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The Physics of the 21st Century

One often hears biologists say that biology is the “physics of the 21st century.” When they say this, I think the main motive is to indicate that great scientific advances will be coming out of biology in the next century. Certainly I agree wholeheartedly with this. But I also wonder whether the following ever crosses the mind of someone who claims that biology is the physics of the 21st century. Physics in the 20th century, and in particular particle physics, was supported by governments in large part because of the fear of the nuclear bomb. If biology is going to be the physics of the 21st century, does this mean that as physics had the nuclear bomb, biology will have biological warfare? Sure it’s a silly thought, but still it’s a bit sobering too.
Another way in which biology is becoming more like physics is the birth of “big biology.” Take for example, the list of authors on a recent Nature article about sequencing the X chromosome (The DNA Sequence of the Human X Chromosome. Nature 434:325 (2005)):

Ross MT, Grafham DV, Coffey AJ, Scherer S, McLay K, Muzny D, Platzer M, Howell GR, Burrows C, Bird CP, Frankish A, Lovell FL, Howe KL, Ashurst JL, Fulton RS, Sudbrak R, Wen G, Jones MC, Hurles ME, Andrews TD, Scott CE, Searle S, Ramser J, Whittaker A, Deadman R, Carter NP, Hunt SE, Chen R, Cree A, Gunaratne P, Havlak P, Hodgson A, Metzker ML, Richards S, Scott G, Steffen D, Sodergren E, Wheeler DA, Worley KC, Ainscough R, Ambrose KD, Ansari-Lari MA, Aradhya S, Ashwell RI, Babbage AK, Bagguley CL, Ballabio A, Banerjee R, Barker GE, Barlow KF, Barrett IP, Bates KN, Beare DM, Beasley H, Beasley O, Beck A, Bethel G, Blechschmidt K, Brady N, Bray-Allen S, Bridgeman AM, Brown AJ, Brown MJ, Bonnin D, Bruford EA, Buhay C, Burch P, Burford D, Burgess J, Burrill W, Burton J, Bye JM, Carder C, Carrel L, Chako J, Chapman JC, Chavez D, Chen E, Chen G, Chen Y, Chen Z, Chinault C, Ciccodicola A, Clark SY, Clarke G, Clee CM, Clegg S, Clerc-Blankenburg K, Clifford K, Cobley V, Cole CG, Conquer JS, Corby N, Connor RE, David R, Davies J, Davis C, Davis J, Delgado O, Deshazo D, Dhami P, Ding Y, Dinh H, Dodsworth S, Draper H, Dugan-Rocha S, Dunham A, Dunn M, Durbin KJ, Dutta I, Eades T, Ellwood M, Emery-Cohen A, Errington H, Evans KL, Faulkner L, Francis F, Frankland J, Fraser AE, Galgoczy P, Gilbert J, Gill R, Glockner G, Gregory SG, Gribble S, Griffiths C, Grocock R, Gu Y, Gwilliam R, Hamilton C, Hart EA, Hawes A, Heath PD, Heitmann K, Hennig S, Hernandez J, Hinzmann B, Ho S, Hoffs M, Howden PJ, Huckle EJ, Hume J, Hunt PJ, Hunt AR, Isherwood J, Jacob L, Johnson D, Jones S, de Jong PJ, Joseph SS, Keenan S, Kelly S, Kershaw JK, Khan Z, Kioschis P, Klages S, Knights AJ, Kosiura A, Kovar-Smith C, Laird GK, Langford C, Lawlor S, Leversha M, Lewis L, Liu W, Lloyd C, Lloyd DM, Loulseged H, Loveland JE, Lovell JD, Lozado R, Lu J, Lyne R, Ma J, Maheshwari M, Matthews LH, McDowall J, McLaren S, McMurray A, Meidl P, Meitinger T, Milne S, Miner G, Mistry SL, Morgan M, Morris S, Muller I, Mullikin JC, Nguyen N, Nordsiek G, Nyakatura G, O’dell CN, Okwuonu G, Palmer S, Pandian R, Parker D, Parrish J, Pasternak S, Patel D, Pearce AV, Pearson DM, Pelan SE, Perez L, Porter KM, Ramsey Y, Reichwald K, Rhodes S, Ridler KA, Schlessinger D, Schueler MG, Sehra HK, Shaw-Smith C, Shen H, Sheridan EM, Shownkeen R, Skuce CD, Smith ML, Sotheran EC, Steingruber HE, Steward CA, Storey R, Swann RM, Swarbreck D, Tabor PE, Taudien S, Taylor T, Teague B, Thomas K, Thorpe A, Timms K, Tracey A, Trevanion S, Tromans AC, d’Urso M, Verduzco D, Villasana D, Waldron L, Wall M, Wang Q, Warren J, Warry GL, Wei X, West A, Whitehead SL, Whiteley MN, Wilkinson JE, Willey DL, Williams G, Williams L, Williamson A, Williamson H, Wilming L, Woodmansey RL, Wray PW, Yen J, Zhang J, Zhou J, Zoghbi H, Zorilla S, Buck D, Reinhardt R, Poustka A, Rosenthal A, Lehrach H, Meindl A, Minx PJ, Hillier LW, Willard HF, Wilson RK, Waterston RH, Rice CM, Vaudin M, Coulson A, Nelson DL, Weinstock G, Sulston JE, Durbin R, Hubbard T, Gibbs RA, Beck S, Rogers J, Bentley DR.

Now if this author list doesn’t look like it could come from CERN or Fermilab or SLAC, I don’t know what does!

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Quantum Jobs

Todd Brun has put together a list of faculty openings and postdoctoral positions available in quantum information processing. See this page. In a related note, but not yet listed on Todd’s website, Australia continues its battle with Canada for the center of the quantum computing universe with various job openings listed on Michael Nielsen’s blog here, here, and short visiting positions here.

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A Messy Room Encodes One Bit

How do we store information? One way is to use a magnetic media, like as is done in our hard drive, where the information is encoded into the total magnetization of a group of spins. Another way is to use a capacitor and transistor to store information into the charge on the capacitor.
Now researchers at Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, the Netherlands ( Lankhorst M. H. R., Ketelaars B. W. S. M. M. & Walkters R. A. M. Nature Materials published online, doi: 10.1038/nmat1350 (1968)) have created a storage medium in which the information is stored in a very strange way. Instead of the information being encoded into the total charge or the magnetization, their information is encoded into the degree of freedom describing whether the media they have is ordered or disordered. The idea of storing information in the ordered versus disordered phase has been around for a long time (such devices are called “Ovonic”) but apparently this new research is the first really viable realization of such a device.
The researchers use antimony telluride, which is naturally in an amorphus state with many of the atoms of the material all jumbled around. A small electral pulse however, will turn this state into an ordered states with the atoms lined up in a crystaline structure. A larger electral pulse (more voltage), however, will melt this crystaline structure and return the system into the disordered jumble of atoms. The state of the system can be read out by measuring the resistance across the material (the ordered phase will have a much lower resistance.) Thus we can store our binary 0 in the ordered phase and our binary 1 in the disordered phase, read out this information, and also write this information.
Which makes me wonder which other order parameters in statistical physics can be used to store information? Can we store information in the two phases of a metal being superconducting and just regularly conducting? How about in fluid-superfluid transition? OK, both of these are totally not practical, but maybe there is an interesting order parameter which we are missing but which would make an amazingly robust and fast storage device?

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Day 10 – The Stupidest Day of My Life

Beware the Ides of March

Yesterday was a snow day shutting down work at the Santa Fe Institute. It snowed about a foot in town. So with a friend, Alex, we decided to go to Taos for a great day of powder skiing.
First run of the day, starting about 10:15, we hiked up the ridgeline above the chair lift to get some nice fresh powder. We went beyond the turn off to the first shoots, but when we got to the top of the hill above this, the wind was too strong and so we strapped on on our skis and headed back to the first shoots. Alex was above me and he told me we had to cut very strongly to the skiers right to get back to the runs. Well, I thought I was traversing pretty hard. A few hundred feet down, I noticed that I didn’t know where Alex had gone to. But taking his advice, I kept trying to traverse to my right. About a 1500 feet later, I realized that I must have gone into a drainage basin on the backside of the mountain. Mistake. Big mistake. Deadly mistake.
I won’t describe for you the details of the next few hours as I realized I was lost, had no idea where I was, had only an apple in my pocket for food, and was faced with trying to climb out of where I was in conditions where I was postholing up to my waist and chest. By around noon my voice was hoarse from yelling for help.
Then a little before one o’clock, following my tracks, appeared my saviors, two ski partrollers, Michael and Rick. Alex had seen me take the wrong turn into the drainage basin, and had almost immediately contacted the ski patrol. If it wasn’t for Alex noticing my wrong turn, immediately contacting ski patrol, and the two brave souls Michael and Rick, well, I don’t really want to think about it. Stupid, David. Stupid, David.
We spent the next five hours making our way down the drainage basin through some astoundingly bad terrain. Here is what the terrain did to my ski:
Don't be and idiot like Dave
Let’s just say that yesterday was one of the scariest days of my short life. Please, don’t be an idiot like me. Always ski with someone and if you don’t know the terrain but your buddy does, always stay in contact with your friend. If you don’t know where you’re going, don’t ski there. Always carry extra food and water with you. Dress warmly. Carry a pack with a medical kit, extra layers, matches, etc.

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Stringing Us Along

Via Not Even Wrong, comes an article from the San Francisco Chronicle which is pretty critical of string theory. Philip Anderson, as always, comes away with an interesting quote,

“…we from outside the (string) field are disturbed by our colleagues’ insistence that every new semi-adolescent who has done something in string theory is the greatest genius since Einstein and therefore must occupy yet another tenure track. … Our sciences are becoming increasingly infected with quasi-theology, a tendency which needs to be openly debated.”

but it’s Robert Laughlin who gets in perhaps the harshest one liner about string theory I’ve heard in quite a while

But skeptics suggest it’s the latest sign of how string theorists, sometimes called “superstringers,” try to colorfully camouflage the theory’s flaws, like “a 50-year-old woman wearing way too much lipstick,” jokes Robert B. Laughlin, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Stanford. “People have been changing string theory in wild ways because it has never worked.”

Of course this is the same Robert Laughlin who once said (rumor mode on) that if the Stanford physics department hired anyone in quantum computing he would resign (rumor mode off).

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Fear and Loathing…

Last week, my friend Luis came through town, with…a two faced calf named “Unique”:
Unique
We went for drinks at the Pink Adobe, $3 cover charge, the band playing loud Led Zeppin covers, and then some of my collegues from the Santa Fe Institute wanted to see what Luis had in the back of his big SUV in a trash can. In the dark parking lot behind the bar, Luis and crew unfolded from its plastic rapper the two faced calf. 17 days it lived, too short, I say, too short. We gathered around, freezing in the cold Santa Fe night, to stare at the two faced calf which itself was frozen and packed in ice. And the entire time, as we gawked and stared, the security guard stationed in the parking lot, he didn’t move a bit.
Somedays, life feels like it should be part of a novel. Other days, it seems even more interesting.

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QCSS05

The dealine (March 15, 2005) for the Summer School on Principles and Applications of Control in Quantum Systems to be held at Caltech on August 7-14, 2005 is fast approaching. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to apply control theory to quantum systems, this looks like an amazing opportunity. The potential agenda includes:

  1. Experiments and applications for control in quantum systems – phenomenology and motivations for control
    • Applications of optimal, relaxation-optimized , and ensemble control in magnetic resonance
    • Quantum feedback control in atomic systems: applications to precision measurement
    • Quantum control applications in quantum information science
    • Quantum dynamics of superconducting circuits and circuit quantum electrodynamics
    • Quantum measurement and feedback with nano-electromechanical systems
  2. Quantum-physical modeling
    • Quantum mechanics in the Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Interaction pictures
    • Perturbation theory and master equations
    • Quantum probability and filtering
  3. Control theory: from classical to quantum
    • State-space modeling; introduction to optimal and robust control
    • Geometric control: overview and highlights
    • Stochastic control: overview and highlights
    • Control-theoretic model reduction
  4. Frontiers in quantum control
    • Presentations on latest research by leading practitioners in the field
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Disordered Personality

Ever wonder what peronsality disorders you have. Via Pharyngula I have come across the totally unscientific, but interesting Personality Disorder Test.

Disorder Rating
Paranoid: Low
Schizoid: Low
Schizotypal: Low
Antisocial: Low
Borderline: Low
Histrionic: Moderate
Narcissistic: Moderate
Avoidant: Low
Dependent: Low
Obsessive-Compulsive: Moderate

— Personality Disorder Test – Take It! —

It looks like I’m a self-centered clown with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Jez, this test makes it sound like I’m Woody Allen.

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Pavlovian Dave

When I was in high school I taught myself the physics necessary to take the AP physics exam. I did this by taking a physics textbook and doing all of the problems which had solutions in the back of the book. At the time I was doing this, I had just discovered Dire Straits “Brothers in Arms” album and that is ALL that I listened to when I was working on these problems. When I went off to college, I was sitting in my dorm room one day when I put on the Dire Straits and all of the sudden I notice I had this amazing urge to do physics problems. I had trained myself to do physics whenever I heard that one CD. It was as if Pavlov’s dogs had suddenly learned to do physics.
So now I actually use this technique to get work done. I play a single album or a single song over and over again when I’m working on a particular subject. Then, if I ever have a problem getting working on that particular topic, I pull out the appropriate song and whamo, I can’t help myself from getting work done.
Here is this month’s song for conditioning myself to get work done:
Protect Me
Placebo: “Protect me from what I want”

It’s that disease of the age
It’s that disease that we crave
Alone at the end of the rave
We catch the last bus home
Corporate America wakes
Coffee republic and cakes
We open the latch on the gate
Of the hole that we call our home
Protect me from what I want…
Protect me protect me
Maybe we’re victims of fate
Remember when we’d celebrate
We’d drink and get high until late
And now we’re alone
Wedding bells ain’t gonna chime
With both of us guilty of crime
And both of us sentenced to time
And now we’re all alone
Protect me from what I want…
Protect me protect me

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Hans Bethe 1906-2005

Yesterday the great theoretical physicist Hans Bethe passed away at the age of 98. Details can be found here.
Whenever I’m traveling and I’m trying to work on a plane, I think about Bethe. Because in 1947, Hans Bethe, on the trainride back to Schenectady, made the first rough calculation of the Lamb shift. And today, when we rush around the world, jetsetting our way from conference to conference, I often wonder if we slowed down, and took the train, whether physics wouldn’t be better off.
Then, of course, there is the famous Physical Review 73, 803 (1948), “The Origin of Chemical Elements” by R. A. Alpher, H. Bethe, and G. Gamow. I’ve always dreamed of finding a coauthor with a suitable last name to go with my food item last name “Bacon.”
Finally, there is this amusing story of a conversation between Bethe and Leo Szilard:

The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: “I don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.”
“Don’t you think God knows the facts?” Bethe asked.
“Yes,” said Szilard. “He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.”