Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Things have been far too busy recently for me to do any substantive posting. But I have noticed that our discussions of topics such as race and gender and interpretations of quantum mechanics are far too genteel and rational for my tastes. (Seriously, why is it that people just cannot resist the temptation to argue with people who say outrageous things, even if they know perfectly well that those people are absolutely immune to reason?)

So I’d like to broach a more controversial topic. I’m thinking of buying a new laptop. Tell me: Mac or PC? I’ve used both quite a bit, so I’m not a fundamentalist either way. The Macs are of course Linux FreeBSD-based, which is useful if you’re a scientist. And there’s the fight-the-evil-empire business. But one cannot deny that there is useful software that isn’t available for Macs. And the variety of laptop hardware is much more diverse in the PC world, including attractively thin ultralights. So — reasonable cost-benefit analyses on either side? Your thoughts are welcome.

And play nice.

Have any of our lovely and astute readers sucessfully gotten the ATLAS libraries to work on a G5 running Tiger?
(i.e., sucessfully linked the LAPACK libraries from the ATLAS distribution)

Progress understanding the fate of the Universe lies in your hands! Thanks in advance for any advice.

Just got my beautiful Brompton wet in a sudden downpour on the way home. Yes, I dried it off, and now I’m sitting here with a cup of warm wet-chalkdust-tasting tea listening to the rain and waiting for last night’s chicken pilaf to warm up. It’s always even better the day after I make it! (Some of the things mentioned above will mean nothing to you if you did not read this earlier post.)

Yes, I’m still here at the Aspen Center for Physics, attending the SuperCosmology workshop. I’ve been attending some Cosmology discussions, but also doing some computations on another project (which I ought to tell you about some time) and thinking. This has been helped a lot by the Aspen Music Festival and School, since I’ve gone and sat in the nearby giant music tent in the mornings where the student orchestra is rehearsing pieces they’ll play in the concerts later in the evening. I love listening to orchestras rehearse. Especially large orchestral pieces (such as yesterday’s Shostakovich’s 1st Symphony) where the rehearsal entails deconstructing certain difficult passages by section. So you hear all the strands of a chord played separately by different bits of the orchestra and then put back together. You really appreciate a chord constructed by a master when you’ve heard it this way. Often more fun than going to the concert.

The Center is a wonderful place to do physics for so many reasons. One of them is the fact that there is a weekly colloquium given by one of the physicists from one of the workshops going on. You learn so much about what is going on in other fields.
(and they have really good cheese, wine, crackers and conversation after.)

So I’m supposed to sit here and write a second installment about stringy cosmology, following on from the first installment I gave here. Since there did not seem to be that much in the way of interest in it, as far as I can tell, I’ll instead tell you about this great colloquium I went to. “Topological Quantum Computation”, by Chetan Nayak.

Chetan told us about new ideas and approaches in quantum computers. So those of you who might know Chetan might wonder what on earth he’s doing talking about that stuff. Was he not working on matters to do with condensed matter physics, and topological quantum field theories showing up in strongly correlated electron systems? Yes, but that’s the point!

Let me back up (and turn off the pilaf).

First, what is a quantum computer? Well, such a thing does not exist, as far as we know. It is a dream that physicists would like to turn into a reality. The idea is often attributed to Feynman, and significant key refinements in the important concepts towards making it a reality were made by Deutch, and by Shor. You might start (as Feynman did) by wondering how well an ordinary computer will do in simulating a quantum system, and you quickly realize it would be highly inefficient. (more…)

Please let me share with you an idea I had a while ago. It emerged in a conversation with John Ellis when I was visiting at CERN giving some string theory training lectures. I was commenting about how great the QuantumDiaries experiment is, having a wide variety of physicists blogging from around the world for the World Year of Physics.
You will recall my mentioning about being reluctant to get involved with blogging, and I may have mentioned there that I did not want to reproduce already good effort out there, and so began to think of new ways to contribute using the medium. Well, as you read, I found some reasons to give it a try and here I am.

Well, a number of things did come up as interesting and fun to try, and the following is one of them. I’ve already said on this blog that our particular field (string theory and related topics) could do with more ways of having discussion, both general and specific. We have already accelerated the primary way in which we exchange research results (revolutionizing scientific publishing in the process) by establishing the Archive (see writing about this by Paul Ginsparg), and it undeniably helped drive the field’s rapid developments in the middle 90s while also democratising it by enabling serious papers from the traditional large and famous institutions to be seen on everybody’s computer screen right alongside the serious papers from smaller less well known institutions, often within minutes or hours of the completion of the work.

Imagine if we could do the same with discussions. How might a blog help? Well, of (more…)