MIT Theory Retreat

Hello all, I just got back from the MIT Theoretical Physics Retreat, at the common man inn in New Hampshire. I had anticipated an absolutely terrible time, after gazing the schedule and seeing that they included ten hours of physics talks and only four hours of recreational time. Luckily, the speakers this year were pretty good.

Firstly, there was Dr. L. Mahadevan (appearently L stands for something asymptotically unpronouncable) whose lecture was titled "Shape, flow, motion (and locomotion): physics at the kitchen table and beyond." It could have been renamed "Folds and Wrinkles, and Why I Like Them". Sounds pretty lame? Well no, this dude was absolutely crazy about folds and wrinkles and their non-linear behavior. He really loves wrinkles. That kind of enthusiasm can rub off and almost make learning about the characteristic length scale of curtain folds for five hours enjoyable.

The second speaker was Max Tegmark of MIT, one of our new faculty members. He spoke about cosmology, dark energy, dark matter, and the CMB. I thought his talks were absolutely fantastic, as I have little exposure to cosmology and would probably like to do more with it in the future.

Dr. Tegmark also happened to be a good skiing partner. Out of the thirty or so people who went to the retreat, only six ended up going downhill skiing during our "recreational time" (leave it to a group of theoretical physicists to skip the one fun part of the retreat). I managed to almost get frostbite by giong down the mountain without any gloves. My hands still kind of hurt. It was idiotic.

but anyway, now I'm in chicago, relaxing with my girlfriend, so I probably won't post again for the next few days...

Part I over, for now

Whew, well I just finished the five hour extravaganza that is Part I of the physics general. I thought it was pretty hard. There's a good chance I failed, but we'll see. I was feeling OK until I saw a friend after the test who said "I'm glad you thought it was tough, I thought it was easy." Not a cool thing to say after a five hour test extravaganza.

Now I'm back to being directionless in life, watching "Not Another Teen Movie," on comedy central and slugging down a beer. The movie happens to be terrible.

Tomorrow I'll be going on a CTP (Center for Theoretical Physics) "ski retreat". The quotes are there because I was led to believe it was a ski retreat, signed up, and then got the schedule. I count ten hours of physics talks and four and a half hours for "recreational time". We'll see about that.

On a good note, here's a nice article in the times about the "year of Einstein". It's especially good because it mentions and quotes my good friend Helen, who planned and calculated the "Einstein Flip".

Topological Quantum Field Theory

Sorry for the long absence, my time has been taken up for (perhaps futile) prelim studying. I got the course outline for the first half of my upcoming quantum field theory course. Roman Jackiw is teaching the first half, and not surprisingly the course is devoted to the topological aspects of quantum fields. I imagine the Jackiw anomaly will be included.

This is fantastic, particularly because I'd like my research to be somewhere in the interesection between physics and geometry/topology. A question for all of you: does anybody do this NOT in the context of string theory? If so, is doing a graduate thesis on the topological aspects of QFT a career death sentence?

Hilarity

I stole this hilarious comic directly from Johnny Logic .

Animosity in Academia

A few weeks ago, a buddy of mine told me about the anthropology department at Berkeley. Apparently, there are professors in the department who disagree with each other so much that the grad students of one professor may not be able to walk the corridors near the office of a professor with an opposing theory.

Now, I can sort of understand this kind animosity in an anthropology department, where people (in a certain respect) are free to make up whatever, but the beauty of physics is that eventually we will find a right answer. We're all looking for it, why not sit down and try to communicate to the other side peacefully and amicably?

Most of the communication between the stringists, the loopists, and and the anti-stringists seems to amount to the latter two calling the former stupid or foolish, and vice versa. Do you guys really think that a large portion of academia is "stupid"? Can we agree on the fact that string theory may or may not be right, and that loop quantum gravity may or may not be right, and that we should probably open more areas of research just in case neither are right? Can we agree that while the issue is unresolved, people should probably be working on all three roads?

What's the matter with all of you? You all have some of the best jobs in the world: you get to sit there, think about things that interest you, and get paid for it!

Here's my vision: a conference where all string theorists, loop gravity, and anti-string people get together. There would, of course, have to be a bit of alcohol at this conference. Everybody would pair up into groups of three, get some beers and talk/argue. Perhaps at the end a stringist would begin to understand why a loopist likes his ideas about quantum gravity, or an anti-stringist could convince a stringist that we need to open more alternatives towards a unified particle theory.

Eventually, everyone would get so drunk that we'd need a way to resolve disputes. I propose inflatable suit sumo wrestling. It consists of putting on a large sumo suit and trying to force your opponent out of the ring. Now, I've only suit sumo wrestled once, but I can attest to the fact that it's a great way to vent anger and frustration.

Here's what I picture:

S.G.: Where's your unified theory now, Witten?
E.W.: GArr, ya scurvy Glashow, get in the sumo ring!

Sure, nothing would actually be resolved, but at least we'd all have a good time.

Generals, Ugh

So unmotivated today. Need. To. Study. For. Generals. I can't seem, though, to get myself away from TNT's primetime in the daytime. Perhaps we'll call this day a loss and update my website and blog. Can't wait till post jan 25...

To Sell Out or Not to Sell Out?

Well, I started this blog with the intention of writing in it at least semi-frequently, but so far have failed. Hopefully it will pick up. According to Jerrywill, the first posts are what build the momentum of the blog, let's hope that's not true...

Two days ago, I went to a fantastic talk "From Theoretical Physics to Quantitative Finance," given by Mark Mueller. Apparently this guy got his Ph.D. at Stanford (working under Sussikind), then did a post doc at the IAS during the second superstring revolution. Then, at a loss for finding junior faculty positions, he defected to quantitative finance for a firm (Morgan Stanley?) in New York that has a habit of employing ex-physicists and mathematicians (apparently, though, all the other firms do too).

The talk could have been titled "How to Sell Out With a Physics Ph.D.," which was great, because I was looking for information about exactly this, but it's not really couth (not a word) to go around physics departments asking this sort of thing.

He first went over the basics of microeconomics, then started to explain the skill set common to both theoretical physics and quantitative finance (what you'd expect--calculus, statistics, linear algebra). The Black-Shoals equation, which is a model for the pricing of derivatives, is actually just the heat equation with a drift term.

Anyway, his work seems to be coming up with models for pricing this and that, making models in a similar way that the theoretical physicist makes models. The research also seems to be organized into "groups," like academia. This gives me hope that selling out might not be as colossal of a bore as I have always thought.

He ended with the question "should you sell out?" . Of course, he concluded that it was a deeply personal matter, but noted, of course, that the money in quantitative finance is WAY better.

On the low days, quantitative finance seems like a better and better option. From where I'm standing, theoretical particle physics seems pretty dead (and oddly, overpopulated). But on the good days, it's what I love to do and can't imagine doing anything else. But then there's the money to consider...

I have at least five-ish years to figure it out!

David's First Real Post

Hello everybody! Welcome to my blog. It is intended to be a diary of life in general, but mostly of a life of a theoretical physics graduate student at MIT. I took my inspiration from Lubos Motl's blog (whose title i egregiously copied), who chronicles life as a string theorist at Harvard.

Certain to be prevalent themes: bitching about MIT, trying to pass prelims, and deciding if string theory is really true (and something I should do).