robcoyne [dot] com

I kept waking up the missus, so I retired to the living room where I could write this post without worrying about risking her wrath. You see, my wonderful girlfriend is a bit of a bipolar sleeper, and it’s sometimes difficult to get a read on what kind of night she’s going to have. Most of the time, a rhinoceros could crash through the wall and wrestle violently with a grizzly bear that tore its way up through the pipes and she’d sleep right through it. Other times - like this night in particular - even the most subtle change in the brightness of my monitor will send her shooting up in bed faster than you can say “I swear I wasn’t looking at porn!”

It’s that kind of strange inconsistency that seems to be governing my life right now. Between the roller coaster ride that is the grad school application process, and my total lack of time to do anything constructive anymore, things are pretty unpredictable. That’s alright though, if I learned anything from my quantum mechanics class, it’s that just because we don’t know all the details about a system, doesn’t mean it won’t all work out in the end anyway. I just hope nobody comes along and collapses my grad school wave function into a series of rejection letters. That would suck.

The first person I catch looking over my shoulder at my applications gets my fist tunneled through their face.

In other news, I’m thinking about taking this blog public at some point in the near future. (That felt so strange to type, knowing that next to nobody is able to read this right now). As per usual with these types of things, Josh (the non-physics one) has inspired (read: goaded) me into taking down the electrified fence protecting this blog, allowing me to once again let my thoughts flow freely through the intertubes. I’m going to miss the attack-iguanas though. They’re so cute!

My biggest concern about the whole deprivitizing process is the unspoken expectation that I actually produce content. I should probably take another page out of Josh’s book and provide some regular features. I know he’s doing Monday reviews, and the Friday-Five, and so on, and I can’t help but concede that as a pretty good idea. I don’t think I’ll run anything quite so regimented, but a number of dedicated fall back subjects that I can reliably post about from week to week (and enjoy doing so) would be a great help for turning this into what I ultimately wanted it to be in the first place: a repository for my thoughts on the world.

Speaking of thoughts, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bill Nye recently. I think of all the figures on television when I was growing up, and all the fantastic shows that shaped me as a child, the one man with whom I connected the most was Bill Nye. To this day I still remember the theme song, and I was always impressed with his rigor and easy to understand explanations, especially when compared to that hack Beakman. In fact, as Kristen and I were watching an episode of Time Warp on the Discovery Channel and I couldn’t stop thinking about crazy old Billy Nye and all the fantastic times we had together. Holding that thought for a moment, I have to take a brief aside to say the following on the subject of Time Warp:

What a horrendously addictive, but wholly substance-less show! Seriously. They do awesome stuff, and catch it on high-speed cameras. What more could you want? I’ll tell you: show hosts that know what the fuck is going on. Ugh! I couldn’t stop myself from correcting all the little mistakes they kept making when they tried to talk about Physics. Freshmen-level Physics at that! Honestly, I couldn’t tell if it was really because they didn’t know what the script they were reading meant, or if they were just trying to dumb it down for the average Joe, but either way, if I’m watching a show that tries to imply that it contains some degree of rigor… I’d like my hosts to get it right. Augh! Frustrating as hell. Still awesome though. Very awesome.

Anyway, aside over. Back to Bill Nye.

As I was saying, Kristen and I were watching Time Warp and my thoughts drifted back to Bill Nye, which reminded me of a conversation I had last semester with Subir - a colleage of mine who’s now working towards his PhD at Columbia. We were sitting in the Computational Physics lab here at Uni, and Subir turned to me and said “you know Rob, you have the gift. I think you could be a great spokesman for Physics.” At the time he invoked the name Brian Greene - the well known String Theorist who has released a couple of hugely popularized novels - but as the conversation continued on, Bill Nye - among others - were thrown out there as well.

At this point, I think it’s important to point out that Bill Nye and popular physicists are on two entirely different levels. Both contribute to science in their own unique ways, but scientists like Brian Green, Stephen Hawking, and the myriad of others recognizable by the laypersons of the world have the magic knack of making high level Physics simple, interesting, and easy to understand. Bill Nye, the Mythbusters, even Mr. Wizard bring something else to the table: they bring charisma (sometimes) and (more importantly) enthusiasm (which is great for getting those children excited in the physik).

On one hand, you have the ultracomplicated made simple and interesting, and on the other hand you have the dull and boring made exciting and engaging, and as Kristen and I sat and watched two grown men dance on Oobleck in super-slow motion, I turned to her and said…

“I want to be Bill Nye.”

That’s not the end of the story though. I don’t just want to be Bill Nye, I want to be Brian Greene too. I want to do both, and that’s where this long, winding, senseless path finally culminates: I think my regular content is going to be putting physics - real physics - out on the table, and make it engaging and interesting, regardless of its level.

And that’s all I’ve got for now. This long assed post (which was started over an hour ago, and should have been a lot shorter if I was going to stick true to the title) got way out of hand, and I really need to hit the sack. But now you (and by you I mean the two people who have access to this right now) have a small preview of what I’m going to try to do with this. Who knows, maybe if I get a savvy lab coat I can even put my camcorder to good use.

And with that folks, my EEE and I say good night.

P.S. I just had to finish proofreading this right when an episode of South Park came on the TV.. Now I won’t get to bed until three. Dammit! Curse you television for distracting me so!

Blog News, General, Physics, Self-Reflection josh, kristen, Physics, ramble, reflection, television

Advanced math physics today in a nutshell:

Dr. Hsu: “Does anyone know why physicists use so many coordinate systems? After all, the three dimensional world we live in can always be broken down into x, y, and z. Why do we need more than that?”

Me: “Because physicists are lazy.”

Dr. Hsu: “Yes, that is very right.”

You can’t tell from the dialogue, but Dr. Hsu is this old Chinese man (he’s got to be somewhere around 70) who pretty much knows everything about everything. Famous for his questions during thesis defenses (that are only very loosely related to the actual topic being discussed), and well known for his meandering lectures (read: the previous post), he’s a man who’s not afraid of a bit of brutal honesty. It’s true. Physicists. Are. Lazy. Not lazy in the traditional sense (I assure you most of us probably wash our clothes, and those that don’t have transcended into beings of pure energy and no longer need the primitive concept of clothing), but lazy in the sense of we don’t want to do any more than we have to.

It’s a wonderful truth.

If you had asked me 10 years ago what the hardest job on the planet was, I probably would have said “being President.” Fuck that! I was way off, just look at Bush. He might not be doing the job very well (read: “at all”) but if he can do it (which he clearly can’t) anybody can (anyone except McCain). After that, I probably would have settled on “being a scientist.” I figure it has all of the right qualities to make it a hard job: you have to deal with nerds all the time (because only nerds are scientists, of course), you never know whether or not what you’re doing is actually right until you’ve done it, and most importantly you’re always dealing with things that nobody understands… no matter how well you explain it to them.

After being “in the field” for awhile now (shut up, 5 years counts!), I have to say that I had no idea what I was talking about. Being a scientist is cake. Awesome cake. It is cake because scientists follow the Principle of Least Action, defined as follows:

Given a particular task, one can define a quantity (henceforth referred to as action) as the amount of work required to complete the task from scratch. Physicists tend to move in a way such that action is minimized. Unlike everyone else, it seems, who can’t seem to sort out what it is they need to be doing in the first place, never mind actually getting around to doing it.

Nice and simple. All there is to being a physicist is looking at the job you have to do, and finding out the easiest possible way of doing it. Have a complex equation to solve? Fuck it, have a computer do it for you. Have to prove something to convince your colleagues over in Mathematics that your theory isn’t flawed? To hell with that! Heuristic arguments and hand-waving “proofs” are all you need my friend! It’s a glamorous life; that of a Physicist. In the end, all we want is to get the right answer while simultaneously being as lazy as is humanly possible.

Sadly, not all tasks end up being quite that simple. Just because the path you take is that of least action doesn’t mean that your action has to be all that small. I’m looking at you Mr. “Show that Maxwell’s Equations are valid for a particular case in spherical coordinates, and then proceed derive the Poynting Vector.” That was the worst 13 pages of tedious mathematics I have ever spent on one exam problem…

Anyway. The moral of the story is be lazy. Period.

(Thank you Maupertuis!)

[P.S. Interestingly enough, in the absence of a potential the Lagrangian for classical mechanics is just the kinetic energy. By the work kinetic energy theorem, the total work done to an object starting from rest (referred to above as "scratch") is equal to the object's final kinetic energy. It should be no surprise that the Euler-Lagrange equations, drawn from Hamilton's Principle, yield the equations of motion from a differential equation involving the Lagrangian. Hence, in some ways, Hamilton's Principle (often referred to as the Principle of Least Action - although with arguable legitimacy) describes not only us, but the world we live in as well. Now why doesn't anyone believe me when I say my attitude is dictated by physical law?!]

Physics, pseudoscience jp hsu, lazy, Physics, pseudoscience

It’s time for a physics lesson! Don’t worry, we’ll keep it simple. We’re going to talk about work. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, think about it kind of like the energy you use or you receive by moving something over a certain distance. In that respect, it’s exactly what you’d think it is. If you carry a heavy box up the stairs, you do work, if you carry a lighter box up the stairs, you do less work. There. Nice and simple.

More specifically:

The work done by any constant force F can be written simply as the dot product between that force and the displacement vector that describes the path traveled (in your freshman year, this is generally just a straight line). When you get a little more advanced, you can define the total work as an integral, dotting the force with a line element (dr). The complete line segment describes the path you took to get from point A to point B.

Now there is a special case of this phenomena. When the force is conservative (meaning there is no friction, for the sake of this discussion) then the total work done between points A and B is path-independent. What this means is that no matter what path you take to get from point A to point B, the total amount of work that you do is the same!

This is not the case for non-conservative forces.

There. Physics lesson over. Now onto the real juice of this post! We (and by “we” I mean “my classmates and I”) were sitting in Advanced Mathematical Physics today, and we were going to be talking about differential and integral operations. No big deal. Basically it’s a class about vector calculus. That shouldn’t be too bad, I’ve got five years of this stuff under my belt, and the last few classes I’ve taken have been absolutely loaded with high level application of these concepts.

Somehow, JP Hsu managed to confuse me. Here’s how the class was broken down (topic by topic, pulling right from my notes:

1. Introduction to differential and integral operations
2. Aside: Definition of a field
3. Scalar fields
4. Vector fields
5. History lesson regarding how Faraday invented fields
6. Discussion about Maxwell’s Equations
7. Imagining six-vectors (Ex,Ey,Ez,Bx,By,Bz) at every point in space (ala Dyson)
8. Definition of field lines
9. Mathemagic (in which Hsu got halfway through a proof, got confused, and gave us the answer)
10. Real numbers versus complex numbers
11. Hamilton’s generalization (quaterions)
12. 2×2 Matrices (Pauli-Spin matrices and abstraction in mathematics)
13. Hypercomplex numbers
14. Integral Operations [Wait... what? That's right. 13 topics (and 8 pages of notes) later we're just getting back to one of the topics we started the class with? Anyway...]
15. Line integrals, surface integrals, volume integrals
16. 4-volumes
17. Generalizing volume in 4-d spacetime
18. Complications of unification between quantum theory and relativity
19. Probability interpretation of wave functions, and the process of normalization
20. Boundary conditions of space and time
21. Div, grad, and curl [This section actually started right as class ended, he had us stay 5 extra minutes so he could say something about them]

Now that’s a long list… and I was already familiar with just about everything on it. You can see that the flow of thought (with a couple of exceptions where he switched directions) makes sense (more or less). The only problem is, that the path we took to get from the beginning to the end was so damned confusing that we all had a hard time understanding what he was trying to teach us.

So after class, I have a chat with Kaptain Khanna and Space, and we decided that teaching is not path independent. Though you are travelling from point A (the beginning of class) to point B (the end of class), the amount of understanding one gets is inversely related to the length of the path taken to get there (where path is meant to imply the path taken by the lecture, not the actual passage of time).

Not only that, when you follow certain odd paths, you actually end up in a region of spacial-understanding that is not where you expected to be. Specifically, there is some strange non-zero curl of the knowledge-field surrounding point B, such that you may spiral around understanding, but never truly settle into it (i.e. div(B)=0). This can be true even when points A and B are well-understood by the students.

The moral of this story? I don’t know, it took too long to get here. All I know is that Advanced Mathmematical Physics is going to be the end of me in one way or another.

Physics, pseudoscience, teaching class, confusion, jp hsu, kaptain khanna, Physics, pseudoscience

That’s right. Tomorrow morning - according to all the conspiracy theorists - the world is going to end. Tomorrow morning at about 3:30 am in fact, because that’s when the Large Hadron Collider first goes beam-on. Microscopic black holes, stranglets, and any number of other crazy ideas that are just plain wrong. Now, admittedly (as one of my students reminded me) it’s not real beam on because it’s only circulating one beam. Still, that’s pretty exciting.  

Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with the LHC, here’s the 15-second run down. It’s a particle accelerator - a large particle accelerator. 27 kilometers around makes it the world’s largest in fact. It’s capable of shooting protons as well as heavy-ions in two beams that circulate in opposite directions. Each beam will be capable of about 7 TeV, resulting in 14 TeV collisions at max beam capacity. To put this in perspective, the upgrade to the particle accelerator that I’ve been working at is going to be upgraded to 12 GeV which is about 3 orders of magnitude smaller than what the LHC is capable of. 

Tomorrow marks what could potentially be the beginning of the most exciting period of time in the history of particle physics. The things that will (or will not) be discovered at the LHC will - for better or worse - shape some of our most fundamental views of how the universe works. The most obvious example of this is the search for the Higgs Boson - the so called “God Particle” - but I assure you that’s not the only exciting science going on at the LHC. 

The awesome thing about particle accelerators is that they essentially give us a window  into the smallest parts of our world - the constituent particles that make up everything we see. There are a lot of secrets wrapped up in that world, and the harder and harder we throw these particles together, the more and more the locks protecting those secrets will break. Think about it. Two particles, hurtling towards each other at velocities that human beings will never be able to obtain, only to meet together in a violent eruption of the most fundamental essences of everything.

In that brief moment we. can. see. God.

Or at the very least, some of his best hidden secrets, and if they don’t kill us all first we could cement what we already know in permanent fashion, or start off on a new path that has never been explored. In the end, all I know is that it is a hell of an exciting time to be a physicist. This might just be one of those times that - when read about in history books - will cause students to think back and say “man, I wish I had been around back then.” The same way I look back on the amazing science that has been done by legends in the field, others will be looking at what is happening right now.

And that’s pretty damn inspiring.

Physics lhc, Physics

Someone recently accused me of being bitter. To that I will reply simply that I cannot be bitter, for I have found Physics and she fills me with her love. With Physics in my heart, there is no room for bitterness. I think I then proceeded to inadvertantly insult a couple of people who were listening in on the conversation because they thought I was being sarcastic towards religion. While I don’t practice much religion myself (although apparently the entire world is convinced that I’m Jewish) I don’t hold any particular ill will towards it. I have my own spiritual beliefs, and other people are entitled to theirs. As long as religion continues to drive people to be good, morally upstanding citizens, then it’s fine in my book.

At this point, I’d normally go into some discussion regarding the difference between science and religion, but that’s one can of worms I don’t ever intend to open directly.

That’s really all I’ve got right now. I’m looking to get my hands on a scanner so I can start putting up some of the xkcd-inspired comics I drew in my notes last year.

Blog News, Physics, Random Physics, ramble, religion

So I was having a chat with a friend last night about nothing in particular - mostly what we had been up to the last couple of weeks - and I mentioned that I had been reading/listening to Feynman. I told him who Feynman was, and why he was important to me, and even though my friend doesn’t have any particular interest in Physics, he was interested in knowing a bit more about such a famous figure. I also told him that listening to his words made me feel a lot better about myself, because while it inspired me to do things that I had not before, it also made me realize that I share a couple of important links with guys like Feynman.

Here’s the example I gave him:

In Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Dr. Feynman tells a story of when he was a child performing small science-based magic tricks. He was a child of the depression after all, and had to find fun ways to entertain himself and his friends that didnt require a lot of money. He found out that certain chemicals - that are harmless to the skin - burn in a strange way. The fumes burn before the liquid can, and burn so quickly that the surface upon which the chemical is burning is hardly affected. In this way, you can douse your hand in the chemical, light it on fire, and your hand will burn but you will feel no discomfort. This struck me as interesting, as I had made a similar discovery using Isopropyl Alcohol. Performing the trick results in merely a warming sensation (assuming you don’t let all the alcohol burn away) and a rather spectacular show.

I continue the story by saying that Dr. Feynman was also known to be quite a prankster, and he enjoyed making silly challenges. Once at school, he told his friends about this particular trick he had done as a child, and some of them disbelieved him. So, to prove it, he repeated the experiment. It hurt like hell!

I had done a similar trick my freshman year. During one of the evenings my friends and I were feeling particularly pyromaniacal (blowing fireballs with high-proof liquor and the like), I remembered this trick, and offered to show them. I poured some rubbing alcohol onto the counter and demonstrated the theory - by looking at the fire from a level even with the surface, you can see the flame begins slightly above the pool of liquid. I had done the experiment many times by putting pools of alcohol in my palm and lighting it on fire. It was really pretty awesome.

So I doused my hand in the alcohol, and lit it on fire. Just like when Dr. Feynman did it, it hurt like hell and at the time I didn’t understand why.

It came to me later - as it did to Dr. Feynman - that the reason it hurt so badly was very simple: as you grow older (and you hit puberty) hair begins to grow on your hand. When you douse your hand in the chemical (in my case, alcohol) the strands of hair on the backof your hand stick up and protrude through the surface of the liquid. When you light the alcohol on fire, the flames burn the hairs on your hand, which I assure you is quite unpleasant. It also has the unfortunate side effect of burning most of those hairs off.

As I was listening to Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman on my way home from school, I couldn’t help but smile that even a great mind like Dr. Feynman went through stuff like this, and the fact that I shared an experience with him in an almost identical manner was really pretty inspiring. Great minds (as I hope to be someday) seem to think alike, and in this case, they fail alike as well.

Whether or not I’m ever going to be a great mind not withstanding, I do have the sense now to suggest that you not try this stuff at home. Unless you’re not particularly attached to your hair, of course.

Physics, Self-Reflection experiment, feynman, Physics

I’ve never been a tinkerer, and in that respect I vary from a lot of the prototypical scientist or engineer. I remember reading on personality profiles when I was younger that the best scientists were people who “were curious in their youth, and are often those who enjoy working with their hands.” The examples of which almost always described kids who would take apart their radio or VCR and build something else out of it. I think it’s fairly common for these types of people to go into science and engineering (especially the latter) because it makes a lot of sense. If you enjoyed taking apart electronics when you were a child, then a field that allows you to play around with that kind of stuff is no doubt very intriguing.

Thankfully that is not the only type of person that makes a good scientist, because although I’ve got the curiosity down pat I never took apart any of my electronics when I was younger. I had a small electronics bench that my father got me (a little toy that you could use to make alarms, and buzzers, and small light shows) but I was never particularly attached to it. Back then, I was too lazy and too spoiled to bother trying to understand what was going on. As such, I never made anything cool because I didn’t know how. These days, I’ve started to mature to a point where I do want to learn this kind of stuff. So I think in that respect, when I’m older, I’ll probably do the same thing that my father did for my children - give them these kinds of toys to play with in hopes that they will be a bit more proactive about their curiosity than I was.

All of that is beside the point though, as I have diverged from the reason I originally started this post. My curiosity has always been much more internal - in my head. Having suffered through most of my childhood with low self esteem, I always kept things to myself, and even today I find that when I have a new idea I want to keep it close until I’ve worked out all the kinks, because of some undeveloped - nearly primal fear - of being judged and ridiculed by people when I come up with it. With time, this tendency to keep everything in made me very dependent on my inner monologue, and nowadays I’d like to think I have a pretty robust imagination. Even if I’m not the most creative person in the world when it comes to writing fiction, or making art, I have a very easy time of visualizing things in my head. Often, when I’m solving a problem I’ll reach out in front of me, and make gestures in the air of manipulating some kind of invisible diagram. That’s because - in my head - I’m trying to get a feel for whatever problem it is I’m trying to solve.

This type of curiosity has manifested itself into what I’d like to think is a new-age kind of tinkering (or perhaps - in many ways - and old-age kind of tinkering). I tinker with ideas, all in my head. It’s nothing particularly fantastic (I won’t say that I perform elaborate thought experiments in my head like Einstein, for example) but it’s always things I find interesting, and a little bit “out there”! These things have gotten me a little bit of a reputation as strange, at least with my friends, because I’ll often use them to get across more significant physical points.

Take this conversation I had with some roommates of mine:

“I’m going to explain Quantum Chromodynamics to you,” I said to my roommates, two of which were fine-art majors, and one of which was studying English. They all groaned in response. “But, I’m going to do it in such a way that you won’t even realize you’re learning about it!”

They chuckled, and said that I was right because it was always so boring when somebody tried to explain science to them.

“First, let me see where you are in your understanding of how atoms work. You’re all familiar with atoms, right?” I asked, genuinely.

“Yeah,” they replied.

“And how about what makes up an atom? Protons, neutrons, and electrons?” I inquired.

“Eh, yeah, we’ve heard of them,” came the response with some grumbles about high school chemistry courses.

“Good. That’s all you need to know. QCD is the theory that governs how protons and neutrons interact. If you’ve ever heard anything about it, you’ve probably heard words like Quarks, Gluons, Pions and so on tossed around. These words are really just fancy things scientists like me throw around to make us feel better about ourselves.” I could feel it already, they were losing interest, because I was starting to go off in the same direction science discussions always did. I had them now, they were about to get hooked.

“But that’s a lie!” I shouted suddenly, in a very loud voice, “it’s a lie because we don’t want you - the layperson - to understand what’s really going on. You see, QCD isn’t a theory of these silly particles! Scientists would have you believe that inside each proton and neutron are quarks, but that’s not the case at all. It’s tiny little men!” I exclaimed to an exasperated laugh from my audience, “tiny little men with gumdrops! And these men exchange force between each other by throwing the gumdrops back and forth.”

This clearly threw them for a loop, and they simply assumed that I was just pulling their leg, but caught in my little web of deception, they allowed me to continue.

“Now, these little men with gumdrops govern ALL interactions, not just QCD ones. After all, there are only two types of forces, really… at the subatomic level: attractive and repulsive forces. Repulsive forces are generated when the gumdrops are hard. After all, it’s natural that if I were to throw a heavy ball at you, the momentum of the ball when you caught it (assuming you caught it squarely) would push you away from me. Likewise, attractive forces are generated when the gumdrops are soft and sticky. I throw the gumdrop at you, but it sticks to my hand and gets stretched out. Then, when you catch it, it sticks to your hand. The elasticity in the gumdrop pulls us together, creating an attractive force.”

They were all laughing now, and I had them.

“You see, protons and neutrons each have three of these little men inside of them, and these little men have different colored gumdrops. The colors don’t really matter, but for the sake of clarity let us say that they are red, green, and blue. All of these gumdrops are sticky, so they create an attractive force between all the little men. They’re all stuck inside the proton or the neutron! These gumdrops are so sticky that they act like glue, and even if the little men don’t like each other, and don’t want to be in the same place, the gumdrops hold them together.”

At this point, I had kept up a facade of seriousness, and they all had big grins on their face, appreciating my act.

“The theory goes deeper than this,” I explained, “but I can see that you’re all getting tired of my explanation, so I’ll stop it there.”

“That’s was pretty good,” they said, “but you didn’t actually teach us about QCD, so you’re a liar.” They were feeling pretty good about themselves, I imagine.

“Oh, but I did!” I exclaimed with a smile. “You see, the real theory goes like this: there are three quarks of different types that make up a proton or a neutron - these are the little men - some of them share like charge, and so they repel each other - the fact that some of the men don’t like one another - but the attractive force between them outweighs this. The quarks inside of the proton or the neutron exchange small particles called gluons - hence the reference to the glue - which I replaced with gumdrops. Each gluon carries a charge that we refer to as “color charge” and there are three basic types of it: red, green and blue - the colors of the gumdrops. The gluons are a lot stronger than the repulsive force from charge, so they’re all stuck inside of the nucleon. I wasn’t lying when I said the theory was more developed, but I figured enough was enough.” In truth, I just hadn’t worked out the details of a more complicated Little-Men-With-Gumdrops theory to work out pion interaction between nucleons.

“Oh yeah,” they said, “I guess you’re right.”

“In the end, I gave you the basic understanding of how QCD works and you didn’t even realize it, because you were distracted by the gumdrops!“

In the end that quote - you were distracted by the gumdrops - got put on a sticky note that adorned a particular door frame upon which we stuck quotes that we liked. It was all in quite fun, and since then I’ve developed the “theory” (LM-GUT, or Little Men Gumdrop Unified Theory, or something of the sort) even further. It’s great fun to come up with silly little things like this, and I do it quite often. A colleague and I came up with an overarching theory of “Game Relativity” linking together video games of all sorts into a kind of Grand Unified Theory of Entertainment. The same colleague and I have invented a league of superheroes and supervillians based on our professors, the best of which goes by the name of Kaptain Khanna, whom is summoned a’la Captain Planet thanks to the special rings that my colleague (Space) and myself (Time) have.

Josh: “Space!”

Me: “Time!”

KK: “By your dimensions combined, I am Kaptain Khanna!”

It’s really pretty fuckin’ silly, but since Dr. Khanna is the department expert on Relativity, Quantum Gravity, and Spacetime, we figured that it was fitting. We even wrote up a 2 page origin story and attached it to the back end of our Advanced Laboratory Class final report. The department really got a kick out of that.

I guess all I really wanted to illustrate is that you don’t need to be a tinkerer to be a good scientist. I hope to explore more of these ideas through this blog, so that perhaps I can finally come out of my shell and share some of these neat things with the rest of the world.

Physics, Self-Reflection, teaching gumdrops, kaptain khanna, Physics, pseudoscience

I hope to keep this brief because it is getting to be quite late and I’m still in my office at school facing a rather long drive home. I just came to the end of the first chapter in my General Relativity textbook. Save for a few small edits here and there, as well as the inclusion or removal of one additional section retracing the history of the theory, the rough draft will be ready for the first round of reading. This is very exciting, because it’s the first time I’ve worked on something with this kind of scope and actually made it to the first big milestone. 37 pages in (double-spaced for editing purposes, of course) and I can officially say that the skeleton of the first section of my first textbook is ready for review.

Or pretty close, at least.

Anyway, that’s not the reason I’m writing. I’m writing instead because I had this little bit at the beginning of this chapter that I couldn’t fill in. It was the first paragraph of my first chapter, and I wanted to fill it in with something simple, and thought provoking that would set the stage for how the book would continue. I just could not come up with anything compelling. Then, as I was finishing the last section of the first chapter it came to me. I’m not writing to my readers in the place of a teacher. Hell, I’m just a grad student halfway through my master’s program! I’m in no position to be teaching anyone about relativity. Instead, I’m just here to guide them. It’s like going on a guided tour of a foreign country. The person leading the tour might not be the authority about their country, but they know enough so that they can translate the rich cultural depth of their home into something you - the foreigner - can understand.

That’s what I’m doing. That’s what this book is about. It is a guided tour of Relativity, designed for the people who are really just seeing it for the first time. And so, after that revelation my first paragraph came to me quite easily:

The study of Relativity is a truly fantastic voyage. It describes many wonderful physical phenomena, some that we see every day, and some that we do not. In many ways, studying Relativity - or any subject for that matter - is like taking a trip to a foreign country. Sure, the act of exploring a new place, and learning about what it has to offer is a universal experience; anyone can do it! To do it properly however, you need a special set of tools to make the most of your trip. In travel, that tool is a tour guide, translating the rich culture of their home into words that you - the foreigner - can understand. In science, the most typical tool we use is mathematics, which in many ways the language of Physics. We use it to learn about the culture, the people, and all of the interesting secrets the unknown has to offer us. In Physics, those defining qualities are the theories, observations, and other interesting things that we - as scientists - get to play with and explore. In this first section, we’re going to take a look at the scientific analog of culture and learn about Relativity by discussing its history and some parts of it that make it a truly special theory.

From there the chapter continues, and it ends with the promise that next step would be the introduction of the language of General Relativity. In this case, tensor calculus, but in the end that’s really a moot point. The reason I’m writing this is because I find it interesting that learning about new things in physics really is just exploring when you get down to it. Going to a new place, learning new things. It’s tough at first because the concepts feel foreign, but as you get more and more comfortable with your new surroundings, and become more and more fluent in the language through which they are described, you start to unlock some really fantastic stuff that you would never have been able to explore otherwise.

So my crude introductory paragraph (which will be edited to sound more eloquent and less like it was written by a seven year old illiterate child who happened to have no hands with which to write) aside, I’m really fond of this cute little analogy, and I expect to use it in the future.

Physics, teaching Physics, relativity, textbook, travel

Today I was given the task by my mother (who is wonderful enough to still put up with me over the summer through my sixth year of university) to head down to the Grand Union (a grocery store) near my house to pick up some things for dinner. She gave me a short list, which I committed to my terrible memory. On that list was parmesan cheese, italian bread, and radishes. With that list in mind I wandered over to the store, and leisurely browsed through the aisles, trying to find what she wanted me to get.

I managed to come across it all easy enough, and I even picked up a few things for myself along the way: a jar of pickles, some pita bread, and a small container of hummus. I had wandered into the magazine aisle (as I used to call it when I was younger, begging my mother to let me go look in it for a video game magazine so that I might get out of the tedium of actually food shopping) hoping to find a recent issue of Popular Science, or something of the like. You see, I’ve been listening to a lot of Feynman lately. My roommate was kind enough to lend me the majority of his works on audiobook, so I could listen while I worked, or while I drove, so I’ve been feeling rather inspired.

In fact, to be brutally honest, I can’t help but admit that while I write this, the monologue running through my head - the stream of consciousness-like state that I tend to write almost everything in - sounds to me like the man who narrates the audiobook version of Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman. It’s really quite unnerving, especially since I’m beginning to see some of the structure present in the way Feynman wrote that book crop up in the way I’m writing this blog. I suppose I ought to interject some of myself back into it, so this isn’t too much of a farce…

Fuck.

There. Done. Now back to the story.

I was poking around in the magazine aisle, looking for an issue of Popular Science, because - as I was about to say before I got sidetracked - the fact that I’ve been reading/listening to a lot of Feynman recently has really inspired me. It’s put me back on the track to enjoying physics. I’ve got all sorts of enthusiasm bubbling beneath the surface, and I was looking for an outlet. Something else to read, something to engage me. I’ve been playing around with ideas of building some simple science things… first a Van De Graff generator, then maybe a Tesla Coil. Ultimately, I’d like to make something useful, maybe I could fashion out a small cyclotron or something stupid like that. You know, something that would no doubt get me killed for some silly reason. When I finished with it, and recovered from my injuries, I could donate it to the school, and give something back to the university that has given me so much.

Anyway, I got sidetracked again. Disappointingly enough, there were no issues of Popular Science. There were plenty of Men’s Health issues and a plethora of other magazines I had no interest in whatsoever, but the closest thing was an issue of Popular Mechanics - dealing almost exclusively with alternative fuel - and I’ve heard enough of that for the time being. Yes, it’s a good idea. Yes, we should do it. I’m not the one you need to be convincing of that.

Anywho, disappointed that there wasn’t really any good science periodicals there (I ignored the Scientific American that was all about the internet), I wandered away, kind of aimlessly poking around the store looking for the bread my mother had asked me to get along with the cheese and radishes. As I was walking, I kind of asked myself, “What Would Feynman Do?” (which I’m probably going to geek out about and put WWFD on a T-Shirt or something). I decided that he - or at least the idealized vision I have of him as ultra-physicist-extraordinaire - would start looking around for simple things that might be interesting to think about. I’m not very good at that.

Yet.

But while I was wandering around the store, a truly wonderful feeling found it’s way to me. I have to imagine that it was kind of what an epiphany might feel like. There was this brief moment of clarity, when all of a sudden all of my doubts about studying physics just disappeared. I was completely and totally content with myself. I got this big, shit-eating grin on my face, and even though I had failed to discover anything interesting about the grocery store, I had figured out something pretty remarkable about myself and my field. In that brief moment, it became clear to me why physics is so exciting for me.

Before I say what that is (because I’m sure you won’t think it’s particularly insightful, so I want to build it up all epic-like first), I’d like to ask a question. What makes your field exciting? There are any number of answers to that question, that will vary from field to field, and even person to person. Some people would say art is exciting because it enriches them and those around them, some might say that engineering is exciting because you get to do real-world things and apply what you do in school to make all sorts of fantastic stuff, and still others might say that accounting is exciting because they really love working with numbers. In each case, the person will most likely explain that their field is exciting because it does something - or allows them to do something - that they enjoy, and more often than not, will be appreciated (somehow) by others.

Physics is like that too. It’s universal. It is the universe, and everything in it. Physics is the sandbox in which everything else plays. It’s laws, it’s techniques, and it’s thought processes can be applied - somehow - to anything. In fact, here’s a challenge. I bet that you can’t come up with a field or a discipline that I can’t relate physics to. Of course, that’s no great secret. That wasn’t my revelation, any physicist will be able to tell you that. Mine was much more… personal.

When you’re a child, what do you do? You play. Sure, there’s eating, sleeping, and all the other things that everyone does, but the most important bit (for most of us) when we were younger was playtime. That habit - that desire for entertainment - sticks with us throughout our lives. For me, it manifested in video games, table-top roleplaying games, photography, playing guitar, and any number of other hobbies. Even when you’re old, you still play. Even if it’s just bingo. The greatest thing anyone can do for themselves is to never forget this, and I would like to think that people gravitate towards fields that they enjoy. Fields that they can play with. The engineer was probably a tinkerer when they were younger, and probably spent a lot of time with Legos. The artist was the creative one, drawing pictures on the wallpaper with their crayons. The accountant was the cute baby who had far too much fun playing with their abacus (which at the time (s)he didn’t understand).

On a totally personal note. I had an abacus when I was younger. I totally loved that thing, but never learned how to use it. Thankfully, I wasn’t so in love with it that I chose accounting over physics - or anything else for that matter. Being an accountant would probably make me want to kill myself, but more power to the people who enjoy it.

Anyway. The big reveal here is that physics is exciting for me because it lets me play with everything. In the most literal sense: the world is my playground. Not just the world, but the whole universe. Every single bit of it. But I imagine I’d have a hard time playing in space - what with the not being able to breathe, and all.

See? Not particularly insightful, but it was a wonderful moment none the less. In that one instant, I couldn’t help but sit back, smile, and think to myself:

“Wow, I get to do nothing but play for the rest of my life.”

Seriously, how many people get to say that?

Physics fucking rocks.

And for a bonus, here’s What Feynman Would Do:

Physics, Self-Reflection epiphany, feynman, Physics

Richard Feynman was a brilliant man, a respected Physicist, winner of a Nobel Prize, acclaimed prankster, and among other things, completely blunt when it came to Physics. Once you got him on the topic of some interesting physical theory, it didn’t matter who you were or what you were saying, if he thought it was wrong, he’d tell you. I have to respect that in a man, partially because I have such a hard time being blunt myself, and partially because he could do it. He was that. damned. smart.

But as I sit here, going into my sixth year of school (second of my Masters), writing a textbook on General Relativity, doing research on Pion Photoproduction, I can’t help but wonder what he would say to me… given enough time and information to get an accurate cross-section of my academic life. For all that I’ve accomplished, and all the changes I’ve made to myself over the last six years, I can’t help but think that while he might appreciate and commend my enthusiasm for physics (and for teaching it, doubly so), he would not hesitate to tell me that I was a blockhead, and had not even begun to scrape the heels of my potential as a physics major, and a physicist in general.

He would no doubt point out that I have floated through most of my college career, and while I have maintained good grades through most of it, I never really pressed myself to learn the things that I was not interested in. As such, my understanding of physics isn’t where it should be. And people who don’t learn physics by understanding bewildered Richard Feynman. Then again, Richard Feynman was a genius. True to life, like so many of the greats who’s names parade through history books and text books alike.

I’ll never be a Richard Feynman, an Enrico Fermi, an Albert Einstein… My name will never be said with the same reverence as Bohr, Newton, and Pauli. I just don’t have the gift that those people did. I’m fine with that. Better than fine, actually. True genius comes only once in a blue moon, and while they contribute to the field in ways that shake the very way we perceive the world around us, the fact of the matter is Physics moves forward because of the normal Physicists. Normal Physicists like me.

Don’t get me wrong, to be normal does not imply that one is not capable of great things, quite the opposite. If such was the case all fields would be doomed to stagnation with periodic bursts of inspiration. Hell, how many people can say that they wrote a graduate-level textbook on General Relativity when they themselves were only in grad school? I hope that by the end of this year, I will be able to say that, and that’s a pretty great thing, if I do say so myself.

But when it all comes down to it, I can’t help but feel that despite what everyone else sees in me I am not a good Physicist. I am an enthusiastic physicist. I am a driven physicist. I am a physicist that wants to show others how truly engaging physics can be. But I am not a good physicist. To be good, I will need more time, more experience… but most of all, I need to stop wasting time and learn.

And so I return to this abandoned livejournal with this post to make a promise to myself. A new-school-year-resolution if you will. This year is going to be different. I’m going to continue growing, and shaping myself to be a better scientist, and by the time I’m done I’m going to understand things that I did not before. I’m not going to stutter over questions that I should know. When somebody walks up to me in the hall and asks me a question from their undergraduate quantum course, I’m going to have the answer, and if I don’t, I’m going to figure it out.

I guess it really was a good thing that I went to UMass Dartmouth. I’ve learned a lot about myself through the Physics program there, and have met - and learned from - many wonderful people. Some of my time was wasted, but the rest of it won’t be. By the time I done, when I ask myself “What Would Feynman Say?” I’m not going to be disappointed with the answer.

Physics, Self-Reflection feynman, Physics, resolution