A Return

Well, I’m back.

It has been very quiet on the blog recently because I’ve been largely occupied with the business of moving. Where have I moved to? For the next academic year I’ll be on the faculty at Princeton University (as a Presidential Visiting Scholar) in the Physics department. It’s sort of funny because, as part of the business of moving forward in my research, I’ve been looking back a lot on earlier eras of my work recently (as you know from my last two year’s exciting activity in non-perturbative matrix models), and rediscovering and re-appreciating (and then enhancing and building on) a lot of the things I was doing decades ago… So now it seems that I’m physically following myself back in time too.

Princeton was in a sense my true physical first point of entry into the USA: My first postdoc was here (at the Institute for Advanced Study, nearby), and I really began to know America for real during my time here. It was a base of operations for exploring the nearby cities of New York and Philadelphia, for observing and absorbing the wider culture, and for learning and getting a foothold in the US academic life. I’ve a real love for the place, the memories it holds, and the fact that it (and the colleagues I met and friends I made) helped forge me into the physicist and the person I am today. And many of the people from those times are still here, and so it is going to be wonderful to be with them on a regular basis again. (Yes, I’ve seen and interacted with them at conferences and so forth over the years, but this is different from that.)

I was told that I got the call to consider coming here because of some excitement about what I’ve been up to recently (with matrix models and quantum gravity), and that’s nice to hear. The funny thing is that when I first came to Princeton all those years ago (1992) I was thinking hard about (and trying to get some people excited about) the very techniques and ideas that are the foundation of what I’ve been using recently to uncover some lovely new results. (It was not long after co-discovering and uncovering properties of a certain lovely “string equation”, and family of string models, that I’ve been using a lot in recent times.) But there wasn’t much interest. The world had moved on to other things, and no-one wanted to hear too much from some young nobody babbling about alternative non-perturbative completions of toy string theories that were yesterday’s news.

Maybe it is a good thing. It encouraged me to drop what I was doing and learn what was going on in the field beyond the issues I had been working on for my PhD. That is almost always a healthy choice. So I began to lock myself away for long stretches to teach myself “grown up” string theory and field theory, attended lectures and seminars on things well outside my initial comfort zone and tried to get up to speed on them (mirror symmetry, complex geometry, topological field theory, supersymmetric Yang-Mills, etc…) and I began to learn properly about string theory’s approach (at the time) to quantum aspects of black holes. Luckily, I was able to produce some notable results in a couple of these areas, directly leading me to my second postdoc, at Santa Barbara, D-branes, and …a plethora of other things over the years, and ultimately to the recent realization that computations that I’d been doing all the way at the beginning are super-useful for quantum black holes, even though that was not the intended application at the time! So it all comes full circle, as things so often do.

Anyway, it will be fun to be able to tell more people about some of the ideas and techniques I’ve been working on, and maybe get some others interested in working on them too, because there’s so much that can be done, and I can’t do it all myself – there aren’t enough hours in the day! There’s some talk of me giving some lectures on matrix model techniques, which could be fun to do. And somewhere in all of this, I’ll also be trying to find time to work on a followup to a certain book… Where will I find the time?

Stay tuned for more reports.

-cvj