If you get a chance, wrap up warmly and pop out for a bit in the early morning to see the Orionid meteor shower. We’re passing through the debris field that is is the tail of Halley’s comet. We are near the peak, I’ve heard, which can be as many as 20 or so per hour. More here, and here.

-cvj

Last night I heard a rather lovely program. It was on the NPR program called “Radio Lab”, and this one was all about music and language. You can hear the whole thing by listening to the archive at this link. Among my favourite things was the first piece, right at the beginning of the program, based upon the work of Diana Deutsch, who specializes in the psychology of music. They talk about (and play you a sample from) a time when she recorded a spoken phrase and “looped it”, so that it plays again and again. After a while of listening to this (I remember noticing this myself in other contexts), that spoken phrase actually takes on a musical characteristic! It is amazing how fast and sharp the transition is, actually. Go listen to the first part of the show to hear it yourself.

The most striking part is then to go back to the original sentence and and hear that spoken phrase in context. Once your brain has hooked itself on the idea that it is a sung phrase and not a spoken phrase, listening to the sentence is normal until you get to that phrase and then it sounds like she is bursting into song!

This opens up a very interesting discussion on the whole business of language and music, and their intersection. What is music, really? How context dependent is it?

Diana Deutsch has done some research on “tone languages”, for example - languages Continue reading ‘Music and Language’

This is a quick reminder about the “Apocalypse” Categorically Not! event this Sunday (see here or here), featuring Marc Kamionkowski, Jonathan Kirsch, and Carolyn See.

I’d also like to let you know about the next Southern California Strings Seminar, next week Friday and Saturday at USC. A number of topics in string theory will be discussed, from applications to topics in Mathematics (the Langlands program), through black hole physics, and all the way to applications to the physics of experiments involving collisions of heavy nuclei. More about this regional meeting over on Asymptotia.

-cvj

The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 24th September. You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them. Have a look at the last two descriptions here and here, and the description of the recent special one on Uncertainty that was held at the USC campus is here.

Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Apocalypse!’

The next Categorically Not! is Thursday 31st August. You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events, started by K. C. Cole, and held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them. Have a look at the last two descriptions here and here.

It is important to note that this one is a USC event, and not a Santa Monica event! It is on a Thursday and not a Sunday! You might wonder - why these changes? Ah! I promised to reveal what was going on behind that photo shoot I told you about a long time ago (with K.C., Tara McPherson, and myself - recall the fun we had with that picture?), and now realize that I did not get around to it.

This is it. There is a series of wonderful events going on throughout the year on the USC campus - the embodiment of our new Provost’s “Arts and Humanities Initiative”. It is called “Visions and Voices”, and I’ll tell you more about it on Asymptotia. Our program within that larger program is not called Categorically Not! but “Science and Serendipity”. Anyway more on that elsewhere.

So will the old Categorically Not! series stop? No. The Santa Monica series will continue, but there will be some gaps to accommodate the USC events. We hope that the regular Santa Monica crowd will make the short trip across the city to USC on those nights. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website. More about the relation to the Categorically Not! events can be found in this post on Asymptotia.

Anyway, here is the blurb for the upcoming event on the 31st August:

Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Uncertainty (Revisited)’

Well, I was going to wait until Monday, since today is one of the worst days to launch a new blog, but one cannot hide from pingbacks.

In addition to my writing here on Cosmic Variance, I’ll be blogging over at a new blog called Asymptotia. It is still in an early stage of construction (I only completed the basic structures last night), but it should be able to handle some visitors if you’d like to go over and try the new furniture, kick off your shoes and visit for a while. You don’t need a hard hat any more, but some of the edges might still be a little rough.

What can you find there? Right now there are some pictures from the California State Science Fair, updates about the garden, and an architectural stop in Marseille to see one of Le Corbusier’s famous buildings.

Upcoming posts you’ll find there, which I’ll do over the weekend, I hope:

A report on an excellent talk here at Aspen’s Institute for Environmental Studies by Kevin Knobloch, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The subject was Global Warming.

A report on a fascinating colloquium by Charles Stevens of the Salk Institute, given here at the Aspen Center for Physics yesterday. The subect was something like “How Theory in Biology is Similar to and Different from Theory in Physics”. He gives some lovely examples, including scaling laws in the architechture of the brain.

-cvj

Drinking tea at high altitude again. Still a bad idea…. must remember to bring a pressure cooker next time. See this link if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Yes, on my short tour of research hideaways this Summer, I’m at another monastery, the Aspen Center for Physics, where I’ll be continuing my quest to get some coherent research thoughts fully explored before the end of the Summer and my other academic duties begin in earnest. For some of the time I’m here, I’ll overlap with a couple of workshops in my area (and other interesting ones besides), and hence several old friends and colleagues, which is always very nice to do. I’m coming in near the middle of the workshop entitled “String Theory, Gauge Theory & Particle Physics”, and have already today heard two excellent outdoor talks, one by Savdeep Sethi entitled “Can Time End?” and the other by Frederik Denef entitled “Factorization of BPS Degeneracies and the OSV Conjecture”.

We found out the answer to the first question when Sav firmly ran out of time before he got to say all he wished to. Seriously, his talk (see papers hep-th/0603104, hep-th/0601062, and hep-th/0509204 on the arXiv) is all about the physics of certain types of spacetime singularities -such as the one that lives in our universe’s past- and whether we can make sense of the idea of space and time coming into being after such a singularity, while not existing prior to that. He describes certain recently constructed models using string and matrix theory which do give you some rather good control over such issues, it seems. The “funny region” -where time and space have no meaning- is handled (via a “dual” or “indirect” description) by a particular type of non-abelian gauge theory (for the non-expert: roughly the same sort of theory that, for example, describes how nuclei hold themselves together) which does not seem particularly exotic, despite the novel spacetime physics it allows them to get a handle on. This is typical of the kinds of things we’re understanding a lot better about spacetime in recent years (and long before the AdS/CFT example, I should mention), which is that many puzzling questions about spacetime -such as how to describe a complete breakdown of its existence as a nice, smooth arena in which we live to for example the (expected) more primitive state of earlier eras in the universe’s history- seem to be better phrased in terms of gauge theory questions.

Frederik (in action in the photo above) spoke about the subtleties in understanding the OSV conjecture, which is -if you’ve never heard of it- a nice conjecture relating properties of certain types of black holes to a seemingly irrelevant computation involving what are called topological string theories. I won’t go into it here, but refer you instead to discussions of it on Jacques’ blog. It is a technical discussion. Part of the issues of subtleties arising have to do with understanding the BPS spectrum -the spectrum of a very special set of objects in the theory which generically are extremely stable (and therefore useful to keep track of when you’re trying to understand the physics)- when the theory takes you to places where the spectrum changes. “Moving across curves of marginal stability” would be the technical term to use, if you wanted to be in the in crowd. Typically, what happens is that some of these BPS states (generically, extended objects or “branes” of various types… see several earlier posts of mine for what branes are) are in fact bound states of smaller objects (other types of brane), which fall apart in certain regimes, thus changing the spectrum of what BPS states you thought you had available to you. Getting the count right is really crucial in understanding the big picture of what is going on with the conjecture.

Continue reading ‘At The Other Monastery’

I’ve decided to live in a monastery for two weeks, along with several other physicists and mathematicians. It is quite pleasant. We have breakfast at 7:30am, lunch at 12:30pm, and dinner at 7:30pm. The latter two are proper sit-down affairs with several courses. We are served by several stern French women of an appropriate level of uncompromising sternness and impatience, who are -frankly- slightly scary. I’m looking forward to tonight’s dinner especially, since the Thursday night special is one of my all-time favourite French dishes (and word)… Bouillabaisse. It is a local specialty. By now you’ve probably guessed, I’m in Provence (which I like to think of as a sort of prototype of Southern California, but that’s another story). In particular, just outside Marseille, on the edge of the Mediterranean. The monastery is in fact the Centre International de Rencontres Mathematiques: C.I.R.M., as you can read on the doorway. Each day I wake up, eat, go to lectures, work in my room, work in the library, talk to people, and work some more. Apparently it is quite beautiful in the surroundings, but I’ve not gone to look yet. Maybe I will on the weekend.

So what have I learned? Well, the setup is excellent. There are both mathematicians and physicists here, and a wide range of talks. In fact, the title of the workshop has “Affine Hecke Algebras” in it. If you stopped me in the street and asked me what an Affine Hecke algebra is, I’d have to tell you that I don’t know what the Helle they are in any precise sense, but that does not matter. I’m learning a lot about what’s been going on in some aspects of the physics and mathematics world in some areas, with a pleasingly European flavour which reminds me of my youth, since a lot of the European string theory and statistical mechanics stars from my past (gosh, almost 20 years ago!) seem to be here. At the same time, to my surprise, several relatively freshly minted young researchers that I know from over the water are here. It is nice.

There have been several excellent talks. Particularly so since the physicists have been careful to spend the first half of their talk giving a general introduction for the benefit of the mathematicians before diving into technical details. As a result, while I am not sure that the mathematicians really benefit from this as much as is hoped, I think it just makes for a great 90 minute (with 5 minute break) physics talk for the physicists. As a result, you get a good idea of what the issues (at least in the mind of the presenter) are, and a bit of the background and history, before they go on to tell you what they have actually done recently.

For example, Martin Schnabl just reported on what can only be described as spectacularly important nice results (see the paper, hep-th/0511286, here). Here he is, in action at the lovely multi-panelled blackboard which he used to great effect:

Continue reading ‘At The Monastery’

Well, Wednesday night at the SUSY06 conference featured presentations by Frank Wilczek, Lenny Susskind, Andre Linde, and Burt Richter, and ended with a panel discussion. Slides and notes can be found here. It was about “Naturalness”, and -among other aspects of naturalness- featured a lot of discussion about the Landscape scenario, and the use of Anthropic arguments in fundamental physics. The first three speakers gave excellent presentations of their points of view on the topics, each using Anthropicity (is there such a word?) to varying degrees. You’ve possibly read about the nature of the discussion (especially as it pertains to what some researchers in string theory are pursuing) in an earlier post of mine (see the comments, especially).

People get very passionate (understandably) about the whole topic, although the strangest thing about it to me is the way so many people seem to want everyone in the field to “choose sides”, as though this is some sort of war for the future of physics. It is not a war. It is an interesting and important discussion that will simply fade away in due course, when other interesting and more urgent discussions take its place. New experimental results and new understanding of theory will inevitably help make this happen. This is the way it should be with all discussions in science, of course, and this is no different.

I was wishing I could get across to you the nature of the discussion that took place on Wednesday, because it was interesting -with good points made on both sides- and because all four characters are so engaging and entertaining in their own ways. Here’s one aspect I particularly loved: At one point everyone in the audience seemed sort of in the thrall of the whole Anthropic view after three excellent talks about it, only to have the bubble burst and splatter everywhere when Burt Richter got up and, speaking from notes with no slides, just declared the whole thing to be a theological discussion. Laughter erupted along with a round of applause! This was -I think- not because everyone agreed with him (he later refined his criticisms to make more productive points), but because it was such a great slap-in-the-face reawakening after about two hours of the other view.

It was basically a loud fart in a quiet cathedral, during evensong. Excellent.

The great news is that some of the panel discussion was recorded, and can be found Continue reading ‘SUSY06 Wednesday Night SmackDown!’

Just a quick note to point out the growing volume of video and stills of the SUSY06 conference that is being produced at an incredible rate by the Cosmic Variance commenter who calls himself “chimpanzee”. He has a handheld device that launches video and stills to the web seconds after recording it. All very splendid, if you like that sort of thing.

He wisely got authorisation from the organizers of the conference to attend in this capacity, and now he’s got more bold and is sitting right up front in some of the sessions and even doing interviews! For example, here are some with physicists Raman Sundrum, and Angela Olinto (she says “hi” to Sean in the interview, by the way).

The links to the video blogs are here:

http://susy06.textamerica.com (stills+video)
http://susy06.blogspot.com (stills+video)
and at iTunes Music Store as the “SUSY ‘06″ video-podcast.

(The Cosmic Variance blog is not responsible for any content found there.)

The pictures and interviews are actually a nice window into physics and physicists even if you’re not an expert, and I’m doing this post because it would be a shame if they went unnoticed.

I’ve got to say that chimpanzee did this all without my help or encouragement, so I can take no credit for this resource! In fact, I was doubtful and declined to help. He just took the initiative anyway and went through the proper channels himself to get it all authorized….. and the results are great!

Well done…..

-cvj