A few thoughts

Clearly blogging has slowed down now that I’m back into the swing of research. Here are a few minor non-research things that have transpired…

Free coffee? While attempting to read a thesis by a professor here, I came across an interesting line in the acknowledgments in which he thanked “the labours of the coffee and tea pickers whose efforts kept me awake long enough to produce this document”. Here’s a thought: athletes and celebrities receive inordinate amounts of free stuff - and of course, money - to endorse certain products (I presume). Why can’t physicists and other scientists do the same? For example, if Red Bull or La Colombe ran full-page ads in Nature along the lines of “Ed Witten drinks Red Bull - do you?” or “Andrew Wiles: turning La Colombe coffee into theorems”, I’m sure their sales would increase significantly. (I venture that no other single demographic consumes more caffeine.) And of course, they could give the individual/individual’s department free coffee and/or funding in return. It’s a win-win situation.

De Gennes dies: There’s not much I can say that hasn’t already been said (see this NYT article, for example). I’ve had the pleasure of delving into two of his books, the seminal Physics of Liquid Crystals - note to self: learn more about the connections between superconductors and liquid crystals - and the perhaps lesser-known Petit Point: A Candid Portrait on the Aberrations of Science. The latter is a rather interesting book, with very short chapters describing fictional characters based on scientific individuals. The sole reviewer of the book on Amazon claims to be able to identify Benoit Mandelbrot, Brian Josephson and Bernd Matthias in the various characters; my own hunch is that the chapter on “Chazot” is autobiographical in nature (the last line, “…in the end, Chazot’s real vocation is perhaps to give talks to high school students”, pretty much gives it away).

Blog-related: Henry Cate of the Why Home School blog is kicking off a carnival of space, which is a great idea (don’t know what a blog carnival is? See here.) Here are the archives, here is this week’s carnival, here’s the announcement, and most importantly - here’s how to submit a post for inclusion. Go for it!

And, in other news, Arunn of n0noscience and Rod of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations have both tagged me as being a ‘thinking’ blogger, which is a wonderful honor. I’m supposed to link to five other blogs that make me think, but it’s tough; the best I can do is link to the list of blogs I follow when I can since they’re all interesting.

Information theory: Cover and Thomas’ Elements of Information Theory (2nd ed.) is a really, really good book. Sadly I haven’t been able to read as much of it as I’ve wanted to, but it’s been a fascinating fusion of mathematics, physics, and computer science.

Pseudo-book review: Edward Tufte

(from ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’, Edward Tufte)

Perhaps best known in some circles for his scathing critique of Microsoft Powerpoint, Edward Tufte is the Leonardo da Vinci of data, as the New York Times put it, and his self-published books (the newly released Beautiful Evidence or the all-time classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) are quite elegant.

Tufte isn’t just about making things look pretty - the epilogue of the latter book (excerpted above) says it best: “what is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity… that is, the revelation of the complex.” There are more books, too, but those are the two that I came across recently, and the thing is, he really means it. This man is in the business of taking data, getting rid of everything extraneous, superfluous, and distracting, presenting it in the most honest and unassuming form possible, and doing it in as accessible and user-friendly a way as possible. And you know what? Among other things, this is the business of science, too - to take good data, and force it reveal its secrets. Although Tufte comes from a social sciences background, I think his work is invaluable to any experimentalist, at the very least.

Book Review: The New Physics

The New Physics For the Twenty-First Century
Gordon Fraser, Editor (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Gordon Watts had a post a few days ago on undergraduate physics curricula, noting that:

The biggest complaint I hear over and over is that we aren’t teaching enough modern physics to our students. By modern I don’t mean quantum mechanics (which is typically called modern physics), but, rather, I mean recent discoveries. Dark matter/energy. Applications in condensed matter. Materials. Basically, the stuff we do for research, or did perhaps 20 years ago (and so is well established at this point). I think everyone agrees with this basic idea.

Here at Penn, we have a new class that is offered every two years that attempts to fill this need that goes under the rather dull name of “Intro to Research” (I took it as a sophomore). The idea is simple: professors from the department give two or three 1.5 hour lectures on their research, going into a significant amount of depth along the way. The goal is to expose undergraduates to what ‘real’ physics is - an idea I consider not only good, but essential, if only because some students need to be shown that ‘real’ physics research isn’t all just dry, pointless derivations or stuffy textbooks. Real physics is exciting, and that point often gets lost amidst weekly problem sets. Grading is done using homework assignments based on the lectures, and a presentation/paper that students have to prepare on another topic of their choosing that researchers are working on.