weeks ago, but it seems to have taken. I don’t mind too much since watching the light change as the sun rises is a marvellous way to start the day.

Among the things I’m up to (yesterday and today so far) is a strip-down-and-redesign of a short talk for an exciting symposium that is coming up in a few weeks in Chicago. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is having their big annual shindig there (apparently the biggest science conference in the world) and there will be a number of addresses, plenary talks, and keynote speakers and the like (including Al Gore, by the way), and also several sessions of symposia and other presentations on various topics.

While slightly annoyed at the fact that one major day of the conference is on Valentine’s day (which means I’ll have to be out of town on just the day that maybe, just maybe, on the off-chance, you know – if the universe sneezes or something, somebody might want me to be their Valentine…*), I was looking at that day’s schedule and it caught my eye that there’ll be a session (with several presenters) entitled “The Science of Kissing”, and three hours long, no less:

Human lips have the thinnest layer of skin of any part of the body and are among the most densely packed areas with sensory neurons. Kissing sets off sensations in the lips, as well as the tongue and mouth, that are transmitted to the brain and other parts of the body and provoke emotional and physical reactions. But how did kissing evolve? What functions does it serve? And what chemical, neural, and psychological pathways are involved? Through an interdisciplinary examination of the subject, this panel will serve to explore the different ways experts across fields are seeking to understand the behavior. A broader discussion will demonstrate the intersections between science and society.

Hmmm. No mention of audience participation or anything. Oh well.

Where was I? Oh, yes. I’ll be presenting something the following day that is very nearly as exciting as the prospect of random kissing breaking out during a scientific meeting. Applications of string theory to recent experiments. It’s going to be fun. The session (only 90 minutes long – I guess they don’t expect as much material from us as they do from the kiss people) is entitled “Quest for the Perfect Liquid: Connecting Heavy Ions, String Theory, and Cold Atoms”.

Well, you’ve heard a lot from me about that physics, and it’s an honour to have been asked by the RHIC people to come and talk about it the string theory connection. Originally I was going to talk just about heavy ion collisions, but I think I’ll broaden things out to mention aspects of the cold atoms physics too. (See here and here for blog posts on the topics. Here for a movie of some slides from my Caltech Colloquium last year.) Nice to note was that some of the RHIC people were aware that I’d been suggesting very early on that we should be trying to make some of the new tools and ideas from string theory (AdS/CFT and its variants – gauge/gravity dualities) into tools for extracting universal physics of interacting quarks and gluons in these sorts of experimental situations. Happily, we’ve gone from people looking at me like I’m crazy when I said that in seminars a decade ago to a lot of very exciting activity in the field that’s broadening and deepening in so many interesting directions. After feeling silly and frustrated during those years, trying to get people to take this seriously, I admit that I feel sort of vindicated (even though I hasten to add that the real breakthrough paper of 2001 (by Policastro, Son, and Starinets) that eventually cut to the chase and got at the heart of the connection had nothing to do with me).

I learned that the time available to me for my part of the symposium is very short, and so I am re-thinking my entire approach, to see how I can get all the key points in, connect to my co-presenters (who are talking about the experimental work – RHIC stuff on the one hand (Barbara Jacak, Stony Brook), and cold atom trapping experiments on the other (John E. Thomas, Duke) – Peter Steinberg of Brookhaven National Labs (and the blogs entropy bound and US LHC Blogs), where RHIC is located, is pulling it all together and moderating) and emphasize the major ideas. This is to a mixed audience of scientists, non-scientists, and journalists. I have 15 minutes. That’s what you can see me working on sketching out in the photo at the top. Wait, no computer? Not yet. I’m very old fashioned, and use pen and paper (and sometimes a board) to organize my ideas visually before making slides. I find that it gives a better final product than writing things in front of the computer directly to screen. At least, it does for me. (Maybe it might work for you too?)

Well, I’d better get back to it.

-cvj

(*Update: Since I got email about this, I should say… No, it’s ok! I was not entirely serious here. Er, thanks.)