robcoyne [dot] com

So I had a nice talk with my new co-advisor today about the status of my thesis. The first thing he asked me as I walked into his small concrete office, decorated sparsely with physics texts and discarded playstation 3 boxes, is whether or not I had been told that the department had awarded me a full Research Assistantship for next semester. Surprised by the revelation I excitedly informed him that it was the first I had heard of it, but that in no way diminished the elation I felt at not having to teach any classes next semester. He chuckled softly and nodded, saying how he was glad they were able to sort out the money so I could focus on finishing my thesis next spring, rather than teaching four classes in addition to my coursework like I’m doing this time around.

There was more to it than that though, I could tell that deep down there was a hidden message lost among my exuberance and his contentment. He was telling me that he was concerned about whether or not I’d have enough time to finish my thesis.

I can’t say I blame him, I’m a little worried myself. My thesis has changed so many times that I never got rolling on any of them, and now I’m faced with completing a brand new project, writing a 40+ page paper on it, and coming up with a compelling presentation all over the course of a single semester. My concern however isn’t that I’d be able to do it. In fact, I have no doubt that I’ll be able to finish my thesis. I’m worried that when I’m done with it, that it won’t be impressive enough to carry me through my future education.

As it stands right now, it looks like the skeleton of the project is going to be about code optimization for the playstation 3’s. It will start by showing how standard data analysis packages can be easily compiled and run, with little to no additional setup, displaying any impressive or important benchmarks along the way. After that, we’ll choose a select few libraries that have been optimized for the Cell architecture (the Fast Fourier Transform - FFT - for example) and do some benchmarks for that, illustrating the benefits of using the Cell. We’ll do some different approaches on the PS3’s (running optimized versus non-optimized code), as well as some cross-platform tests (runs on a Core 2, server rack, etc). All of these things together will certainly give an impressive view of what the PS3’s are capable of, but there’s one problem: there’s no physics in it!

So I need to come up with some nifty way of making this project about some kind of exciting physics as well as exciting electronics. I only hope that I have enough time to do that. Thoughts are more than welcome.

Before I let you go however, the wonderful people over at Animals Have Problems Too put out a fantastic motivational comic that comes to mind here. It’s hanging on the side of my cubicle, as a constant reminder of what needs to be done. And since it’s fitting, I will share it with you now:

It’s not my drawing, not my advice, but certainly words I can live by. Good night.

school advisor, computer science, Physics, playstation 3, thesis

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’m here at the hotel waiting for the girls to get ready for the rehearsal dinner of my best friend’s wedding. The story of how we got this room is really quite amusing, so before I get into the meat of this post, allow me to share it with you.

You see, the wedding and the rehearsal are on back to back days (as they often are) and it’s quite a distance from both my house, as well as my girlfriend’s house. So to save ourselves the extra driving, we opted to get a hotel room in the area so that we could have a convenient base of operations for the weekend. We have it booked both for tonight (Friday) as well as tomorrow night (Saturday). We originally asked the mother of the bride - who’s from this general area - where a good hotel to stay at would be. She suggested a decent place in Woonsocket. It’s a fairly long drive - about 20 minutes or so - considering that it was designed to save us from driving, but if it was good enough for the bride’s mother, it was good enough for us.

We shared our hotel plans with the groom (for whom I will be acting as the Best Man) and he gawked. “Why would you stay there?” He asked. “It’s such a long way from the place where we’re going to get married! You ought to have booked at the same hotel as we did - in Franklin.” We were bummed. Not only were we concerned about the driving distance, but it turns out that the bride’s mother had not given us good advice. That’s okay, I’m sure she didn’t mean it intentionally, but still… it was a wee bit frustrating.

But my girlfriend is a crafty little devil, and she managed to cancel our plans at the other hotel, and get us a room at the same hotel as the groom. There was only room type available - one King sized bed and a pull out couch - which wouldn’t been so bad if we hadn’t planned on bunking up with my girlfriend’s sister and another groomsman, who was actually a groomswoman (my friends are wonderfully unorthodox). As such, just two beds would be awkward, so the three girls decided they would share the bed and I would be demoted to the couch.

That sucked. But c’est la vie.

The culmination of the story is a typical one for what happens when you go to a nice hotel on some last minute plans: when we got there, the room we had reserved was not available. As it turned out there was another wedding party that was taking up the entire second floor leaving us without a room! It seemed as if we were up the proverbial creek without even a boat, but as I said my girlfriend is a crafty devil. She put up a stink, and the hotel agreed to put us up in their Presidential Suite! It’s a large room (perhaps I’ll post pictures) with a living room, kitchen area, bedroom, and a large bathroom with a jacuuzi tub! There is still the one king sized bed and a pull out couch.

Fuck! Such a great room, but still stuck on the couch.

Or so it seemed at the time. There was one more brilliant stroke of luck that changed my fortune: the groom’s parents had reserved four rooms - one of which was for the priest who would be marrying the happy couple. He - however - had another appointment Saturday morning, so he would save himself some early morning driving and not spend the night out here. There was an open room! So we gave the groomswoman (and her boyfriend) that room, and now my girlfriend and I get the king bed, while her sister gets the couch (should she choose not to take advantage of the bed with us =P).

So here I am, writing this post from the desk - that’s right, I even have a nice office desk - in this awesome room, in this hotel we ended up getting completely by chance.

Now to the reason I’m writing… (Has anyone noticed that I rarely ever start with relevant stuff?)

I was going downstairs to get my stuff out of the car, when I had a thought. You see, unlike everyone else, I dressed up quite a bit for the rehearsal. I’m in a nice pair of pants, with dress shoes and socks, a neat slimming button-up shirt with matching tie, a good black vest with nice gold buttons, and my suit-jacket. It’s a thrown-together 3 piece suit that makes me - if I do say so myself - look absolutely stellar (incidentally, my girlfriend and her sister both agree). I did notice however that I’m a bit overdressed. This got me to thinking about something my girlfriend said regarding her new job teaching at high school.

“It’s important,” she said, “to make a strong first impression the first day.” With that in mind, she’s planning on going into school dressed up very strictly, like she has a stick up her ass. “It’s easy to start strict, and then relax as time goes on. It’s not so easy to start relaxed, and try to tightening things up later. The kids just won’t respect you if you do that.” As I pondered this advice - and my state of being overdressed - I thought up an amusing analogy that could be used as a teaching method.

The premise is this: the first day you are in class (at university), you come in very overdressed for the occasion. Not a tuxedo or anything stupid like that, but something like a three piece suit (under which you wear a normal shirt). Bring with you a pair of sandals (or casual shoes). When you begin your lecture, explain how exciting physics is in the normal way, but also warn that it is a subject about which there are many preconceptions. Physicists are thought of as being not only smart, but rigid and often unapproachable (this should be evidenced by your style of dress). As you continue your explanation however, you begin to show your students that they should not be intimidated, and that Physics is really pretty easy once you “get to know it.” The whole time, you should be taking off layers of your clothing.

First, you start off fully dressed. “A lot of people think that Physics is a very difficult subject, and it’s natural to feel a little bit intimidated.”

Then, you take off your jacket. “But you should know, that it’s not really as bad as you might think.”

Then your vest. “You should know that Physics isn’t just a study of how math describes the world around us.”

Then your tie. “It’s really nothing more complicated than trying to understand why things happen. All you need to succeed in Physics is a little bit of curiosity.”

Next, you kick off your shoes. “It’s important to keep things in perspective while you’re exploring all of this. It will get hard at times, but with hard work and perserverence, you’ll be fine.”

Finally, you slip into your sandals and roll up your sleeves. “I bet you thought I was going to be quite the professor when I walked in - all dressed up in a suit - you may have thought I was crazy, and maybe you were a bit intimidated. You may have wondered if I was going to be a hard professor or not. Well, as you can see, I’m really not that different from anyone else underneath all these layers of fanciness.”

Then you continue to explain that Physics isn’t any different. It might be dressed up to look like something terribly complicated and fancy, but realistically it isn’t different from anything else you might study in school. You just have to look underneath all of the bells and whistles, and find the real core of Physics. All you really need to do that - like I mentioned - is a bit of healthy curiosity. From there, you can begin your course as normal, hopefully quelling some of the student’s fears regarding what’s often considered to be a very difficult subject.

Honestly, the idea could use more refinement, and it would really only be appropriate for perhaps a group of first year students. I like it though, and I hope to maybe try it out someday, to see how it works.

General, teaching Physics, stories, teaching

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