Happy Lunar Eclipse! I was born on a lunar eclipse. Kind of explains things, doesn’t it? Also: Is it a coincidence that the lunar eclipse happens to be on the night the Red Sox finally beat the curse? Also notice: Cardinals are as Red as they get. An omen for Nov. 2? I’ll take any [...]
This lunch I saw a talk about “Augmented Reality” which is like virtual reality, except that you use a combination of the real world and VR type equipment to add new elements to the real world. Thus, for instance, users wear transparent displays so that they see extra objects in their environment. At the end [...]
In the golden ages, when people were just beginning to think hard about quantum information, there was a workshop held in 1988 at the Santa Fe Institute on “Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information.” This produced a proceedings which is well worth reading, even after all these years. Now, thanks to the support of [...]
Phase transitions are fun. Change the temperature and wah-lah, water turns to ice and ice into water! Throw random bonds down on a lattice: if we occupy the sites with low probability, we form lots of isolated regions of small bonds, but if increase this probability past a the percolation threshold, wah-lah we form clusters [...]
There is a primeval part of me which thinks that if the Red Sox beat the Yankees, then John Kerry will win the presidential election. And maybe then baseball will stop their seventh inning offensive singing. Actually I guess the real matchup should be the Astros and the Sox in the world series.
In quantum theory, we are interested in calculating the amplitude for starting in some initial state |i> and ending in some final state |f>. For a Hamiltonian H evolving for a time t, this amplitude is given by <f |exp(-iHt)|i>. In the path integral formulation of quantum theory, we rewrite this as the path integral [...]
Saturday I did the 12 mile 10,000-12,000-10,000ft Big Tesuque Run. My time was 1:45:30. I was 25th out of 110 and came in 5th in my age group. My time was almost 15 minutes faster than when I ran the course the previous week! Yeah for addrenaline.
Bell’s theorem tells us that there is no local hidden variable theory which reproduces the statistics of quantum theory. Fine. One way to think about moving onward given Bell’s theorem is to given to look for nonlocal hidden variable theories which reproduce quantum theory. But now there is something strange that happens. If you have [...]
Patrick Hayden points me to hep-th/0410036. If I understand this paper correctly and the paper is correct, this seems to me to be a BIG deal. In this paper, the author take the Hilbert-Palatini action for GR and adds two terms, both of a topological nature. These terms don’t change the fact that the classical [...]
This coming weekend, I’ve signed up for I ran the course last weekend and finished in just under two hours. It’s a very spectacular run this time of year because the aspens have all colored up. Just as long as it doesn’t snow on me it should be fun!
I will have you note, that one of today’s Nobel prize winners in physics, David Politzer, has written articles on closed timelike curves (a.k.a. time travel). Does my paper on closed timelike curves look crazy now? Huh? Oh yes, it does.
