O brave new quantum world!
From today’s New York Times, a few questions for Stephen Hawking
With all your intense erudition, why do you bother writing pop-science books about the universe, the latest of which is the illustrated version of ”On the Shoulders of Giants”?
I want my books sold on airport bookstalls.
From the a New York times article on the first string revolution
Dr. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., described it this way: “String theory is not like anything else ever discovered. It is an incredible panoply of ideas about math and physics, so vast, so rich you could say almost anything about it.”
And thus spoke Voltaire:
The way to become boring is to say everything.
From a Caltech postdoc mailing list:
I am working on two science show teasers for Discovery and we are looking for a couple of articulate, passionate scientists who would be interested in appearing in reality television. The first show is called “Get Out of There” in which we recreate survival situations that actually occured and two scientists have to figure out how to get out/survive. The second show is called “Brain vs. Brawn” in which two contestants are both given the same challenge and one is coached on how to accomplish it by a scientist and the other by a non-scientist. The challenge we will be shooting for the pilot/teaser will be fire-walking, so ideally we will have scientist who can explain the physics behind it and the other will be a new agey-type who will focus on a more mind over matter approach. If you can recommend anyone, please contact: *******
(if you really want to know who to contact, please email me.)
This site, archivefreedom.org, intended to tell the story of banned arxiv posters is bound to be worth checking out every once in a while. My favorite quote so far, is in the letter to Noam Chomsky, where Carlos Castro Perelman, writes
I would like to bring to you attention the level of corruption and hypocrisy that has plagued the world of science, Physics in particular, in recent years . No wonder why this country ( USA ) is spiraling into Fascism.
Capital Ph, Capital F, spiraling into McCarthyism.
In my never ceasing effort to increase stereotyping, I present, for you, a recent Gallup poll about American views on the theory of evolution:
|
Subgroup |
% Who Believe that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution |
| Postgraduate education | 65% |
| Liberal | 56 |
| College graduate | 52 |
| West | 47 |
| Seldom, never attend church | 46 |
| Catholics | 46 |
| 50- to 64-year-olds | 44 |
| Men | 42 |
| East | 42 |
| 18- to 29-year-olds | 41 |
| Independent | 40 |
| Democrat | 38 |
| Moderate | 36 |
| SAMPLE AVERAGE | 35 |
| Nearly weekly church attendance | 35 |
| 30- to 49-year-olds | 34 |
| Some college | 32 |
| Women | 30 |
| Republican | 29 |
| Midwest | 29 |
| Protestant | 28 |
| South | 27 |
| Conservative | 26 |
| Weekly church attendance | 22 |
| Age 65+ | 21 |
| High school or less | 20 |
This data makes me think maybe we need another 1960s cultural revolution. Well, truthfully I always think that…
If I were an extraterrestrial, I might be very cautious about communicated my location to the rest of the universe since the universe might be full of other hostile extraterrestrials. This is an argument which must scare the bejebus out of those working on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). And this begs the question: is there a way to transmit a signal such that the location of the transmitter cannot be discovered? In this 2003 article by Walter Simmons and Sandip Pakvasa, the authors claim that it is possible to design such a protocol by using entangled photons. Now I haven’t fully understood their protocol, but I do worry that it requires the transmitters to bounce their entangled photons off of relay stations which make a large angle on the reciever’s sky. And if you can create a large angle on the reciever’s sky, why don’t you just send a signal from somewhere where you don’t have any of your cute little alien colonies?
Patrick Hayden points me to scholar.google.com which is Google’s beta of a search engine designed to for search academic sources. It doesn’t exist if it’s not on the web, eh? Interesting the engine still has a ways to go. For instance, it doesn’t have John Baez’s “This weeks finds in mathematical physics.” articles indexed, which is a total shame because these are an extemely useful resource. But those Googlemeisters are smart cookies, so hopefully by the time it goes beyond beta it will be a rockin resource.
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 of infinite connectivity! Change the amount of magnetic field applied transversely to an ising magnet and you find distinct magnetic phases. Oh yeah, wah-lah: quantum phase transition!
What I find most interesting about all of these different examples of phase transitions is what the knobs are which we turn in order to change phases. Most often, this knob is simply the temperature (in the first two models, this is indeed true, in the last the phase transition arises from a different knob, the transverse magnetic field.) What I’ve been curious about lately is trying to find models of phase transitions which occur as a function of time. The idea here is that you set up a system, evolve it, and at a particular time the system system undergoes a phase transition. Thus there would be a “critical time” at which the order of the system would change. I don’t know of any good examples of such temporal phase transitions. The closest I can come to are situations where a system is cooling off and hence one gets a phase transition at a particular time because the temperature is a function of time. But are there examples of temporal phase transitions without time being simply a substitute for some other “knob” we can turn for a phase transition?
Go Lazaridis, go Lazaridis, it’s your birthday, go Lazaridis:
Canadian Press
WATERLOO, Ont. — The man who co-founded Research in Motion and helped create a physics research facility in Waterloo, Ont., criticized the federal and provincial governments Monday for not having “the guts” to adequately fund scientific research.
Mike Lazaridis said the governing Liberals in Ottawa and Toronto have “turned their backs” on research.
Mr. Lazaridis donated $100-million to launch the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and $33-million to help start the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo.
The 43-year-old Mr. Lazaridis is the co-founder of RIM, which makes the popular BlackBerry device. He is also the chancellor of the University of Waterloo.
Mr. Lazaridis, who is passionate about research, says politicians are wrapped in “hot potato issues of the day” and have “just lost the guts to face the future.”
“Who are they paying the megabucks to, to tell them that research, you know, isn’t important,” Mr. Lazaridis said. “It just blows me away.”
Mr. Lazaridis made the comments just days before Prime Minister Paul Martin is to attend Friday’s official opening of the Perimeter Institute’s new building. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is scheduled to visit on Saturday.
A passionate advocate of education and research, Mr. Lazaridis likes to emphasize the importance of pure research, noting that it often leads to important and unforeseen discoveries.
The title to the email said: “Your Manuscript in: Phys Rev Lett, 2003; 90(15):157904” so I open it. It started by congratulating me on the publication of paper and saying how much it impressed the author of the email. But my happy little chemical glow was quickly snuffed out by the realization that the whole email was a strange form of academic spam. The author of this email claims to be the editor of a medical science journal and the content of the email was basically to advertise this journal. Now I may be a doctor, but I’m not THAT kind of doctor: it looks like they mined academic journals in hopes of getting submissions. Strange tactic for a journal. They can’t be doing it for the submission fee ($65), can they? And if I was in the medical field maybe I wouldn’t even realize it was spam. But surely my article on “Bell Inequalities with Communication” isn’t even remotely appropriate for this journal.
The final disturbing part of the email was where it claimed that certain select authors (like, potentially, myself) who review papers for the journal would have priority publishing with the journal. Can anyone think of a reason why this is reasonable?