It has been extremely busy in the ten months or so since I last wrote something here. It’s perhaps the longest break I’ve taken from blogging for 20 years (gosh!) but I think it was a healthy thing to do. Many readers have been following some of my ocassional scribblings on social media (see sidebar), and will guess from those that the main news to report is that I’ve been getting on with the usual practices of my job (research, teaching and mentorship, science communication, etc) and life, including getting settled into a new city and a new working environment. The latter has all been rather fantastic, I’m happy to say! I hope to say a bit more about all these things at more-than-social-media length.
Let me end this little update with something juicy to dig into: Last week I gave a public lecture at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) here at UCSB. Its title was “Living in the Matrix – Recent Advances in Understanding Quantum Spacetime” and you can see a recording of it here. It is a little bit of an update on some aspects of research into understanding black holes at the quantum level using random matrix model methods to perform the gravitational path integral.
I put a lot of preparation into it, trying to motivate the research and give some ideas about how and why it proceeded the way it has. I was trying to do a bit more than just show a lot of pretty pictures and talk over them. I wanted to convey to the audience member a little bit of the sense of what it is like to think about some of the issues involved, and how a theoretical physicist tackles them. So you get to look over the shoulder of physicist as they write in their notebook.
I learned afterwards that people seemed to enjoy the talk, and so maybe you will too.
Enjoy.
–cvj
