More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, V

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At the (K)ITP the other day there was a journalist-led discussion/presentation on the largely-media-driven “controversy” about string theory. You know my opinion on this -it’s a largely made up story based on two inaccurate chariacatures (in book form) of research in the field- told by the same journalists and editors who some time earlier brought you the glossy stories about string theory that played up the excitement and promise, and played down the often-said but often-ignored cautionary remarks. The irony of all of this seems to have been lost on most. (I’m not saying that string theorists are entirely blameless in this, but I’ve seen how hard it is to get a balanced remark -about the basic process of seeing a complex scientific program through to its end- to survive next to a glossy one-liner).

The point is that the story being told now in the press is simply the one that journalists and editors want to tell now – a David vs Goliath story. It has little or nothing to do with what is actually going on in the science research. The journalist -George Johnson- does a good job of pointing out supporting evidence for this by going through a Click to continue reading this post →

Panel Matters

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Coffee break.

Day two of the panel work. Locked in a room again, looking at proposals. Yesterday we deliberated over who passed to the next stage, and who did not – a painful process at times. Today there’s a final part of the process to be performed. We are writing feedback to each applicant to give a little guidance on their proposals for the future. This is an important service to perform, as you can imagine by simply putting yourself in the shoes of the person applying for the grant. In a room full of international people, all with some pride in their wordsmithing abilities, jointly crafting sentences that reflect the salient points of the panel’s deliberations is often an amusing task. Last time I did this (earlier this year) I learned a good algorithm for getting right the use of “that” vs “which” – useful when writing with eight hour jetlag. I probably should have known it before. In addition, I’ve learned several arcane uses of hyphens, “however”, and other modifiers, but I’m sure I’ll forget those.

The coffee is a bit weak. Not a good thing.

Well, better carry on.

-cvj

Magic Ring

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guinness circle

It was a long day on the Job. From 8:15am to 6:15pm, we were stuck in one room for more or less the entire time. Now…. a quick guinness on the way back from dinner. Conversation about the private vs public forms of university, funding in science in general, dark energy and dark matter, Borat…. all the big topics of the day.

-cvj

Ballooning Costs

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virgin balloonI’m still excited about the news that Branson has joined the fight to put money aside to lead the way in fighting global warming issues.

I blogged about it here a month ago, you’ll recall.

Well, of course the Onion has a take on this. It’s mean, but it is funny:

Analysts are predicting that the $3 billion Sir Richard Branson has pledged for developing energy sources to combat global warming could come close to matching the amount the entrepreneur, adventurer, and Virgin CEO has already spent on elaborate balloon-based excursions.

That’s the main joke, but to me, even funnier is the ending line of the artice:

Branson also reportedly plans to invest billions more on a time machine that would enable him to prevent the creation of Virgin Airways, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by some four percent worldwide.

-cvj

A Positive Sign

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positive sign I’m always pleased to see this sign. It is at Heathrow, on the walk down the perpetually dingily lit underground corridors connecting the terminals, the tube, the extortion Heathrow express, and the parking lots.

For a start, I generally like the idea that the ground floor of a building (the one you walk onto off the street) is the “zeroth” floor. (I mean no disrespect to this splendid country I live in, that has largely chosen otherwise, although every now and again in older buildings you see it.) So it is just great to see a (-1)th floor, and all the more pleasing that it is not considered odd to have that. No worries about people being confused about what a negative number is. I know it sounds trivial, but when you see basic mathematics and science literacy seemingly getting worse all around -on both sides of the Atlantic, mark you- …when you think something shouldn’t or can’t possibly get “dumbed down” any further for the general public, and then it gets “dumbed down” anyway… seeing this sort of thing is a relief.

Every time I see it, once the above has flashed through my mind, you know what I think next, every single time? Wouldn’t it just be great if elevators went horizontally too?! Then we could have the imaginary axis as well! But that will have to remain just in my, uh, imagination.

-cvj

Pause for a Pint of Guinness

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guinness Well, it was only yesterday that I was telling the physics 100 class all about Special Relativity (lots of incredulous looks…. lots of reassurances, including: “You’re confused? That’s ok! It is one of the greatest pieces of science of the 20th Century… It’s not supposed to be trivial….”), but it seems like an age ago, and very distant. That’s because I’m in Dublin today. (Pesky wormholes.)

Just for a few days.

Guinness will be involved, I imagine (yeah!), although it will not be the primary focus. (The pint in the photo to the right is from a previous trip.)

I hope to have at least half a day to walk around in the rain. I miss that.

More later.

-cvj

News From the Front, IV

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(A relatively technical post follows.)

So imagine the following:

You’re walking along the street, minding your own business, and somebody walks up to you and tries to sell you a string theory. So you stop and examine the goods, since you’re in the market for string theories, on the lookout for any that might be novel, useful, bright, or shiny, etc. You never know when one or other property might come in useful.

Question: How do you know that it is a string theory? Let me be sure to point out that it comes with a lot of the defining path integral done for you. In other words, you don’t have to do the integral over string world sheet metrics and world sheet fields. This was done in the factory for you. What you have access to are parameters such as the coefficients of the operators in the theory, and you can also adjust the value of the string coupling.

So a lot of the stuff you would recognize as a string theory in your typical string theorist’s notebook have been cleaned up. They’ve been integrated over. The observable physics actually never cared about them (the technical details of summing over metrics – slicing up the moduli space of inequivalent metrics properly at each genus, etc etc…. all done), assuming you’ve done the integrals properly. The factory did it all for you.

So what criteria do you use to decide that it is a string theory at all? Actually, this is not an idle question. Think about the issue in the context of trying to understand some phenomenon or phenomena in Nature. How would you know you had a string theory description underlying the physics?

Well, what we might start doing at this point is start listing various things we’ve learned about strings that we think are rather spiffy about the theory that make them different from what we’ve seen before. I’m sure you have your favourites.

A word or more of caution though. From my new paper:

With a few notable (and highly instructive) examples in D ≤ 2, string theory still lacks a satisfactory and well–understood non–perturbative definition. It is fair to say that while strings have marvellous properties that may prove a great boon for studying Nature, we have not been learning about these properties systematically, but instead by following the theory into regimes which have become accessible to us by various techniques. As a result, it is not clear what the big picture is —certainly not clear is the complete list of phenomena we should expect from string theory.

My point? Do we really know enough about what string thory is to decide when to rule out something as being stringy or not. How do you know when to hand over the cash to the person on the street trying to sell you one?

Ok, so you’re thinking: What’s he getting at? What’s in this paper?

Well, one of the things of which we are all very proud -that we show off at theorist parties to all our theorist friends from other fields, you’ll admit- are branes, right? We’ve spent a huge amount of effort on them in the last decade or so expecially, and Click to continue reading this post →

Finding the Orionids Tonight

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When I was a child, I was fascinated with a straight line of three stars that were evenly spaced. Whenever I looked up in the sky, I would be comforted by being able to find those stars, especially when I was about to embark on a long walk home at night. I later learned that they were actually known as Orion’s Belt, part of the constellation of Orion. So Orion remains my favourite constellation.

These nights, Orion takes centre stage in stargazing circles since the Orionid meteor shower will be originating from a point near the constellation. Of course, Orion has nothing to do with the shower. It merely marks the apparent direction that it comes from (see red dot in image below).

orionids

(Above is the view of the sky looking Southsoutheast from mid northern latitudes at 3:00am today.) We will be traversing a debris field made of stuff left over from Halley’s comet’s tail. That stuff will rain down into our atmosphere, glowing brightly as Click to continue reading this post →

Field Trip, I

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As part of the Freshman Seminar I told you about earlier (e.g., here, here and here), we went on a field trip to MOCA in nearby downtown LA.

We went to see the exhibition of drawings by Eva Hesse. Hesse is very well known for her sculpture, and among the things she did, I think that a rather splendid one in this context is the one below. It is an example of those that resemble three dimensional renderings of her interesting use of line on the paper.

Eva Hesse - Metronomic Irregularity

This one (not in the exhibition) is called “Metronomic Irregularity” (I think it has a number as well… there are several pieces of this title done by her).

field trip hesseThe group is standing in front of the sculpture I posted about earlier. There’s Ashley and Adam, left and middle. Jeff (on the right in the picture) -who is not a freshman, but a senior who does physics research projects with me- came along as well. We had a rather good time, taking the bus up from campus (the horror!) and then walking up through the city, looking at some of the public spaces and public art that nobody seems to look at after hours much. We got to the museum just as it was opening.

A great deal of the work on display was in the form of developmental drawings, some of which were still in her notebooks, or were clearly pages of notebooks. These I found fascinating, for the most part. (Click the following for larger view): Click to continue reading this post →

Flight of Fancy

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Down at MOCA for a field trip today. More later. Took a shot of this old favourite:

Nancy Rubins Sculpture

Nancy Rubins’ “Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s Airplane Parts, About 1000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, Gagosian’s Beverly Hills Space, at MOCA” (Can never really make out if that is the acttual title, but that’s the bit in italics on the plaque.)

-cvj

Not the Hole Story?

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NASA ozone layer 24th sept 06The hole in the ozone layer over Antartica was recently the biggest it has ever been, I learned from this Reuters article:

“From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles ,” said Paul Newman of
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington.

If the stratospheric weather conditions had been normal, the ozone hole would be expected to reach a size of about 8.9 million to 9.3 million square miles, about the surface area of North America, NASA said in a statement.

(NASA image top right. More about it here.)

This immediately reminds one of the other story on the hole I mentioned not so long ago. There was good news there, since it was supposed to be stabilizing, as a result Click to continue reading this post →

Those Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

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You may recall that we were recently discussing stereotypes as a result of an earlier post. Particularly, I was talking about the effects those sterotypes can produce as a result of modifying the expectations of others, making it hard for some people to be taken seriously, and resulting in them having to go that extra mile (or several) as a result.

Well, I’d like to point your attention to a recent study about the direct effects of those stereotypes on the stereotyped. Quoting from an article by AP science writer Randolph E. Schmid:

[Steven J.] Heine and doctoral student Ilan Dar-Nimrod wanted to see how people are affected by stereotypes about themselves. They divided more than 220 women into four groups and administered math and reading comprehension tests between 2003 and 2006. Their results are reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

What they actually did was to provide the different groups with different images and reading materials before they did the tests. They seem to have found significant differences in the results that suggest that having a negative stereotype of yourself in mind actually makes things worse. In other words:

It’s a process psychologists call a stereotype threat, Heine explained. “If a member of a group for which there is a negative stereotype is in a position to test the stereotype, they are likely to choke under the pressure.”

So reminding them of the stereotype affects them.

Here’s what they found:

Click to continue reading this post →