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Anderson on Strings

Philip Anderson (“More is different!”) in the New York times today on “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”

Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It is an interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and doesn’t on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on it.
My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundres of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we would like it to be rather than the way we see it to be: and it is improbable that Nature thinks the same way we do.
The sad thing is that, as several young would-be theorists have explained to me, it is so highly developed that it is a full-time job just to keep up with it. That means that other avenues are not being explored by the bright, imaginative young people, and that alternative career paths are blocked.

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Day 5

Yesterday I skied at Santa Fe Ski Basin. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to ski while I was in the Pacific northwest: they didn’t have any snow and I didn’t have nearly enough time. The Ski Basin has quite a lot of snow now, over half of their upper mountain is open. It started snowing a few minutes after I showed up and snowed lightly all day, putting about two inches of snow on the ground while I was there (and making the drive home interesting: the truck in front of me slid off the road, and I saw one big long truck that had clearly done a bunch of circles before ending up in a ditch.) The highlight of the trip was when I got to start fullfilling a New Years resolution: “Learn to talk about my work and physics in terms which are understandable and exciting to the layperson and don’t make me sound like an elitist.” The subject of my first such rant was a yoga instructor who wanted me to explain to him quantum gravity. I gave him this nice beautiful spiel, and just as we were about to get off the lift, he told me about how he was trying to use the concept of a graviton in his yoga: he figured that if you set your body up in the right position you could send out gravitons which were well balanced with the gravitational field of the earth.

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The Fireplace

A little over a year ago a massive snow storm had blanketed northern California. The kind of storm that hits the area about once every ten years. Upwards of three feet of snow had fallen in the area around my parent’s home in Yreka, stranding holiday motorists in the metropolis of Yreka because the pass over the hill to Oregon, the Siskiyou summit, was closed. After the roads had opened, my dad decided to check on our cabin outside of the small hamlet of Etna. My dad was always active. Not in that hyper way that shouted out that he needed attention, but in the manner of someone who must have woken up some morning and thought “gee there’s a lot of good stuff to do!” So before my dad left to head over the Forest summet to our cabin, he halled in some logs and kindling from outside, crumpled up newspapers, and set our fireplace ready for a fire. He didn’t light a fire, he just set it up in case my mom or sister might want to start a fire to keep warm.
A year ago today, my dad never returned to light or find a lit fire. He had a heartattack when he arrived at our cabin. It’s a cliche to say it, but there’s not a day that I don’t think about him. My dad was, in many ways, my spiritual mentor (certainly one of the reasons I am not a religious person.) In my parent’s home (my home) until today, we never lit that fire my dad set ready.
Today, as you can surely imagine, was destined to be a tough day for my mom. So she had a brunch with some our close friends and she decided, after a year, to light the fire. At first I was sad for the loss of the symbol of my dad’s love for his family. And then I began to laugh. A good laugh straight from the belly. Because I thought: while many men’s fire goes out the day they die, my dad cheated and his fire got an extra year on life.

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Connections

When you are bored, you do silly things. Today I discovered that on quant-ph, I am a coauthor with 18 people who are in turn coauthors with 295 more people.

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Happy New Year

If you survive ’til two thousand and five,
I hope you’re incredibly thin.
For if you are stout,
you will have to breathe out,
so the man next to you can breathe in. – Pink Floyd

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Quick, to the Ivory Towers!

Particle physicists have always considered themselves the kings of physics. Murray Gell-Mann famously called solid state physics by the moniker “squalid state physics.” In the ivory towers where scientists picture themselves as selfless serfs in the service of knowledge, particle theorists have long occupied the attic. At the same time, there is another community of the mathematically inclined who claim that they do their work for the greater good of knowledge: programmers. In particular the open source spirit of programming, that good code is in some way eternal and should be shared and contributed to the greater cause, gives good coders an air of superiority not dissimilar to that found in particle theorist.
And when I think about these two fields, I begin to think that perhaps quantum computing is today’s version of the selfless king in search of knowledge. Not only are we learning about the fundamental ways in which quantum information and computation differs from classical information and computation, I think many of us in the quantum computing community also feel that our work will have some greater consequence once a quantum computer is eventually built. We are, therefore, I think a rather smug community not very dissimilar to particle theory or the ethic of the eternally beautiful algorithm. Whether this smugness will be our undoing, our triumph, or our own psychosis with which we will beat ourselves over the head is another question.

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It Works On So Many Levels

In some bizarre twist straight from the pages of a Pynchon novel, the Air Force in 1994 became interested in chemicals that might annoy the bad guy and in particular (thanks to a memo made available at the memory hole):

Chemicals that effect [sic] human behavior so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely effected [sic]. One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.

As a weak minded liberal I guess I should be happy that the military was finally heeding the hippy mantra “make love not war,” but still..

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Scientific Thank You

Who is the most thanked person in computer science? According to an analysis of the CiteSeer database performed by Giles and Councill, the most thanked person in computer science is Olivier Danvy. I was also interested to see that the institutions I’ve been a member of, Caltech, Berkeley, and the Santa Fe Institute, are all in the top ten of most thanked educational institutions (third, seventh, and fourth respetively.) I can understand why the Santa Fe Institute is high on the most thanked list, their extensive visitor and workshop programs are a great way to generate acknowledgements, but I was a bit shocked by how high Caltech was on this list.

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Physics 12

On the plane I got quized by a neighboring passenger about tsunami dynamics (“oh, you’re a physicist?”) Here is what I recall from Physics 12:
The waves created by tsunamis are very long wavelength. While typical ocean waves are around a hundreds of meters long, tsunamis produce wavelengths of up to a hunderds of kilometers. Since the wavelength of the tsunami is on the order of the depth of the ocean, tsunami waves are shallow water waves (most ocean waves have wavelength of hundreds of meters and are so are different beasts called deep water waves.) The speed of this type of wave (if you want to be fancy you say “celerity” here) is around the square root of the accleration due to gravity times the water depth (typically a few kilometers). This is why tsunami waves move at speeds of a few hundred meters per second and is also why tsunamis which hit the land aren’t moving at this speed (because the ocean depth gets shallower as you approach land and so the tsunami slows down.)

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Merry Christmas

Quoteth Saint Lennon:

And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?
Another year over, and a new one just begun.
And so this is Christmas, I hope you have fun,
The near and the dear ones, the old and the young.
A very Merry Christmas,
And a Happy New Year.
Let’s hope it’s a good one,
Without any fear.
And so this is Christmas, for weak and for strong,
For rich and for poor ones, the war is so wrong.
And so happy Christmas, for black and for white,
For yellow and red ones, let’s stop all the fight.
A very Merry Christmas,
And a Happy New Year.
Let’s hope it’s a good one,
Without any fear.
So this is Christmas, and what have you done?
Another year over, and a new one just begun.
And so happy Christmas, I hope you have fun,
The near and the dear ones, the old and the young.
A very Merry Christmas,
And a Happy New Year.
Let’s hope it’s a good one,
Without any fear.