Long Needed Update

Alright, General Relativity and Advanced Quantum Mechanics are done with and Quantum Field Theory with David Tong and Statistical Mechanics with Leo Kadanoff began last week. The notes used for the QFT course are here on Tong's website for those who are interested. For Stat Mech we are using some interesting and unconventional notes in book form written by Kadanoff.

Tong is an excellent and clear lecturer and presents the subject superbly. The ideal introduction to QFT I must say. It turns out, his first post doc was at TIFR and he's been to Aurangabad (my hometown) several times. Which was good to hear :)

Kadanoff is one of the people who was involved in creating some of the most profound and fundamental ideas in modern theoretical physics - Renormalization and Universality besides a host of related ideas. It is quite an honour to be taught by him, and he is always happy to have lunch with us and discuss various subjects. He is 82, and still remarkably sharp. Today he told me that Cellular Automata are a field research that is slowing down since nothing of major importance is happening there, and that the Santa Fe Institute started in the 70s to explore complex systems has more or less abandoned the program to find a unified framework for complex systems and emergent phenomena. You study the subject one complex system at a time, he said.

Im quite looking at complex systems, information theory, cellular automata, chaos and related things actually, they interest me, and Id like to find something fundamental, important and interesting to work on there.

In the meanwhile, Ive got to ensure I become reasonably good at QFT and Stat Mech. neither of which are trivial. to say the least.

One Week of Classes

The first week of regular classes ended today. Thats not to say that the two weeks preceding that were not worth writing about ! The week we spent with Dr. Nima Arkani-Hamed was overwhelming for me. He came and started deriving things like the velocity of sound in a neutron star and the height of a giraffe in terms of fundamental constants like the planck length and mass of an electron, charge of an electron etc with hand waving arguments and a few squiggles:-) He then took us on a whirlwind tour of the frontiers of quantum gravity, particle physics and quantum field theory. There were (very) few people among the psi group who actually understood what was going on, but Neil Turok (who sat through many of Nima's lectures) said they were brilliant. Nima would speak for 4 hours straight in the morning and then turn up randomly in the afternoon for another couple of hours of impromptu lecturing. It was interesting to watch such an obviously gifted man expounding upon what he loved. His energy was boundless !

That was followed by one week of miscellaneous stuff, computing, latex, unix, a 6 hour Quantum Mechanics test which I used as a pretext for going over Irina's notes again and completing (finally) studying most of the quantum optics I was supposed to know one year ago ! Then we started with Relativity a couple of days before the regular classes commenced.

The first 3 weeks of core course classes are devoted to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. The way the course is organized is that there are 2 courses running in parallel at any given time and these run for 3 weeks. Then the next two courses start. There are 3 hours of class before lunch followed by 3-4 hours of tutorial and twice a week we have to hand in homework assignments. Since each morning a large amount of unfamiliar (for me) territory is covered, the weekdays are very hectic. Its exciting to be learning so much in such a short period of time !

General Relativity is absolutely the coolest thing I have ever studied. Its absolutely brilliant, and I have not even gotten to the really genius parts yet. We are using Hartle's book called 'Gravity' as our textbook, and its quite nice, but Id suggest Schutz's book for anyone wishing to study the subject fairly rigorously from scratch. Im making a feeble attempt to read it in parallel myself. There is so much math I do not know - differential geometry, group theory, topology, catagory theory, gauge theory, lie groups and the list is endless - that seems to be common knowledge in my class and vital to do anything in theoretical physics that Im beginning to feel I need to make a non-feeble attempt to teach myself some serious math too.

Its a difficult balancing act in a course like this - between depth and breadth. I could solve all the problems given to us, and then not learn anything else at all. Or I could spend time absorbing as many related concepts as possible - apart from keeping up with class work of course - and be practical about how many problems I can solve in each topic. Hardly any at all, is the answer actually. I think Im going to try and solve enough problems related to class to keep myself happy-ish about the concepts and my confidence about knowing them, and also make a serious attempt at breadth.

Ive come all the way here, I might as well do it like it ought to be done !

Of Mandelbrot and Feynman

The last two assignments of the first week provided much to think about and a few pleasing moments of insight. The first one was to take a picture of some everyday, commonplace occurrence/thing and explain some interesting physics behind it. I was completely at a loss ! Nothing seemed interesting suddenly and everything I could explain seemed trivial. We were supposed to give a 10+2 minute presentation introducing some of the concepts on Friday, so we had 3 days or so to prepare. I took pictures of clouds, confident that clouds would provide something, Rayleigh scattering if nothing else. But then, I hit on a much more interesting angle - the Fractal nature of clouds :)

That turns out to have some very interesting concepts and Im uploading my presentation here, at some later date Ill include a voiceover which will explain the slides as well, but this will already give interested people some terms to google and some papers to look up.


The other assignment was to do a live demonstration in front of the class and illustrate some interesting physics. Our group decided to do the Feynman sprinkler experiment mentioned in the brilliant book "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman !". This basically involves a sprinkler system submerged in water. When it is ejecting water, it is obvious in what direction it will spin. However, when the question is posed, what if it is sucking in water ? what direction will it spin then ? In the book, the folks at princeton never did reach a conclusion and the experiment was never completed since the vaccum pump Feynman and co were using to suck up the water blew and messed up the lab.

This seemed like the ideal opportunity for us to try it out. The gentleman at the hardware store was extremely helpful and even provided us with a pump and so on. We did the experiment, and it turns out that when water is sucked in, the sprinkler does not spin. There were heated arguments about time symmetry and why this could not possibly be right. There were some explanations on the net which were not entirely convincing. After much head banging, I came up with a momentum based picture which seemed to satisfy most people (might put it up here at some point) and Henry came up with an even simpler way of looking at it using gas pressures.

Im sitting in the Breakfast room on Monday morning and Dr. Nima Arkani-Hamed from the Institute of Advanced Physics at Princeton just arrived. We are going to spend the week with this famous genius, and no one knows what he is going to talk about :) :)

what a place !!

update : Ended up having breakfast sitting with Neil Turok (TED prize winner and famous cosmologist, head of PI among other things)
but Nima Arkani-Hamed is an absolutely brilliant lecturer ! This morning has already been exhilarating and there is more to come after lunch. Ill write about it before I sleep tonight. Profound, brilliant insights into physics in general.

Day One

I'm not going to post daily updates here of course but I think the first day deserves some mention since it sets the tone for the rest of the course and it was fairly interesting in itself. After some sumptuous breakfast at PI we went to the heritage post office building where our classes take place and we kicked off with an introductory talk by John Berlinsky who is the director of the PSI course. We are expected to be competent researchers when we leave this course. He explained that the idea of the course was to encourage co-operation rather than competition (thats something that I sincerely hope happens) and also to emphasize the communication of science apart from the serious rigorous courses we are to do. Science needs a balance between social exchange of ideas and solitary thought. All of us will be expected to teach and communicate with the community at large, and as such would be part of numerous outreach activities. I'm really looking forward to interacting with the school children and so on, there is nothing better than to see someone excited about a subject after you speak to them about it.

The first course we are doing is a general one on Research Methods taught for the first week by Kari Dalnoki-Veress who is more of an applied and experimental physicist with infectious enthusiasm and an emphasis on 'having fun' which was great to see. In this course we are meant to do a lot of science communication as well as group work and discussions about what it means to do science and do it well. One of the first things we discussed was Success. And the three ingredients for success :
1. Ability !
2. Opportunity !
3. Hardwork !
:)
He read out passages and gave examples from a book that sounds very interesting - Malcom Gladwell's Outliers. The take home message from there was this - there are NO naturals ! people who do better are the ones who have worked harder (given ability thats above a certain minimum threshold, which is quite low). Thats a fairly encouraging thought for outsiders in this course like me, its not about intelligence...if we put in the work, the learning will follow.

Also discussed were the characteristics of a good scientist. Over all, the major ones seemed to be
Curiosity
Perseverance
Tools
Scepticism (of a healthy nature)
and combined with all these, that mystical creature - Creativity. Inspiration comes to those people who have worked hard enough to prepare a base solid enough to identify and follow a good idea when it turns up. Also mentioned were originality and a willingness to be alone - courage.

The assignment for tomorrow is simply to talk for a short time about a paper in any field that we find interesting. I'm going to talk about Dholakia's paper on 3D optical trapping from Science 2002. But the more interesting assignment is to take a picture from nature and research the physics and give a conference style formal presentation on it. This is especially interesting after some of the absolutely splendid videos about physics in everyday life that were shown today. Fluid instabilities, chaos, the Kaye effect and so on....there is really much to explore in our world, too many questions we leave unasked.

I want to start asking questions of myself again.

Second Post

Yesterday we had a barbeque at PI (at the Black Hole Bistro, which is run by a gifted chef and is open only to researchers most of the time :-) ) where we got yet another chance to meet each other as well as some of the faculty and tutors. The interesting thing is even the tutors don't really seem very sure as to how exactly the course is supposed to work. 'I'm not sure, lets see what happens' is a common refrain.

But this much is clear, everyday there will be homework for two courses to be handed in the next day. Classes in the morning, tutorials in the afternoon and then homework. There are blackboards everywhere in PI and in our flats. I begin to see how they might come to play a big role, I think collaborative problem solving is the only way in which this could possibly be possible :-)

The first course is 'Research Skills' for three weeks, so I'm guessing that won't be as serious as the hardcore physics that will come later.

I can't wait to start.


-- Post From My iTouch

First Post

I am a B.Tech in Electronics and Communications from NITK Surathkal with a masters degree in photonics from the EMMP consortium and I left the straight and narrow path when I was admitted to this amazing ten month program to study theoretical physics with the best in the world. Why did I take the plunge ? Because not everyone can live their childhood dreams, and I could not possibly have passed this up for anything.

I arrived here in Waterloo a couple of days ago and was received at the Pearson Intl airport in Toronto by a limo with an envelope inside with the keys to my apartment, access cards et al. Waterloo is about an hours drive away from there and is a small place, with a sort of boxy, rural American feel. The apartments are very comfy and well furnished, as one might expect from the perimeter institute.

I've met my classmates a couple of times and they seem to be a pleasant and enthusiastic bunch. The walk from the apartment to the institute is a pleasant one through parkland and playing fields.



Google earth shows a cricket field close by, but I haven't checked that out yet. Will do that today. I've been to The institute once yesterday morning when hardly anyone was about and it's an absolutely splendid place. Spacious, open, with plenty of sunlight streaming in, superb architecture.

The corridors are interspersed at regular intervals with lounges and coffee machines and laarge black boards which are all meant as discussion spaces where science can be done. The black hole bistro is another splendid place and I made myself some exotic tea. That's where we - the psi students - will have two meals a day. Its the ideal place to work and think. And I haven't even seen the library and the theaters yet.



I expect the lectures will be brilliant, almost every single faculty member is famous, and I don't say that lightly. I'll keep this blog updated about subjects and lectures once they start tomorrow. I intend to write about what we learn, how, why etc. Plus additional titbits about life in the best place in theoretical physics in the world. Apparently, they have concerts and yoga and other such activities everyday. I'll put up pics of these initial days on here soon.

I'm really excited about what I'm about to start learning and the journey that lies ahead. I trust I'll be able to share some of the more interesting parts with you along the way :)



-- Post From My iTouch