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Seeing the Kingdom of God on the arXiv

A new entry in the best title every contest, arXiv:0907.4152:

Born Again
Authors: Don N. Page
Abstract: A simple proof is given that the probabilities of observations in a large universe are not given directly by Born’s rule as the expectation values of projection operators in a global quantum state of the entire universe. An alternative procedure is proposed for constructing an averaged density matrix for a random small region of the universe and then calculating observational probabilities indirectly by Born’s rule as conditional probabilities, conditioned upon the existence of an observation.

WWJD? Not quantum Born’s rule, apparently.

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Diary of a Sad Physicist

Writing a blog is for me (1) amusing and (2) amusing. Can anyone take anything that I write on a blog seriously? Well sometimes people do. Many eons ago (okay, I lie, it was 2005), I wrote a post about the then new “h-index.” The h-index is an attempt at trying to find a better way of “ranking” citation counts. As such, it is, of course, nothing more than another meter stick in the long line of lazy tenure committee metric sticks. But it’s also fun! Why is it fun? Because calculating any “metric” is fun for people like me who spent their childhood involved in such mind expanding tasks as counting the number of loads of wood we did before we finished stacking all that had been cut. But that’s just me.
Sadly, for others my original post provoke an amazing amount of hatred and anger. Thus is the diary of “Sad Physicist.” Did I endorse this index as the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and tenure. Of course not. What do you take me as, an academic bent on analyzing everything within sight through the eyes of Science! Pfft.
Okay, you ask, well why am I writing about this subject now? Well today, after over three years, the Sad Physicist, the one commenter of most venom about that post, has reappeared! Welcome back friend! So I thought it would be a good chance to collect the original dialogue, you know for posterity. Maybe one could even count this article as a citation, thus increasing Sad Physicist’s h-index! Always helpful, the pontiff is.
Continue reading “Diary of a Sad Physicist”

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Various and Sundry

Two notes from Caltech of interest:

  • Michael L. Roukes’ group at Caltech has produced a NEMS (nanoelectromechanical system) device which can (almost) measure the mass of a single molecule (as opposed to the many tens of thousands (is this the correct amount?) needed in mass spectrometry.) Build a 2 micrometer by 100 nanometer NEMS resonator. Drop a molecule on it. The frequency of vibration of the NEMS resonator changes. Detect this frequency change. Of course vibration frequency also depends on where the molecule lands. So run the experiment about 500 times to get good estimate of the mass. Future (all ready prototyped) work should alleviate the problem of where the molecule lands causing a need for repeated experiments. From the press release:

    Eventually, Roukes and colleagues hope to create arrays of perhaps hundreds of thousands of the NEMS mass spectrometers, working in parallel, which could determine the masses of hundreds of thousands of molecules “in an instant,” Naik says.
    As Roukes points out, “the next generation of instrumentation for the life sciences-especially those for systems biology, which allows us to reverse-engineer biological systems-must enable proteomic analysis with very high throughput. The potential power of our approach is that it is based on semiconductor microelectronics fabrication, which has allowed creation of perhaps mankind’s most complex technology.”

  • Hawaii beats Chile as site of new Thirty meter telescope.

For the past few months I’ve been getting back into shape by running my rear end off. On these jaunts, when I’m not in the mood for KEXP (they stream check them out!) I try to fill my head with something that isn’t mind numbingly dumb (read most radio stations.) Good podcasts include EconTalk where you get to hear about the dismal science. The interviewer, Russ Roberts, has a very strong libertarian (Austrian school) bent, but even when he disagrees he does ask the questions. I think we get to call it the dismal science because a recent interview was on “The Rational Market.” Apparently economists believe that the economy can pass the Turing test! Anyone else have good recommendations for non brain dead podcasts?
Speaking of finance, the Information Processor has two posts up that are worth looking at: Against Finance and Goldman apologia. The lesson of this financial crisis (and LTCM and…) is that when Goldman comes knocking at your door with a deal, run, don’t walk screaming for the door!
Nate Silver has gotten sick of climate skepticism and the daily weather report, and so lays down some money for those who want to bet against average weather statistics. Time to see if I can find a hometown where the weather instruments have been recently changed.

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Moonquakes

As someone who was born on a lunar eclipse (explains a lot, no?) the 40th anniversary of man walking on the moon has a special place in my heart. Okay, that sentence makes no sense (I was born on a lunar eclipse however), but anyway everyone is all abuzz about the anniversary of the moon landing so it’s as good as any sentence to let me talk about booming sand dunes.
Booming whah?
Continue reading “Moonquakes”

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The Great Firewall of Collaboration

A fellow quantum computing researcher of mine recently joined FriendFeed. Along with another researcher we got involved in a discussion about a paper concerning a certain recent claimed “disproof of Bell’s theorem.” (arXiv:0904.4259. What it means to “disprove a theorem” like Bell’s theorem is, however a subject for another comment section on a different blog.) But, and here is the interesting thing, this colleague then made a trip to China. And FriendFeed, apparently, is blocked by the great firewall of China, so he had to email us his comments to continue the conversation. Which got me thinking.
China is a country that has been, historically, a great power. It is, by all accounts, returning to that status with the a wave of lifting of its people out of poverty (numbers I’ve seen are from like over 60 percent below poverty a few decades ago to 10 percent recently, though it’s not clear to me that the poverty level (a few dollars per day) used is the really relevant number.) It has, even more interestingly, achieved an amazing increase in the production of people with a large amount of education. From under 10,000/year PhDs a decade ago to nearly 50,000/year recently, there has been a huge increase in PhDs in a very short span of time. In some minds, the rise of China is the dominant story of the coming decades. This is equally true in academic circles where the productivity of science in China has been rising rapidly.
But my colleague’s experience made me wonder a bit. Suppose that you take at face value the idea that online tools are going to change how we do science (through any of the numerous forms that such tools can now take.) If the Chinese government is banning tools that allow for collaboration (in our case, just a mere discussion) then, despite all they do, I wonder if this might cause a severe lack of bang for their Ph.D buck. Do we really believe that the kind of large scale data sharing or online collaborating, for example, that characterize Science 2.0 will be easy to carry out under the probing eye of the Chinese government? Of course, I’m as far from an expert in China and Science 2.0, so I can’t even begin to approach this question. But it did strike me that there are some fairly strong preconditions assumed by those pushing online tools for science that don’t seem to hold for numerous countries around the world, including China.
Or, in other words (executive summary), those of you doing Science 2.0 can now think about yourselves as modern freedom fighters. Hazzah!

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Detexify Squared

A friend sent me a link to Detextify2:

What is this?
Anyone who works with LaTeX knows how time-consuming it can be to find a symbol in symbols-a4.pdf that you just can’t memorize. Detexify is an attempt to simplify this search.
How does it work?
Just draw the symbol you are looking for into the square area above and look what happens!
My symbol isn’t found!
The symbol may not be trained enough or it is not yet in the list of supported symbols. In the first case you can do the training yourself. In the second case just drop me a line (danishkirel[[[at]]]gmail.com)!
I like this. How can I help?
You could spare some time training Detexify. You could also look at the source on GitHub and if you want to contribute you’re welcome.
Who created Detexify?
Philipp Kühl had the initial idea and Daniel Kirsch made it happen.

Pretty cool. One step closer to the day when I write an equation on a piece of paper and the LaTeX just automagically appears for this at equation.

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Solid State Quantum Job

David Poulin sends me a job announcement for quantum information processing in the solid state at the University of Sherbrooke:

Permanent position for a Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) on solid state quantum information processing
University of Sherbrooke is seeking candidates for a Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC). The successful candidate will obtain a permanent full professorship in the Physics Department of University of Sherbrooke in the Faculty of Sciences. The CERC program aims to attract and retain the world’s most accomplished and promising minds. This program will provide the Chair with a 10 millions dollar (CAD) grant over a seven year period. University of Sherbrooke has been selected to present one of the 40 candidates to the international selection committee of the CERC program that will select half of the proposals.
The team of researchers in the Physics Department has distinguished itself in the following areas: Quantum Information, Superconductivity, Strongly Correlated Electrons, Magnetism and Photonic Applications. Sherbrooke University has the best infrastructure in Canada for research on quantum materials. Our outstanding research facilities include: the most important combination of low-temperature (down to 0.01K) and high-magnetic field (up to 20 T) equipments in Canada, world-class micro fabrication clean rooms, a central cryogenic facility with in-house liquid Helium supply, a state of the art cluster of equipment for material characterization, and a computing infrastructure with two of the most powerful computers in Canadian Universities. In addition, more than three hundred square meters of laboratory and office space is already being built to host the successful candidate and his or her team.
The candidate will join Alexandre Blais, David Poulin and Michel-Pioro-Ladrière who are already working in the field of the CERC and will be able to take advantage of interactions with members of the Institut TRansdisciplinaire d’Informatique quantique (INTRIQ), of the Regroupement Québécois sur les Matériaux de Pointe (RQMP) and with members of the Quantum Information, Quantum Materials and Nanoelectronic programs of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
For additional information, please contact Alexandre Blais, Michel Pioro-Ladrière, David Poulin, or André-Marie Tremblay. Interested candidates should send a CV with a letter of introduction before 17:00 Eastern Daylight Savings time, August 21 2009 to the following address. Strict confidentiality will be observed.
Monsieur le doyen
Faculté des sciences
Offre d’emploi no 00421
Université de Sherbrooke
Faculté des sciences
Sherbrooke (Québec) J1K 2R1

So you don’t have to google it, 10 million CAD = 8.95015 million USD 🙂

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Backwards Archive

Via @mattleiffer, viXra.org:

In part viXra.org is a parody of arXiv.org to highlight Cornell University’s unacceptable censorship policy. It is also an experiment to see what kind of scientific work is being excluded by the arXiv. But most of all it is a serious and permanent e-print archive for scientific work. Unlike arXiv.org tt [sic] is truly open to scientists from all walks of life.

Maybe I should submit one of my papers with all of the text reversed (yeah, yeah, it would still be incomprehensible.)

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Feynman Lectures Online – Thanks Bill!

Microsoft Research’s Project Tuva website is up. Project Tuva is a collection of seven searchable Feynman lectures aimed at a popular audience (with extras coming online in the future.) The rights to these lectures were obtained by Bill Gates after he was entranced by them over twenty years ago. Well worth watching, especially if you’re about to give a popular science talk (I’ve always been fascinated by how Feynman uses his hands in describing physics.)
Even more interesting, in my egocentric universe, are the comments by Mr. Gates himself about Feynman:

Someone who can make science interesting is magical. And the person who did that better than anyone was Richard Feynman. He took the mystery of science, the importance of science, the strangeness of science and made it fun, and interesting, and approachable.
…
He makes physics fun. Some people will laugh at that phrase, but I’m not kidding when I say it.

Compare and contrast to a certain undergraduate at Caltech in a 1996 interview on CNN:

But for students of physics, Feynman is remembered most for his amazing lectures. Part actor, part storyteller, part physicist, Richard Feynman the lecturer first stood at a podium at Cal Tech [sic] in 1950. Until his death from cancer in 1988, he inspired legions of students.
Mention his name to physics students at Cal Tech [sic] today and watch their eyes light up: “One of the reasons it was easier to become a physicist was because he was so exciting and he wasn’t the typical, you know, nerd who doesn’t say anything,” said Cal Tech [sic] senior Dave Bacon.

One of the other students interviewed (and the smartest physicist in my class) attempted to get in a great double entendre involving Feynman’s “little red book” into his interview, but alas either CNN caught onto him, or they just didn’t like the quote.