Neutrinos

Just to follow up on the last post.   Neutinos it was.   I guess they found the correct two people to give the prize to.

Undoubtedly this discovery was extremely important no matter how you slice it.   Neutrino oscillations.  Solar Neutrino Problem.  Neutrino Mass.  New particle (the other chirality of neutrino).
I approve.    

Nobel Bets 2015

This is my once-per-year blog post attempting to predict the physics Nobel Prize.   (Except the obvious Higgs a few years ago, I've never gotten it right).  

Reuters has some interesting guesses here. Of those guesses, I think Debbie Jin is the most likely.

In high energy experiment, for years I've been thinking that neutrino mass really needs to get one. Apparently it isn't at all obvious who would be the right person or persons to be named, so that makes it a bit difficult. Possibly this is also  a problem with giving a prize for the experimental discovery of the Higgs  at LHC, which obviously would have a large political force in its favor.

Last year I predicted topological insulators.   Given that last year was awarded in condensed matter(ish), it seems unlikely that this is the year for TIs.

Other possible topics that I have mentioned before:

Lene Hau and Steven Harris (Slow Light)
Zeilinger/Aspect/Clauser (Quantum Tests)
Bennett (is he alive still?), Brassard, Wootters (Quantum teleportation)
Berry/Aharanov (I realize there are problems with precedent here, but still I think it is possible)

OK, back to work!

Nobel Bets 2014

I am breaking my blogging silence to go on record with my predictions for the 2014 Nobel Prize.  The physics prize will be awarded next Tuesday, so place your bets now!.   (Last year was too easy, everyone knew it was going to be Higgs). 

A lot of people think I am placing my money years too early, but I really think the time is now ripe for Topological Insulators to receive a Nobel Prize.   My reasons:

(A)   The topic has been hugely influential, and has very much changed how we think about matter

(B)   The Nobel Committee tends to rotate between fields, and condensed matter last got the prize in 2010 (graphene), so I think the stars are properly aligned.

(C)   There was a “Nobel Symposium” on Topological Insulators this summer, and that is a good sign.

So who will be included on the prize?   This is where things get complicated. Charlie Kane is probably a lock, but beyond this, things are up in the air.

Case 1) Prize emphasizes theory of topology in condensed matter

                                Charlie Kane, for topological insulators

                                Duncan Haldane, for spin chains

                                David Thouless, for topological quantum numbers

Pro:   Thouless is someone who really should have gotten a prize for something by this time!

Con:  Volovik should be included  (I suppose one could swap out Haldane, but the spin chain work was pretty important too!)

Case 2) Prize emphasizes quantum spin Hall physics

                                Shou-Cheng Zhang, for prediction of quantum spin Hall effect

                                Laurens Molenkamp, for experimental observation of quantum spin Hall effect

                                Charlie Kane, for topological Insulators

Pro:  Contains experiment

Con: So what?  This field has been driven much more by theory

Pro:   There is political force in the community behind this one

Con: There is political force in the community behind this one

 Case 3) Prize recognizes discovery of the Z2 invariant in 2D

                                Charlie Kane and Gene Mele for one killer paper.

Pro:  Very simple and focused

Con: Leaves everyone else out.

The 3D topological insulators, would be hard to recognize with a prize simply because too many people were involved both in the theoretical and experimental aspects of the discovery.   

If Topological Insulators is indeed awarded the prize, I will put in a blog post explaining what they are.   I might also add a story about sitting in a bomb shelter with Charlie Kane while being shelled by Hamas in Israel this summer.  And I might explain what this picture is about...

Late One Night at King's Cross

Now tell me this isn't real...

Awesome things from East Germany

The old state of East Germany is famous for a lot of things that are not very pleasant  --- the secret police, or Stasi, comes to mind as being the worst the country had to offer (the movie "The Lives of Others"  or "Das Leben der Anderen" gives an idea of how the Stasi operated --- it is a frightening but wonderful film).  Despite the bad things of the old east, one is forced to also admit that some very great things came from East Germany as well.  Some people are even nostalgic for the old East German times --- thus coining the modern German portmanteau "Ostalgie"  (from Ost, meaning East, and Nostalgia). 

Even from a western perspective there are some unquestionably awesome things that were produced by East Germany.  Katarina Witt, perhaps the most popular ice skater ever, comes immediately to mind.   A bit more obscure, but certainly just as awesome, is the legendary Ampelmann: the hat-sporting character on East German pedestrian traffic lights.  The Ampelmann has now achieved cult status ---  with entire stores in Germany devoted  to selling products, such as tee-shirts, bearing his likeness  (you can also order Amplemann products on the web, here). 

Here are closeups of the Amplemann in his two possible poses. 

And in these two photos below, I have crossed a street in Berlin at the kind direction of the Amplemann. 

Now to finish off this blog post, I think it would be entirely appropriate to post photos of Katarina Witt.  My younger brother is a big fan (he just loves Olympic skating) and I thought that maybe, if I post some pictures of her, he might actually read my blog. 

This is Katarina Witt in her gold-medal-winning Carmen routine from the 1988 Olympics in Calgary (she also won gold in 1984 in Sarajevo).  I remember watching that performance.  She was stunning (here is a video of it, or here).  She also earned some international cred by being completely unimpressed with famed slalom gold-medalist and lady's man Alberto Tomba.  After he declared publicly that he would woo her at the Olympics, her only response was "I don't think he knows very much about figure skating."

And this is Ms. Witt, a few years later, and off the ice.    She certainly looks a lot better than Alberto Tomba. 

The Death Star?

This picture on the left appears to be the reactor core of the Death Star.  Looking down into the hot blue nuclear furnace, this reminds me of the scene where Obi-Wan has to disable the tractor beam so that the Millennium Falcon can escape the clutches of the evil empire (shown on the right).  

Actually the picture on the left is not really from Star Wars.  It is a photo from the inside of the Reichstag Dome in Berlin looking down into the debating chamber of the Bundestag below.   The blue things are the seats of the Bundestag.  

The symbolism of the dome, which is open to tourists, is that the people should always remain above the government.  And the futuristic design is supposed to symbolize that Germany is moving into the future away from its ugly past.  (These interpretations are gleaned from Wikipedia.   I am not wise enough to be able to interpret architecture on my own.)  

While I like the idea of having such symbolism, you might think the architect, Norman Foster, might have designed something that looked a bit less like the inside of the Death Star (he also designed London's futuristic Gherkin).   On my visit to the Reichstag Dome, I half expected R2D2 to come running around the corner at any moment. 

And in this photo, my friend Sabine is contemplating making a jump to the control tower so that the X-wing fighters of the Rebel Alliance can escape the tractor beam.

May the Force be with her!




Added: How could I have mentioned the death star without posting a link to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5iEK-IEzw

Getting Your Degree

If you come from an American school you are probably used to the idea that graduation occurs once per year on some random weekend day in May or June, during which the college town overflows with family and friends.

But this is not how it works at Oxford.  There are something like a dozen degree ceremonies per year.  Once you have been given permission to graduate (or if you are a DPhil, it is called "leave to supplicate", which strictly speaking means, "permission to beg" for your degree), you then have the right to sign up for a ceremony.   This can be shortly after you finish, or could be many years later.   It is not at all unusual for people to return to Oxford to finally collect a degree they earned twenty or more years ago.


In September, a whole bunch of my recently finishing undergraduate students decided to collect their degrees together.   This most excellent bunch, having (most of them) started four years ago this week and finished this past June, is the first set of students who I have seen through from their first year to their last. So I admit that I am particularly attached to them.    I came to the ceremony just to wish them well, and of course, to take their pictures!

.. and here they are!

Apologies for the fact that some of the pictures are not great.   Extra points if you can spot the portrait of Mary Somerville, the namesake of our college.

Nice Optics

One thing that is actually nice about all the light drizzle around here is that you get quite a few good rainbows. (For those who might not recognize it, that is Keble College on the right and the Clarendon lab of the physics department straight ahead). 

Just as I was taking this photo my colleague John Chalker came up behind me and said "Don't let anyone see you doing that, or they might force you to teach optics!"  

Nobel Bets 2012

It is that time of year again when the brightest of the brightest lie awake at night wondering whether they will get that elusive call from Stockholm.  For the rest of us, it is that time of year when we place our bets and take our chances.

Official betting odds have the Higgs boson as the heavy favorite.  See the official odds here.  The odds stand at roughly 1 in 3 that the prize will be somehow related to the Higgs.  Although at least seven people have some possibility of being included in this prize, the favorite combination appears to be Higgs and Englert. 

That said, betting odds are not everything.   The betting odds for Bob Dylan winning the literature prize are now almost 1 in 10.   However, these odds have apparently been artificially pushed up by many people who like the idea of putting their money on the rebellious bard.   (Still, Murukami remains the odds-on favorite for literature).

So do I think Higgs will win the prize?  Yawn.  Yes, I think that is probably the best bet for this year.     (The atlantic monthly says it is a sure thing). 

Reuters, however,  is betting against the Higgs.  They have listed three alternatives here.

1. Photoluminescence in Porous Silicon, Leigh T.  Canham.   Yawn.   Yes, this started a big field, and has been cited many times.  I just don’t think it is interesting enough.  

2. Slow Light, Steven Harris and Lena Hau.  Yeah, this was pretty cool.  And it would be very nice to have another woman physics Nobel Laureate.   But again, I somehow don’t think this is a likely one.

3. Quantum Teleportation, Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, and William K. Wootters.  This one is interesting, and potentially possible.  But I think it is slightly the wrong combination.  The teleportation paper was 1993 --- and it had seven authors.  I would instead choose Quantum Cryptography (which came first by many years) and award the prize to Bennet and Brassard (for their 1984 paper) along with Stephen Wiesner, for work in the early 1970s which had some of the key ideas in it.  In some ways the ideas that these guys were working on in the 70's and 80's really launched the quantum information field.   (Also Wiesner is an interesting character --- a bit of a hermit genius.)   

I still have my money on Higgs, but the quantum option an interesting one.

And who else should be on the list?   

For a number of years I've been saying Michael Berry for the famous "Berry Phase".  Yes, I know there were several previous discoveries of Berry Phase before Berry, but no one really nailed the issue  the same way that Berry did.    A possible combination (and one I'd really like to see) with Berry would be David Thouless.   I used to think Yakir Aharonov would be a good combination with Berry until I found out about this paper by Ehrenberg and Siday which was ten years before Aharonov-Bohm and has basically the same result.

Another one that no one besides me seems to think is likely is the discovery of neutrino mass by the Super-K collaboration.  I guess the problem there is that it is not clear which person (or people) would get the prize.  It is certainly deserving though.

Anyone else have opinions?

Shrunken Heads and Other Fun Things

When the British Empire spanned the globe, one thing they liked to do was to collect things from the outer reaches of the known world.   Lieutenant-General (pronounced "Left-tennant" here)  Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers  was particularly good at collecting things wherever he traveled.    His collection of, well, what his mother must have thought was complete junk, formed the basis of what became Oxford's Pitt River's (and natural history) museum.

While there are many many strange things in this museum, probably the most bizarre is the collection of shrunken heads or tsantas.     Here is one of the best looking of the collection   In case you can't read it, the sign behind it says "Scalp of an enemy painted red on the inside.  The holes round the edges indicate it has been stretched on a hoop --- N. American Indian"

They make these by removing the skin from the skull and then steaming the skin until it shrinks down to a tiny size.   Yuck.

Here is a photo of some more shrunken heads, this time with my hand in the photo so you get a size of how small they are.  The small guy on the bottom reminds me a bit of my brother when he is making his "vulture face".   It is hard to believe (and it is rather disgusting to think) that these were once people!





The museum is just filled with crazy stuff from all over the world.     If you've read the recent best-seller "Remarkable Creatures" by the author of "Girl with a Pearl Earring", you will be excited to know that many of the things collected by Mary Anning are in this museum as well. 

For those who have not read the book --- don't worry there is a movie being made.   If you can't wait for the movie,  Mary Anning was a fossil hunter in the 1800's who discovered some of the very first dinosaurs.  And although she was working class,  a spinster (a woman, for that matter), and not very well educated, she overturned the scientific establishment and became the world expert on fossils.  On the left are some of her smaller finds (The tag above says "Teeth of Large Marine Reptiles")

Among the other things they have in this museum is a huge collection of minerals.   I tried to get some good photos for my upcoming solid state physics book (very very close to done now!) but it turns out to be very hard to get nice photos of a rock.

The museum has a grand central hall filled with large dinosaur skeletons, large animal skeletons, stuffed animals, a stuffed (now extinct) dodo bird and countless other strange beasts.

On the particular day I visited the museum, two other animals were on display:

                                                                  


These are my parents.

Playing Tourist Part I

Last week my parents came to visit.  It was great to see them and it was really fun to do all the London and Oxford touristy things that one never does if one lives here.

For some of the visit my parents stayed in Oxford at my house (which, as mentioned here and here, I actually cleaned.)   For some of their visit, however, they stayed in London -- at a rather appropriate place  --- see the picture on the right --- I've always said that my family is a bit nutty!

One morning last week we went to the Imperial War Museum, which is a terrific collection of the history of  the UK during war.    They have a great (albeit depressing, as expected) exhibition on the holocaust.   They also have a terrific (and more upbeat) exhibition on MI5 and MI6 (James Bond stuff), and lots of interesting stories about soldiers.    Perhaps most interesting though is the huge collection of artifacts from the wars.


On the left here is a V2 rocket.  These things landed on London during WWII carrying thousands of pounds of explosives.   In some respects the Brits managed to outfox the Nazi's at every turn during the war -- but the V2 was one case where Hitler really had the upper hand --- there was just no defense against this thing.  It came in fast and silently and caused tons of damage.

 During the final years of the war, thousands of these things landed in England -- and thousands of people were killed by them.   Made by slave labor, interestingly enough, roughly one person was killed in the production of these devices for each person who was killed by them exploding on their targets.

Technologically, however, these things were a marvel.  Built by the young and brilliant Wernher von Braun, the V2 was the direct predecessor of almost every rocket ever built thereafter.  After the war, von Braun's Nazi history was secretly expunged and with false papers he was recruited to work for the US defense and space program.  His greatest achievement was the Saturn V rocket that put men on the moon.  He may be the only person who was both a hero to Nazi Germany and then many years later a hero to the US.

On the lighter side, here is a photo of a Sopwith Camel -- a combat airplane from the first world war.  Although I'm sure there were many bloody dogfights with this type of early aircraft, the Sopwith Camel is perhaps most famous now as being the airplane that Snoopy supposedly flew in combat against the Red Baron.



Here he is in action

Er... ok, maybe there is some similarity.... 

More on playing tourist later...

Some geek info

I'm posting this info because both of these computer things cost me hours of grief and I'm hoping by posting them and having them google searchable, others will not suffer.

(1)  Upgrading to mac-osx lion, I found that the x2go client would not properly detect the mac keyboard.  Go to settings, keyboard, and type in pc104 where it is default pc105.   This fixes the problem (at least for me it did).

I still have a few problems with x2go.  But logging into my linux box from my mac, I find that kde4 and LXDE run fine.  The other window managers still give me trouble and crashed frequently.

(2) Writing a program in gfortran or g77  in ubuntu 12.04:

I had trouble running the program if the program requires over 2Gb of RAM.  The computer has 6GB so this should not cause trouble.   This caused me half a day of grief.  The solution was first, to include the compile flag (this is expected)

-mcmodel=medium

But even then, when the program wanted more than 2Gb, the program would compile but not link.   I then installed binutils-gold which swaps out the linker for a newer (and faster) version, and it works.

I'm still hunting down some bugs, but for some reason when my program takes more than 2Gb of memory, I'm still getting errors when I compile using gfortran.  But it works fine under g77, so maybe I'll just stick with that.   If anyone cares to debug, here is my info:


$ gfortran -v
Using built-in specs.
COLLECT_GCC=gfortran
COLLECT_LTO_WRAPPER=/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.6/lto-wrapper
Target: x86_64-linux-gnu
Configured with: ../src/configure -v --with-pkgversion='Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5' --with-bugurl=file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.6/README.Bugs --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran,objc,obj-c++ --prefix=/usr --program-suffix=-4.6 --enable-shared --enable-linker-build-id --with-system-zlib --libexecdir=/usr/lib --without-included-gettext --enable-threads=posix --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.6 --libdir=/usr/lib --enable-nls --with-sysroot=/ --enable-clocale=gnu --enable-libstdcxx-debug --enable-libstdcxx-time=yes --enable-gnu-unique-object --enable-plugin --enable-objc-gc --disable-werror --with-arch-32=i686 --with-tune=generic --enable-checking=release --build=x86_64-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-linux-gnu
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.6.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5)

$ g77 -v

Reading specs from /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/3.4.6/specs

Configured with: ../src/configure -v --enable-languages=c,c++,f77,pascal --prefix=/usr --libexecdir=/usr/lib --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/3.4 --enable-shared --with-system-zlib --enable-nls --without-included-gettext --program-suffix=-3.4 --enable-__cxa_atexit --enable-clocale=gnu --enable-libstdcxx-debug x86_64-linux-gnu

Thread model: posix

gcc version 3.4.6 (Ubuntu 3.4.6-6ubuntu5)

(the old linker) 

$ld.bfd -v

GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu) 2.22

(the new linker) 

$ ld -v

GNU gold (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu 2.22) 1.11

Cleanliness is next to...

I'll be honest.  I'm a slob.   I've always been a slob.   My house usually looks like a disaster area.    Sometimes (like in this post) this causes problems.   

However, this week, my parents are coming to visit --- all the way from the U. S. of A --- and I promised them a clean place to stay.   So, although it took a lot out of me --- I vacuumed, I dusted, I organized (gasp) I cleaned!  (... as if this were something to report to the media).

On the left is a view of the sofa in the living room.  It is a nice piece of furniture when it is not covered in the usual mess.   Now I can actually sit on it without causing a landslide (this makes me the sofa king?)  Notice that you can actually see the floor through the glass coffee table.  For me, this is unusual.

I suppose I don't have to post pictures of every single room in the house, but it suffices to say that all of them have been made similarly tidy.  Even the garden has been ... well... improved at least.

For any of my friends who want to come visit, now would be a very good time to do so.  Presumably, the house will decay slowly back to its natural state of being a complete dump.   So if you want to come and stay in anything other than a dump, I recommend you do so now.

Having a clean apartment has resulted in some unexpected benefits.  On the right is a picture of my "office" (also known as "the other side of the living room").    Notice that you can actually see the surface of the desk.  That makes the desk functional.  Once I got everything functional again I decided it might be kind of cool to try working there instead of at the university -- and actually I kind of like it.  I wake up in the morning, I can go right to work, and I can stop to take a nap when I feel like it. In the last few days, I've been working here a lot, and actually I've been pretty efficient.

Maybe I'll turn over a new leaf and become a cleaner person.

Maybe. 

Calling all Linux Geeks

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my excitement over installing Linux 12.04.1.    (Non linuxers need read no further).

Since then, as luck would have it, for work I've been writing some code.  Although this is not something I do a lot of, I do need to do it occasionally.   This code, based on a program I wrote a few years ago, is about 10,000 lines --- not huge perhaps, but still enough to be a project.  Anyway, this gave me an opportunity to stress test 12.04.1 and see how much I like it when I have dozens of windows open at the same time:  editors, debuggers, octave, data analysis, as well as the usual assortment of browsers, skype, and you-tube videos of skateboarding dogs.

After some getting used to, I decided that the Unity interface is ok.  I installed the Gnome classic menu and then never touched the HUD or Dash or whatever they call that thing.  I suppose if I'm not using the Dash, I'm probably missing the whole point.

However, there was a major problem with Unity.  As I mentioned in my earlier posting, the killer-app for me was NXFree -- the world's best virtual desktop.  Wherever I took my laptop, I could access my home computer with ease -- even on a slow connection. Unfortunately, once I made the upgrade, NXFree broke.   Even with a fair amount of work, I failed to make NXFree function properly.    Fortunately, there is an alternate program, x2go which is based on the same nxlibraries and works just as well, and it did seem to still work correctly -- but not for the Unity interface.  As a result, I started trying different window managers to see which one I could learn to love -- so that I would get used to the same environment whether I was at work or at home.

Here is the list of the environments I tried so far (in alphabetical order).


  Cairo-Dock (Gnome + Effects)
  Cairo-Dock (Gnome No effects)
  Cairo-Dock (with Unity Panel)
  Cinnamon
  Enlightenment
  Fluxbox
  GNOME Classic
  GNOME3
  GNOME Classic (No effects)
  KDE Plasma Workspace
  LXDE
  MATE
  Openbox
  GNOME/Openbox
  KDE/Openbox
  Razor Desktop
  Razor Desktop (kwin)
  Razor Desktop (metacity)
  Razor Desktop (openbox)
  Ubuntu 2D (Unity 2D)
  Ubuntu (Unity)
  Xfce
  Xubuntu

Of these, my favorites (all which seem to work really well over x2go) are

  Enlightenment

  KDE/Openbox
  MATE

Does anyone have any other favorites I should try out?

Some Appreciation...

Probably the very best moment of the year for any teaching faculty member is the moment when the last lecture is over and the class applauds.  You are happy to just be done with another exhausting term;  but moreover, it is  really wonderful when students show their appreciation for your hard work, and for the subject.   

I should say at this point, that Oxford students are extremely good about showing appreciation of faculty.  (I suppose this should not have surprised me, but when I arrived here I was not expecting it).  The students always say "thank you" at the end of every tutorial.  Most of them really do seem to understand how much work teaching is -- and most of them do realize that they are very lucky to have so much personal attention from faculty members. 

One gets positive feedback in other ways too.  Of course there are the official student evaluations.  Mine are usually good ---  I work hard to make sure of it.   I take it very hard when even a single evaluation is negative.  Maybe I shouldn't care so much, but I do.

There can be occasional awards as well.   Last spring I was thrilled to be nominated as a finalist for a teaching award from the Oxford Student Union.  (Look here for details).    

And there are some random other ways students show gratitude.   This year, the graduating Somerville students got me a plant -- a bromeliad (wisely chosen because it is fairly hard to kill --- and so far it is still alive!).

... and then there are occasional creative types of appreciation:  After my last lecture last spring I found in my "pidge" (i.e., mailbox)  the picture shown above by an anonymous student.   The topic of the lecture was self-consistent mean field theory in magnetism.   (Note the magnet in the upper left hand corner, and the words "self-consistency" featured prominently.   Not sure what the flower is doing there though).   It is not a bad likeness of me, no?   It certainly made me smile.

The Dark and Evil Forest -- Redux

Keeping the plants in my backyard under control is a sisyphean task.  No matter how many weeds I remove, they seem to come back bigger and stronger.   Two years ago I wrote this blog post about my attempts to remove the overgrown nettles.   Despite hours of work, you will notice that the "before" and "after" pictures don't look all that different.

The following summer, I was even more defeated by the task.    Not only do the giant spiders hate me, but even the plants themselves hate me.   When my yard began to look like the amazon jungle, and the risk of wild animals roosting became too great, the college (who owns my house) kindly sent their gardeners over to clean up the mess.   On the one hand, I was very appreciative of help.  On the other hand, I felt very bad giving the college gardeners extra work  --- they do a wonderful job with the college grounds, and they really don't need an extra yard to deal with.

So this summer, after all my travels were done, I decided that I would take serious aim at the backyard.  I learned a few lessons from my previous attempts.

Lesson 1.  Get thicker gloves.
Lesson 2.  Always keep the giant spiders where you can see them.

So prepared, I spent the last few afternoons filling about 20 large trash bags with weeds.   Here are the before and after photos. 

Can you tell the difference this time? 

PS: broken link is now fixed. 

This week in awesome

This is so cool

http://io9.com/5937052/this-beautiful-video-about-parabolas-will-100-blow-your-mind?tag=this-is-awesome

This got me hooked on Vi Hart's videos.http://vihart.com/doodling/

She is my new hero.

Small World

Last Sunday I flew into Incheon Airport from Heathrow on an overnight flight. Tired, and a bit disoriented, I got off the plane, walked through customs out into the lobby, and I started trying to figure out how I was going to get a bus to my hotel in Seongbuk. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, someone I know is standing in front of me ``Steve Simon what are you doing here?”

The person in front of me was Randy Giles, a colleague from my Bell Labs days. Randy was one of the star research directors and I remembered (albeit only after he reminded me) that about the same time as I left Bell, he was tapped to head the newly formed Bell Labs Korea branch. Honestly though, if someone had asked me last week “who do you know who lives in Seoul”?, I would not have been able to come up with a single name (save Kwon Park who was organizing the physics conference I was attending this week at the Korean Institute for Advanced Studies). The fact that I ran into Randy in the airport was quite a coincidence. It is indeed a very small world.

As it turned out, Randy had come to the airport to pick up the president of Bell Labs, Jeong Kim, who was visiting Korea for the week. Jeong’s flight landed only a few minutes after mine, and he found us after I had been talking to Randy for only about two minutes. Jeong remembered me too (“Yes, you are the Quantum Guy”). They very kindly they offered to have their extra driver take me to my hotel rather than have me struggle with the bus system. They also invited me to come by the labs, give a talk, look around and meet some of the team.

 On Wednesday afternoon there were no talks in my conference, so I arranged to head over to Bell Labs. I gave an impromptu talk on topological quantum computation. Being that Bell still has a few people working on this subject, I thought it certainly wouldn’t hurt to promte the field in general. The talk went over well I think –-- even though the audience was a mix of computer scientists, network scientists, engineers, and only one physicist. After this I spent some time chatting with one of their engineers on the subject of MIMO communications –-- a flashback to one of my previous research lives (I took the opportunity to point out this paper –-- which is one of my favorite nasty calculations).

I joined the members of the lab for a nice dinner. As it turned out, one of their ranks is leaving this week to take a job at a university and they were having a little farewell party that night. At dinner, I made a special request for a bibimbap. I realize this was like saying “I really need to have a burger” when you are in a three star restaurant --- bibimbap is really considered to be student-food, or even drunk-food. But I like the stuff, and while I could get a good bibimbap in New York on 33rd street, I have not had any since moving to the UK. Being that my time in Seoul was running out, I was not to be denied a good bibimbap --- and the restaurant did not disappoint.

Low Pants

When you travel a lot you get fairly good at packing.   You know what you have to bring and you rarely forget anything important.   However, on my last trip (to Seoul), I somehow forgot to pack a belt, and for the entire week  --- no matter what I did, my jeans kept falling down.  Among physicists no one really cares, but out in public I looked like an extremely schlumpy professor, or maybe I looked like I’m trying to be a bit too hip-hop.   I fear that this is how it starts… pretty soon, I’ll go entirely one way or the other. 

On Physics Culture

This comment was left on my blog by "Anonymous", but i wanted to give it a bit of attention:


***

Hey Steve, 

I wanted to solicit your thoughts on a topic. Physics has a culture . I thought of this when looking at this post about the conference. Going to the board. Working with other people--thinking on the fly--at the board. The value of scribbling together.  Taking walks. The value of re-presenting someone else work in a new form. The value of articulating a problem. The low value placed on facts--the you could look that up feeling. the way of writing down ideas to make intuition clear--the feynman style. There are so many things. I work in Biology now, and there is a very different culture where these things are absent. Boards dont even exist. Everything is power point. And everyone constantly talks about facts--facts first--always can you be more specific--can you make that concrete. I really feel that these cultural attributes have contributed to the success of physics--and I dont want them to be lost in a world dominated by engineering disciplines and biology. In fact, biology has not really been successful given all the resources it has--and I feel that part of this is the intellectual tradition.



***

While I do think the interactive physics culture of  bouncing ideas around is extremely productive (and fun), I'm not sure one can conclude that it should be appropriate for all fields.    There must be some amount of Darwinism of cultures in the various branches of sciences --- if this culture worked in other fields, people would adopt it more.   Conversely, the reason other fields have other cultures is probably because their culture is effective for their fields.    

Admittedly there are some pieces of culture that continue for not-so-good reasons (e.g. powerpoint) but still, there must be something to the fact that the different fields operate differently from each other. 

On the side, I'm not sure it is fair to conclude that "biology has not really been successful".   While there are immense unknowns in biology, it is also true that the progress that has been made in biology in the past fifty years is really mind-boggling.