String Theory
drorzel | December 19, 2014Given that I am relentlessly flogging a book about the universality of the scientific process (Available wherever books are sold! They make excellent winter solstice holiday gifts!), I feel like I ought to try to say something about the latest kerfuffle about the scientific method. This takes the form of an editorial in Nature complaining that Richard Dawid and Sean Carroll among others are calling for discarding traditional ideas about how to test theories. Which is cast as an attempt to overthrow The Scientific Method.
Which, you know, on the one hand is a kind of impossible claim. There…
drorzel | September 2, 2014I didn't write a summary of the third day of "Quantum Boot Camp" to go with my Day One and Day Two summaries for a simple reason: I would've needed to do that on Saturday, and I spent Saturday in transit back to the US. More than that, though, it was harder to summarize than the other two days, because my talk was the middle of three, and thus I spent most of the first talk fiddling with my slides and fretting, and most of the third fighting off the post-talk adrenaline crash.
Happily, Sedeer at Inspiring Science offers a summary of the first two talks, namely Larus Thorlacius from Nordita…
drorzel | April 17, 2014As I've mentioned here before, I do a lot of work these days in my local Starbucks. This is slightly ironic, as I don't like coffee-- instead, I order tea, which I put in an insulated travel mug. I tend to get the tea, carry the mug back to the table, and let it steep while I boot up the laptop, then pull the teabags out. I get a hot water refill after I finish the first mug, and take it over to campus if I'm going in that day, and those generally carries me through the morning.
At some point, I noticed that when I had the cap on, I tended to end up with a small puddle of liquid next to the…
drorzel | December 14, 2011Over at Scientific American, John Horgan has a blog post titled In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain't Easy, which opens with an anecdote any scientist will recognize:
A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an ironic response to what I thought was an ironic faxed letter. The writer--let's call him Tachyon Tad--had "discovered" a new physics, one that allowed for faster-than-light travel. In my reply, I told Tad that if he built a warp-drive spaceship, I'd love to hitch a ride. Dumb joke. For months, my fax machine churned out sheets covered with Tad's dense elaborations…
drorzel | October 23, 2011It's been a while since I posted anything science-y, and I've got some time between flipping pancakes, so here's an odd thing from the last few weeks of science news. Last week, there was an article in Nature about the wonders of string theory applied to condensed matter physics. This uses the "AdS/CFT" relationship, by which theorists can take a theory describing a bunch of strongly interacting particles in three dimensions (such as the electrons inside a solid), and describe it mathematically as a theory involving a black hole in four dimensions. This might seem like a strange thing to do,…
drorzel | November 5, 2010Regular commenter onymous left a comment to my review of Warped Passages that struck me as a little odd:
The extended analogy between the renormalization group and a bureaucracy convinced me that she was trying way too hard to make sophisticated concepts comprehensible. Also, I'm not really sure that analogies are the best way to explain concepts to people without using mathematics.
I'm not talking about the implication that making sophisticated concepts comprehensible is not worth doing, but rather the negativity toward analogies. It's odd because, if you think about it, a huge chunk of…
drorzel | November 3, 2010I have nothing useful or interesting to say about electoral politics, but I suspect that's all people will want to read about today. So here's a book post that's been backlogged for quite a while.
Lisa Randall's Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions dates from 2005, and was, I think, part of the huge spate of string-theory-related books at that time (just before the String Theory Backlash books of 2006). It includes the usual survey of the Standard Model and the problems thereof, with an emphasis on the sort of extra-dimension theories that Randall and…
drorzel | July 28, 2010On Twitter, I saw Graham Farmelo link to this Physics World blog post about Ed Witten's Newton lecture, describing it as "Edward Witten's clearest-ever overview of string theory for laypeople (i.e. most others)." Witten's a name to conjure with, so I thought "That might be worth a look."
So I went to the blog post, which has video embeds for the two halves of the talk (~30 min each), each with a single frame frozen as an example. Both representative frames show slides that are nothing but words-- one full paragraph each, starting in the very upper left of the screen, and ending at the bottom…
drorzel | June 29, 2010A couple of significant news items from the world of particle physics:
There was a conference on neutrino physics recently, and the big news from there is that two experiments measure something funny with neutrino oscillations, namely that the oscillations seem to proceed at different rates for neutrinos and antineutrinos. This is a really surprising sort of asymmetry, and would be awfully hard to explain. These are, however, preliminary results that are being released now because there was a conference on neutrino physics, not because the people doing the experiments have rock-solid proof…
drorzel | June 15, 2010Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don't bother with the comments to Tommaso's post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru both admitted that they don't expect to see experimental evidence of extra dimensions in their lifetime, then cites a commenter saying "Why the f*** are you working on it, then?" Tommaso offers a semi-quantitative way to determine whether some long-term project is worth the risk, which is amusing.
I was reminded of this when I looked at the Dennis…
drorzel | June 14, 2010At last weekend's Hidden Dimensions event, Brian Greene had a graphic of a Calabi-Yau object (it wasn't this one, but it's the same idea). He put this up several times, but never actually explained what the hell it was supposed to show. It just looked kind of cool.
Last week's Through the Wormhole program segment on Garrett Lisi kept showing an animation of some sort of graphical representation of the E8 group, shifting between some collection of circles and that giant mandala-looking thing they use to illustrate every story about the guy. Again, there was no explanation of what the hell this…
drorzel | June 5, 2010Since I was going to be down here anyway to sign books at the World Science Festival Street Fair, Kate and I decided to catch one of the Saturday events at the Festival. It was hard to choose, but we opted for the program on Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace (Live coverage was here, but the video is off), because it was a physics-based topic, and because I wrote a guest-blog post on the topic for them.
(No, we didn't go to the controversial "Science and Faith" panel, opting instead to have a very nice Caribbean dinner at Negril Village, just around the corner. I'll take excellent…
drorzel | May 18, 2010It's been a very long day, so I'm lying on the couch watching
"Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN. They're having a boring
conversation about baseball, and I'm just drifting off into a pleasant
doze when:
"Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!"
I jolt awake. "What are you barking at?!?" I yell at the dog, who
is standing in the middle of the living room, baying at nothing. She
stops.
"Scary things!"
The room is empty. "There's nothing here," I say, and then hear a
car door slam. I look outside, and see the mathematician next door
heading into his house. "Were you barking at Bill? He…
drorzel | April 12, 2010What's the application? LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Graviitational Wave Observatory, because (astro)physicists feel free to drop inconvenient words when making up cute acronyms. This is an experiment to look for disturbances in space-time caused by massive objects, which would manifest as a slight stretching and compression of space itself.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "Can we directly observe the gravitational waves that are predicted by the equations of General Relativity?" 2) "Can we detect things like colliding black holes, because that would be awesome!"
How does it…
drorzel | March 25, 2010I did one sketchy update from Portland last Tuesday, but never wrote up my impressions of the rest of the March Meeting-- when I got back, I was buried in grading, and then trying to put together Monday's presentation. And, for reasons that will become apparent, I was unable to write anything up before I left Portland
Anyway, for those who care, here are my impressions from the rest of the meeting:
Tuesday
In the 8am session, I went to the polymer physics prize talk by Michael Rubinstein, which was a sort of career retrospective, talking about how he wandered into the disreputable field of…
drorzel | July 31, 2009I had a bit of a discussion via Twitter with Eric Weinstein yesterday, starting with his statement:
Ed Witten has no Nobel Prize. Now tell me again how this era's physics just feels different because we are too close to it.
Basically, he appears to feel that Witten is sufficiently smart that he ought to have a Nobel. My feeling is that if you look at the list of Nobel laureates in physics, you won't find any theorists who won before their theory had experimental confirmation. It's not an official rule, but it seems to be well established practice.
My attempt at an analogy was the late John…
drorzel | July 8, 2009There's a press release dated a week or two ago from Leiden University headlined "Physical reality of string theory demonstrated," in an apparent bid to make Peter Woit's head explode. The release itself is really pretty awful, with poorly explained and irrelevant pictures, and a really confusing description of what this is really about (in part because English was not the first language of the person writing it, I suspect). You have to go down to the third paragraph to find a sort-of explanation of what this is about:
Electrons can form a special kind of state, a so-called quantum critical…
drorzel | March 24, 2009One of the NCAA pools I'm in has a copy of Obama's bracket entered, and the last I checked, I'm a couple of games up on him. This means I'm as qualified as anyone else to offer a plan to fix the financial crisis, and I have just the plan we need.
On the question of the AIG bonuses, I'm pretty much in agreement with the people who say that it's not worth making too much fuss over less than a tenth of a percent of the total bailout funding they're received. Passing laws to punish specific individuals is a lousy precedent, and it's not worth corrupting our principles for such a pittance. Let the…
drorzel | March 12, 2009There's a really good article from Martin Rees in the latest issue of Seed, on the scientific challenges that won't be affected by the LHC:
The LHC hasn't yet provided its first results, the much-anticipated answers to questions we've been asking for so long. But they should surely come in 2009, bringing us closer to understanding the bedrock nature of particles, space, and timeâ--âtoward a unified theory of the basic forces. This would push forward a program that started with Newton (who showed that the force that made the apple fall was same one holding the planets in orbit), and continued…
drorzel | February 19, 2009A few days ago, Bee put up a post titled Do We Need Science Journalists?, linking back to Bora's enormous manifesto from the first bit of the Horgan-Johnson bloggingheads kerfuffle. My first reaction was "Oh, God, not again..." but her post did make me think of one thing, which is illustrated by Peter Woit's latest (no doubt a kerfuffle-in-the-making).
Bee quotes Bora urging bloggers to keep twirling, twirling, twirling toward the better day when scientists communicate to the general public, without all the hype and exaggeration:
Perhaps if we remove those middle-men and have scientists and…