Famously, classical general relativity tells us that black holes “have no hair”: the mass, electric charge, and angular momentum of the black hole are the only parameters about the black hole measurable by us “outside the horizon” observors. Silly me it was only today while exercising that I realized that it might be interesting to ask if black holes can carry a charge from a non-abelian gauge theory. While I was pondering this, the other thought I had was that maybe if the theory of nature has multiple gauge fields, not just just the U(1), SU(2), SU(3) we know, but other higher ones, then this the “hair” produced by these theories might help explain the information paradox for black holes. Amazingly, this is deeply related to the content of some ideas about string theory and black holes!
Update 11/14/03: and of course, embarrassingly, there is this famous paper as pointed out by Ben Toner in the comment section.
Powder Magazine
Oh how it taunts me, this “Powder” magazine. Confined to my office writing applications for jobs, it sits, silly little magazine, on my desk and taunts me. “Ski,” it jeers, “Snow” it whispers. But no! I must apply for jobs. Of course it affects my judgement. Of course I dream of the academic jobs where one might do physics and also ski. A theoretical ski bum’s paradise is not complicated, just hard as hell to achieve. But it must be some kind of Nirvana, this physics job in the mountains. A heavenly bliss of powder in the mornings and equations at night. The two converging, diverging into a state of infinite bliss.
Someday I dream of writing a letter to “Powder” magazine. All those years you teased me with your pictures of powder days while I slaved away in the bowels of academia. “Get a Ph.D. and then find someplace to ski.” “Take a postdoc and then find someplace to ski.” But now I actually have a job in academia where I can ski! While others dreamed only of academic success, you “Powder” magazine made me dream of the mountains, of snow, and of doing physics while riding the first chair of the day.
Until then, I content myself with my small dream. And go back to work on another beautiful physics problem.
ArXiv Entry
Sometimes papers on the ArXiv are crazy. From the amusing but more than a bit scary department comes this paper comparing astrophysics and prostitution.
By Popular Demand
Here is a Powerpoint copy of the talk I gave at MIT: QIP seminar talk. If you can’t view powerpoint, here is an html version.
MIT QIP Seminar
Today I will be giving a talk at the MIT QIP seminar. Here is the abstract for the talk
There are distinct physical reasons why classical computers act as naturally error free devices. Not all classical systems can act as robust classical computers. Similarly we should not expect all quantum systems to be useful for quantum computation. More interestingly we can ask the question of whether there exist (or whether we can engineer) naturally fault-tolerant quantum computers. In this talk I will discuss recent progress toward this goal and present a sequence of examples which possess many of the properties of a naturally fault-tolerant quantum computer.
I like to call this talk my “sermon on the mount” talk. In case anyone is interested in attending, the talk will be held at 16:00 hours in room 4-270.
Tempting Chronos
Well I’ve made it to MIT. But not before spending 9 extra hours in LAX due to the southern California fires! My nice easy flight back to Boston turned into a horrible 9 hours plus a redeye. Ouch. OK Chronos, I have learned my lesson. Temporal karma is worth more than gold.
Tripped
Off to MIT for ten days. From “hi”s in the 90s to “lows” in the 40s. Brrr. Notice how I have planned my trip back east to coincide with the end of day light savings time. Wahahaha!
References Not Found
Today I recieved a proof of a paper to be published with Ben Toner in PRL (quant-ph/0304076.) The APS has this neat little program which automatically checks your references. In the proofs we recieved the following error for our paper: “References [5,9] could not be located in the databases used by the system.” The references that were said to be incorrect were
J.S. Bell, Physics (Long Island City, N.Y.), 1, 195 (1964)
and
A. Einstein, P. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, Phys. Rev. 41, 777 (1935)
Funny, these entries are indeed correct and are two of the most famous papers in physics!
The King is not Dead
Today I was driving down the street in the happy suburban community of South Pasadena when I saw Kurt Cobain trying to cross the street. Of course I stopped for him and then watched him cross the street and go into the original Trader Joes.
El Color Del Crystal Con Que Se Mira
Question of the day:
If Iran was a democracy, would there be an uproar over its nuclear program?