Albert Einstein Action Figure

"Dressed for intense classroom action, this Albert Einstein Action Figure stands with a piece of chalk in his hand, poised to explain relativity or do battle with the forces of entropy. Fits in nicely with any office, cube or dorm decor and features realistic disheveled hair! [...] Sure he might not have been able to fly, breathe underwater or emit spider webs from his wrist - but he could melt your mind in a heartbeat with just a single attempt at explaining the Universe to you. Now that's power! Your Albert Einstein action figure measures 5-1/4" (13.3 cm) tall and is made out of hard vinyl. Illustrated blistercard included!" As seen on ThinkGeek.com

Wow, physicists action figures, this is an idea with potential! I am thinking Lisa Croft and the Nima Turtles, heroically fighting the instabilities of warped passages and infrared catastrophes!

ThinkGeek.com has the largest selection of things the world doesn't need I've ever seen. Like Great Scientists Finger Puppets ('They also feature a magnet sewn into their brains, so [...] you can literally put their heads together for an all night brainstorming session'), Caffeinated Soap ( 'each bar of Shower shock contains approximately 12 servings/showers per 4 ounce bar' ) , or Collapsible Chopsticks ('The white ash used to make the wooden tips comes from recycled baseball bats'). My favourite is a knife holder called 'The Ex' ( "Overall, we'd say The Ex Knife Set is very cutting edge!" )

You also shouldn't miss this important insight into Einstein's Dreams.

Physics Blogs

The January issue of Physics World has several interesting articles about how the 'Brave New Web' is influencing research in physics. Besides an article about 'The open-access debate' (authors pay instead of readers), Sean Carrol from CV tells us why he is 'Blogging for Physics' and Martin Griffiths writes about 'Talking physics in the social Web'.

In the latter article, some interesting points are raised that I briefly want to comment on.

What blogging can do

Sometime in the late 90ies I read an article about the - then new - phenomenon of the world wide web. The author wrote that one shouldn't be surprised that emails, chats, and personal homepages have incredibly boosted the interest in personal computers, and catapulted it out of the nerdy corner. The reason is simply that most people aren't interested in computers. They are interested in other people¹.

Blogs have contributed significantly to enhancing the interaction between users of the world wide web. Blogging is a very easy to use, and widely accessible tool to share thoughts, interests, and experiences. Similar to online forums, it is useful to connect people with common interests, to discuss questions, and exchange helpful references or advises. But in contrast to an online forum, the blog's content is filtered by the author, who is in power of the discussion, and who dictates the direction in which the story evolves. In this way, he or she collects people in his sphere of thoughts. In contrast to personal homepages, blogging allows for feedback and interactions with the visitors.

That people are interested in people is of course also true for physicists, most of which I know are human as well. Writing a blog is useful to establish contacts worldwide to people with similar interests. Developments of search engines, and features like tagging, feeds, and trackbacks make this work very efficiently. I'll give you an example. I've had a personal homepage since 1997. In these 10 years, I've had roughly 60,000 visitors. This blog isn't even one year old. Now look at the counter in the sidebar, and google Hossenfelder. Astonishing, isn't it?

Physicists writing about their every day life in a blog do communicate to a broad audience what this profession is about, and what it isn't. I feel that this has been severely neglected in the past, and I think that writing a blog gives the readers a good impression what it actually means to be a physicist². This can be very helpful for those who want to decide on what major to take, whether to make a postdoc, are interested how the situation in fundamental research is on universities or private institutions, or what really happens in a laboratory. Blogs also do a good work in making research results accessible to the non-expert by providing plain-text summaries of reserach papers. A big advantage of online articles over the printed media is here that the specialisation of the text can be kept flexible by adding links to further references.

Funding decisions basically reflect the relevance that our work is believed to have for the society we live in. Therefore, I find it very important to tell about the fascination and the excitement of our work, but also to report on the problems that our profession faces.

Besides this, blogs do of course distribute news, they do so very fast and efficiently. That is, if you're bored and sitting in your office chewing on a pencil, they are a nice distraction.

To summarize, blogging in physics is:

• Useful to find and connect people with common interests, also on the expert level
• Useful to share references and advises
• Useful to distribute news
• Useful to make reserach results accessible to the laymen^*
• Useful to communicate what physics is, and how it works
  

What blogging can't do

Blogs do distribute news, but they also act as a filter on these news. Why and how some stories get amplified and others don't is still a mystery for me, and also a reason for caution. One shouldn't misinterpret the attention that is paid to some topics and not to others. Very often, people don't comment on the actual story, but on somebodies comment on the story (not necessarily because it was a very bright one). The reason for this is again: people are interested in other people, in what others think, and what mistakes they make. Also, many who aren't experts on the topic just pass on things they've read elsewhere, and what seems like a lot of contributions are just echos of the same sentence again and again.

Obviously, blogs don't only profit, but also suffer from the online forum's diseases. Anonymity of comments tends to polarize discussions in a way that wouldn't happen in personal conversations. And since not everybody is very well in writing (or maybe just not very well in English), misunderstandings are unavoidable, esp. when it comes to humorously meant remarks.

"I can well imagine that blogs and wikis will become the framework for brainstorming and discussing ideas," says Gordon Watts of the University of Washington in Seattle. "It may even end up in some cases that ideas are fully formed on blogs and never make it into a preprint, let alone peer review." In fact, some have suggested that a framework based on blogs and wikis could be the basis of a new type of peer review." (from the mentioned Physics World article)

Even though I think that blogs can spark discussions about papers, lead to improvement, or actually develop ideas, I don't think they will become THE 'framework for brainstorming and discussing ideas'. For one, in most cases these discussions will end with a small circle of people going on in a comment section. This is about the same as having a collaboration with them per email, the only difference being that one has a neat timeline of the comments (instead of a messy inbox), and that the discussion is public. From a certain point of specialization on however (and from a certain amount of comments on), there will hardly be anybody reading through all of the discussion.

Pure 'virtual' collaborations can work, but are often frustrating. For me it is without doubts that collaborations work more efficiently when one spends at least some weeks in face to face discussions, with a blackboard nearby, and with a trip to the next Café every now an then. Though large parts of developing an idea can be worked out by email - or possible via a blog - I doubt this will ever become the first choice for researchers. After all, people are interested in people... ³

But there are also functions blogs can't and shouldn't fulfil. When it comes to reviewing papers, or developing ideas one has to keep in mind that a blog is usually maintained by one or a few persons, who are in charge of the posts as well as the comments. They are even more so when they run their own software. It is tremendously easy to modify posts after they are written, or to publish them with an arbitrarily chosen date. In a scientific debate this fluid change of information can be very confusing. E.g. consider somebody points towards a faulty statement, the post is corrected afterwards but without adding a note on this correction. Also, regarding the comments, there is the obvious problem of censoring contributions that the blogger just doesn't like. From the very construction, blogs just are not objective.

Regarding the peer review, I do think that online reviews can considerably improve the situation. Right now we have a tremendous amount of publications available, and it would be good to have a qualified rating on these. E.g. I have suggested before that the arxiv allows reviews and comments on the papers. This would also be useful to clear up the arxiv from papers like 'A comment on the paper ....' followed by 'A reply to a comment on ... ' and 'A comment to a reply to a comment on...', which seems to happen more often lately. For the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, doing this via trackbacks to discussions on blogs is not a good idea.

To summarize, blogs

• have a limited applicability for 'brainstorming and discussing ideas'
• are generally not objective enough to be a reliable source for scientific judgement
• suffer from the common online phenomena like 'what many people talk about, more people talk about' and anonymous comments
  

What this blog does

I am writing this blog because I've always liked to write about the topics that I am fascinated of on a general level, to communicate the excitement to a broader audience. It is very rewarding to get feedback on the topics, and encouraging that physics receives so much interest!

In the first line, I want to give you an impression what it is like to work in theoretical physics. Besides this every day life, there are topics that physicists care about but that aren't subject of their research papers, like the philosophical or religious implications, as also Sean has mentioned. And, as you might have noticed, I often use my blog to express my confusion about things I did not understand. (And, believe me, there are many things in this world I don't understand.) So, every time you let me know what you think, you help me understand a piece of this world.

I am not a news ticker, and I have no intention (and no time) to become one. Things I write about often aren't new but just newly summarized, and I hope this is useful - or at least entertaining - for the readers. After all, this blog is not so much about action, but about backreaction.

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Footnote 1: With the possible exceptions of the mentioned nerds, and those who are interested in why people are interested in other people.

Footnote 2: I've encountered quite a lot of sometimes funny, sometimes tiresome prejudices that stem from this lack of communication, as most people have a very distinct idea what physicists do. E.g. as long as I was working for universities, I've more than once heard the remark (comes with a wink) that I'm the eternal student who sleeps through the whole day and doesn't have to work because the government was dumb enough to give me a scholarship. The truth being that I didn't sleep through the day, but worked through the night, and there was a reason why I got the scholarship. Funny, eh?

Footnote 3: One should note that 'virtual' collaborations can considerably improve the situation for those who can't afford travels.

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TAGS: PHYSICS, SCIENCE, BLOGS

PLoS ONE: a new "interactive" scientific journal

The January 2007 edition of Physics World, the magazine of the British Institute of Physics, has several very interesting articles about the impact of the "Web 2.0" on publishing in physics. Topics discussed include the open access publishing models for physics journals, and "Talking physics in the social Web", about Blogs and Wikis in physics. This latter article cites a very nice quote by Sabine about the impression of the string theory debate that may emerge if blogs are the only source of information one relies on...

While the physics community has made first steps to combine the open-access papers on the arXiv with the blogosphere through the trackback mechanism, the Public Library of Science has launched a new online journal, PLoS One, where the option of an annotation and discussion of papers is built in right from beginning.

The Public Library of Science, PLoS (it is not related to the Proceedings of Science, POS, the SISSA-based open-access proceedings publication which has evolved from the proceedings section of the the Journal of High Energy Physics) was founded originally to provide open-access scientific journals, mainly in medicine and the life sciences, where something similar to the arXiv was not available. These journals are free to read for everyone, and peer-review and publication is paid for by fees of the authors of papers, and by donations.

This scheme also applies to PLoS One: Authors pay for the publication, and access to the journal is free for everyone. The special feature of PLoS One is that the reviewing process predating publication seems not to include an estimate of the relevance of the paper. The idea is to leave the judgement about the scientific merits of a paper to the readers, who are invited to leave annotations and comment in the paper, and (in a future stage) to rate it!


Example of a Paper with annotations at PLoS ONE

PloS One includes so far more than 100 papers, from Biochemistry (1 paper) over Diabetes and Endocrinology (6 papers) and Infectious Diseases (29 papers) to Virology (6 papers). From the current table of contents it is clear that the main focus is on medicine and biology, although there is even a section called physics. It's bemusing to see such a wide topic to be squeezed in one small division of the journal - the two papers are about The Sound Generated by Mid-Ocean Ridge Black Smoker Hydrothermal Vents and the Relationship between Thermodynamic Driving Force and One-Way Fluxes in Reversible Processes.

PLoS One promises to accelerate research, but to view and read the journal, a little patience will be a bonus, at least for the time being: The heavy use of CSS and advanced HTML (I guess) makes the rendering of the pages in the browser really slow.

However, I think this is an exciting experiment in scientific publishing, which will be very interesting to follow!

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TAGS: PHYSICS, SCIENCE, PUBLISHING, WEB 2.0

Interference

There is a lot of funny stuff I found in my old desk at my parents house! Among other things a 20 Mark bill... some 1000 Pesetas... a photo from me at Ipanema beach.... a truly ancient article from the Süddeutsche Zeitung (April 13th 2003) that a friend gave me, and which features Fotini Markopoulou talking about time not being continuous but quantized in Planckian units (I remember being relieved that there are people doing even weirder stuff than I, and thinking I didn't know they have cockroaches in Canada as well¹)... lots of trash... offprints of a paper I forgot I wrote... my old passport with the visa from Zimbabwe... a Miró postcard book, that is nice...

What else...? Aah, the CD from Queens of the Stone Age that I thought I lost in Tucson! And a laser pointer. This laser was extremely expensive at the time I bought it. Nowadays you get them as advertisement gifts. I exchanged the batteries and it still works.

If you have a laser pointer, try hitting a CD² with the laser... here's how it looks like:

(Click to enlarge)

Surprised?

Audio Compact Disk - An Introduction: "The CD disk is a 120 mm diameter disk of polycarbonate. The center contains a hole 15 mm in diameter. [...] The active data area starts at the 46 mm diameter location and ends at the 117 mm diameter location. The 46-50 mm range is the lead in area and the 116-117 range is the lead out area. Disks are written from the center to the outside [...]. A CD disk contains a long string of pits written helically on the disk. [...] Each pit is approximately 0.5 microns wide and 0.83 microns to 3.56 microns long. (Remember that the wavelength of green light is approximately 0.5 micron). Each track is separated from the next track by 1.6 microns.[...]"

To summarize this flash of information: the spacing between the tracks on the average CD is approximately the wavelength of visible light. That's why the CD separates the visible light into a whole spectrum and you see all the beautiful rainbows on it. The very clean and periodic spacing of tracks makes the surface of the CD act similarly as a multiple-slit, just that the light doesn't go through but is reflected back. You might have to fumble around some while before you find a good angle.

The multiple slit experiment is quite similar to the well-known double slit experiment, to which you find a brief introduction here, and an applet for a virtual experiment here. Roughly speaking, an incoming plane wave (the laser light) is split into two spherical waves centered around the slits. These interfere and cause a pattern of maxima and minima on the screen. For this to work, the distance between the slits and their width needs to have roughly the wavelength of the incoming light. The double-slit experiment was first performed by Thomas Young in the early 1800's and shows that light behaves like a wave.

The more slits there are in the experiment, the more the maxima are focused, and the less their peak intensity drops for the outside lying maxima. If you had an infinite series of slits, all the maxima would look equal. You can click yourself through various diffraction gratings on this website. The reasoning is the same if the light is reflected back: the reflection occurs in different angles, depending on how the incoming plane wave hits the tracks of the CD. The outgoing waves interfere and cause multiple maxima which you see in the photo above.

"I saw it during an optics course at Edinburgh University," wrote respondent Alison Campbell, an astronomer at St Andrews University. "The prof didn't tell us what was going to happen, and the impact was tremendous. I cannot remember the experimental details any more - I just remember the distribution of points that I suddenly saw were arranged in a diffraction pattern. Seeing the two-slit experiment is like watching a total solar eclipse for the first time: a primitive thrill passes through you and the little hairs on your arms stand up. You think this particle-wave thing is really true and the foundations of your knowledge shift and sway."

From: The most beautiful experiment

Further reading:

• Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments
• Young's Double Slit Experiment
• Wikepedia on the Double-Slit Experiment
• Thomas Young's Experiment
• Physics Web: The Double Slit Experiment

Ah, my husband is interfering with my blogging... his washing machine spin-dried itself towards death, so we have to go get a new one. Have a nice day!

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Footnote 1:

SZ: Was kommt der Menschheit zu Gute, wenn man die Zeit in Atome schneidet? (How does mankind profit from cutting time into atoms?)
FM: Hat es den Leuten geholfen, zu wissen, dass Materie aus Atomen besteht? (Did mankind profit from cutting matter into atoms?)
SZ: Es ist vor allem spannend. (First of all things it is exciting.)
FM: Und man hätte ohne die Erkenntnis keine Computer und 1000 andere High-Tech-Sachen erfunden. (And without that knowledge computers and 100o other high-tech-things hadn't been invented)
SZ: Keine Atombombe zum Beispiel. (And no atom bombs for example.)
FM: Auch die. (That as well.)
SZ: Haben Sie Angst vor dem Tod? (Are you afraid of death?)
FM: Nicht so sehr. Eher davor, etwas im Leben nicht versucht zu haben. Angst machen mir auch die dicken Autos hier in Nordamerika. Und Kakerlaken, die hasse ich wie die Pest. (Not so much. I am more afraid not having tried something in my life. And I am afraid of the fat cars here in North America. And cocroaches, I hate them like the plague.)

Footnote 2:

If you've all your tracks on the iPod, go ask your granny to help you out.

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TAGS: PHYSICS, SCIENCE, DOUBLE-SLIT, LASER, THOMAS YOUNG

Optimists

I read in the newspaper that Germans are unusually optimistic about the New Year! A full 49% of them think the New Year will be a good one, that's 11% more than last year. The reason for this might be that 2006 - for the 4th time in a row - Germany was the export world champion. But now that the New Year has actually begun, they are already back to complaining, in this case about the raise of the sales tax from 16% to 19%.

Speaking about optimism, I saw today that The Edge Annual Question — 2007 is

WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?
"The 160 responses to this year's Edge Question span topics such as string theory, intelligence, population growth, cancer, climate and much much more. Contributing their optimistic visions are a who's who of interesting and important world-class thinkers."

It is definitely worth having a look! You'll find a lot of familiar names on the list.

E.g. Leon Ledermann is optimistic about science education: 'a war we must declare and win: The War on Ignorance.'

Paul Davies is convinced that 'Some time before the end of the century there will be a human colony on Mars.'

David Deutsch tells us that 'failure is opportunity.'

Alexander Vilenkin uses the opportunity to advertise the multiverse: 'In my view, it is science [...]'

Lee Smolin is optimistic that 'new experiments [...] are likely to transform our knowledge of fundamental physics'

Lisa Randall is also 'optimistic that we'll learn something truly new and exciting about the fundamental nature of matter'. I give her the optimist award for the best writing, and the sentence 'I'm anticipating that society will increasingly recognize and understand the value of knowledge. People will want to make their own critical judgments, know more facts, and stop deferring to questionable authorities or visual media for their education. '

John Horgan is optimistic not about The End of Science, but the End of War: 'In fact civilization, far from creating the problem of warfare, is apparently helping us to solve it.' (See also The End of Physics?)

Frank Wilczek thinks that there will be no End of Physics, because he is optimistic 'that physics will not achieve a Theory of Everything'.

Leonard Susskind states that some humans have successfully rewired their brains 'beyond the things that natural selection could have wired it for' and is optimistic 'that we may be able to go beyond our Darwinian roots in other ways.'

Carlo Rovelli is optimistic that 'scientific thinking is growing in depth' and writes 'The number of people that have realized how much nonsensical is there in religion continues to increase, and no doubt this will help decrease belligerency and intolerance.'

And the nicest piece I find that by Brian Greene who writes so well I just can't delete a single syllable:

"As I help raise my two year old son, I witness a basic truth familiar to parents through the ages and across the continents — we begin life as uninhibited explorers with a boundless fascination for the ever-growing world to which we have access. And what I find amazing is that if that fascination is fed, and if it's challenged, and if it's nurtured, it can grow to an intellect capable of grappling with such marvels as the quantum nature of reality, the energy locked inside the atom, the curved spacetime of the cosmos, the elementary constituents of matter, the genetic code underlying life, the neural circuitry responsible for consciousness, and perhaps even the very origin of the universe.
While we evolved to survive, once we have the luxury of taking such survival for granted, the ability of our species to unravel mysteries grand and deep is awe inspiring. I'm optimistic that the world will increasingly value the power of such rational thought and will increasingly rely on its insights in making the most critical decisions."

And I? I am optimistic that we will accept the challenge of the world changing rapidly, and take it into account in political, sociological and scientific decisions to be made. I am optimistic that 'modern' civilizations recall that science is about the understanding of nature, and not in the first line about being internationally competitive. I am optimistic that I will write a couple of good papers this year, that I'll have fun with my blog, and that theoretical physics will see a lot of young optimists who'll learn how to sail despite some past storms in teacups.

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TAGS: PHYSICS, SCIENCE, OPTIMISM

Hunger Strike for Tenure

Here's how things look like Inside Higher Education these days:

Dec. 27: Professor’s Hunger Strike Ultimatum

"A professor who was denied tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has vowed to start a hunger strike on February 5 outside the provost’s office.

“I will either see the provost resign and my hard-earned tenure granted at MIT, or I will die defiantly right outside his office,” James L. Sherley, who teaches biological engineering, wrote in a letter to colleagues [...]."

Found via The World's Fair's post MIT professor denied tenure will start a hunger strike. Don't miss the comments on that post :-)

Is he also going to hold his breath until he turns blue?
Posted by: speedwell December 28, 2006 03:26 PM


Why is he waiting until February 5th? Does he have an incredible stockpile of holiday leftovers he can't stand to miss out on?
Posted by: Ashley Bone December 28, 2006 03:47 PM

Okay, okay, I admit, was just looking for an occasion to use this Dummy Book Generator.

KATRIN

What are these people staring at?

Here is what they see out of their window:

What is this?! No, it's not the preparation for the New Year's firework. This is the main spectrometer of the KATRIN experiment as it is transported through the small German city Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen. If you have a high bandwidth, you can look at the full video here (~35 MB).

KATRIN stands for KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino experiment, and is designed to detect the spectrum of the tritium beta decay with very high precision to directly measure the absolute mass of the electron neutrino. Keep in mind that neutrino-oscillations only measure mass-differences (for an elementary introduction, see here). In the beta decay, an electron is emitted together with the electron neutrino. The neutrino is hard to detect, therefore the measurement of the absolute mass with KATRIN is done by detecting the electron that is emitted, and measuring its energy, from which the neutrino mass can be extracted.

(Figure 6b, page 29)

The figure above shows the signature in the electron's spectrum for an electron neutrino with a mass of 1 eV in comparison to the spectrum in case the neutrino was massless. The distortion is statistically significant only in a region close to the endpoint of the spectrum of E₀ = 18.6keV. Since we already know that the electron neutrino's mass is very tiny, it requires such a huge spectrometer to resolve the spectrum of the electron's energy fine enough. The Design Report of the experiment says that they anticipate a sensitivity on the neutrino mass of 0.2 eV (90% C.L.) corresponding to a 5 sigma discovery potential for a mass of 0.35 eV.

The detector was manufactured by MAN DWE in Deggendorf, but then had to be brought to Karlsruhe, which is about 400 km away from Deggendorf. However, since the tank is too big for motorways, the spectrometer had to make a detour of almost 9000 km as shown on this map. You find much more information about the detector at this website.

See also: KATRIN moved

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TAGS: PHYSICS, NEUTRINOS, KATRIN

Happy New Year!

Dear Fellow Readers:

I wish you all a good start into the year 2007, whether you are with your family or on your own, whether you are on a sunny beach or stuck in snow knee-deep.

Sabine

Most interesting posts of the year (as measured by number of comments):

• The Principle of Finite Imagination (May 15th)
• Nonlocality (May 22nd)
• Science and Democracy I (June 12th)
• Science and Democracy II (June 27th)
• Stupid Title List (July 6th)
• Extra Dimensions (July 8th)
• Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong (July 10th)
• Neutrinos for Beginners (July 17th)
• Thoughts on the Anthrophic Principle (July 21st)
• Lee Smolin's Trouble with Physics (Aug 2nd)
• Micro Black Holes (Sep 22nd)
• The Inverse Problem (Oct 4th)
• Does String Theory explain Heavy Ion Physics? (Oct. 11st)
• The End of Physics? (Oct. 15th)
• Dark Matter (Oct. 22nd)
• More on AdS/CFT and RHIC (Nov 23rd)
• Book Cover Physics (Dec 3rd)
• Deformed Special Relativity (Dec 4th)
• The Satire Strikes Back (Dec 24th)
• Anomalous Alignments in the CMB (Dec 26th)

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"You only see what your eyes want to see
How can life be what you want it to be
You're frozen
When your heart's not open

You're so consumed with how much you get
You waste your time with hate and regret
You're broken
When your heart's not open
[...]

Love is a bird, she needs to fly
Let all the hurt inside of you die
You're frozen
When your heart's not open"

~Madonna, Frozen

The Common Microwave Background

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TAGS: PHYSICS, HUMOR, CMB

Cracked Pots

"An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole, which she carried across her neck. One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water, at the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

After two years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream. “I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house.”

The old woman smiled, “Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house.”

Each of us has our own unique flaw. But it’s the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding. You’ve just got to take each person for what they are and look for the good in them."


I'm having a slow time... so today I just wanted to share this beautiful story that I found on Tommaso's blog.

Flower graphics from Juelie's State Flower Garden of Gifs.

Anomalous Alignments in the Cosmic Microwave Background

I just answered a phone call for my parents. A very distant relative somewhere from the Northsea coast, who I vaguely remember having met sometime middle of the last century. She apologized that we didn't get a Christmas card this year (not that anybody had noticed) because her husband broke an arm (a-humm). When asked, I told her I turned 30 this year, upon which she exclaimed: OH MY GOD!

Now I feel really old. What helps in such a situation is to look at a picture of something even older. Like the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Since we've lately heard a lot about the high angular moments that allow us to determine the parameters of the LambdaCDM model, and since I'm already feeling low, let me instead tell you something about the low angular moments.

Basics

Back then when the universe was young and only 300,000 years old, radiation decoupled from matter and since then, photons could travel almost undisturbed. The CMB shows the temperature, or the inverse wavelength, of the microwaves that we receive on earth from this early times. This afterglow carries information about the conditions in the early universe which can help us understand the origin of the structures that we see today, and the processes that were important in this era.

We can draw the temperature of the received microwave signals on a map similar to how we draw a map of the earth. However, for the CMB, the orientation of the map is chosen such that the plane of the Milky Way falls on the equator.

The top figure to the right shows the temperature in a scale in which blue is 0 Kelvin and red is 4 Kelvin. What we see is the mean temperature of the CMB of 2.725 Kelvin. On this rough scale it looks very uniform.
The middle image is the same map displayed in a finer scale such that blue corresponds to 2.721 Kelvin and red is 2.729 Kelvin. The "yin-yang" pattern is the dipole that results from the motion of the sun relative to the rest frame of the CMB.
The bottom figure shows the microwave sky after the subtraction of the dipole. On this map, the hot regions, shown in red, are only 0.0002 Kelvin hotter than the cold regions, shown in blue. The red band in the middle is dominated by emissions from the Milky Way. (source)

What is usually shown in the CMB pictures is thus not the absolute temperature, but the differences between measurements taken in different directions, this is also called anisotropy - the deviations from isotropy.

An useful orientation in these maps is the ecliptic, that is the apparent path of the sun. If you draw it onto the sky map, the ecliptic will look like a lying S. The maximum and the minimum on that curve the are the equinoxes^*. On the days when the sun is on the equinox, there are 12 hours each of daylight and dark.

Advanced

The temperature anisotropies in the CMB have been measured with very high accuracy by the WMAP mission (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe). The full map contains a lot of very small structures, you find a picture here (notice the scale!).

If one wants to analyse this data, one takes all these fluctuations apart in less messy shapes, called multipole moments. This is a procedure that essentially decomposes the whole picture into simpler ones that add up to the full one. For scientific purposes one uses very specific shapes that are defined though functions, the so called spherical harmonics. These are labeled by two numbers one of which is called the multipole, and usually denoted with l. The first multipole is the monopole, followed by the dipole, the quadrupole, the octopole, and here I've exhausted my Latin.

The lower the multipole moment is, the simpler is its shape. You can look at a picture of the lowest multipole moments here. To describe how you have decomposed the full picture into the multipoles, you will need to specify the axis of these things. The higher the moment is, the more axis you have to specify.

The pretty picture below shows the octopole moment that is extracted from the CMB (the three year Internal Linear Combination map ILC123). Again, red indicates the hotter, and blue the colder areas.

The solid line is the ecliptic plane and the dashed line is the supergalactic plane. Also shown are the directions of the equinoxes (EQX), the dipole due to our motion through the universe, the north and south ecliptic poles (NEP and SEP) and north and south supergalactic poles (NSGP and SSGP).

Pros

The dipole moment is defined through one axis that intersects the sky sphere. For the quadrupole moment one needs to specify two axis. These span a plane, the plane has a normal which defines another axis (its the cross-product of the other two). The octopole comes with three further axis, and correspondingly three normals.

In the above figure, the quadrupole vectors are plotted as the solid red symbols. (Different symbols are results from different maps, the ILC123 analysis is shown as triangles.) The octopole vectors are plotted as the solid magenta symbols for each map. The open symbols of the same shapes and color are for the normal vectors for each map (see here for what the other symbols mean).

As you can see in the figure, the normals of the quadrupole and the octopole are quite close together and clump in the South-South-West. This anomalous alignment is unlikely at the 99.9% CL [3]. But even more puzzling is that they are aligned with the direction of the cosmological dipole and the the equinoxes at a level inconsistent with Gaussian random, statistically isotropic skies at 99.95%CL [3]. To put it it less technical, this means the probability that this happens just by coincidence is very small.

Also remarkable is how the ecliptic plane carefully separates the weaker power in the northern ecliptic hemisphere from the stronger power in the southern ecliptic hemisphere. This is known as the north-south asymmetry. The confusing thing about these results is that there is absolutely no reason why the CMB - if we understand it correctly - should be correlated with any features of our local solar system. These correlations have been confirmed in three year WMAP data[2].

There are several attempts to explain these anomalies, e.g. instead of using the standard Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric, one can consider anisotropic or inhomogeneous models, foreground effects, lensing effects, quantum gravitational imprints, non-trivial topologies of the universe, modifications of the gravitational potential that the background photons might experience (Rees-Sciama/Integrated Sachs Wolfe effect), scattering of the CMB (Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect), etc.

So far, it is not clear how the measurements can be convincingly explained...

Conclusions

I've learned quite a lot while writing this post. Maybe getting older isn't all that bad.

People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live...[We] never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.

~Albert Einstein, in a letter to Otto Juliusburger

Further reading

[1] On the large-angle anomalies of the microwave sky
Authors: C. J. Copi, D. Huterer, D. J. Schwarz, G. D. Starkman
astro-ph/0508047

[2] Can extragalactic foregrounds explain the large-angle CMB anomalies?
Authors: Aleksandar Rakic, Syksy Rasanen, Dominik J. Schwarz
astro-ph/0609188

[3] Mysteries on Universe's Largest Observable Scales
Author: Dragan Huterer
astro-ph/0608318

[4] The axis of evil
Authors: Kate Land, Joao Magueijo
astro-ph/0502237

See also: Multipole Vector Information

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Footnote: Is there somebody who could explain me why these are the extrema on the curve when the equatorial plane is defined through the Milky Way? Is this just coincidence?

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TAGS: PHYSICS, COSMOLOGY, CMB

Christmas Broadcast

Whatever Bee may think about the German public radio Deutschlandfunk, it is indeed my favourite radio station, with lots of interesting programmes. One special gem is the daily Kalenderblatt, a five-minute feature about some historical event related to the current date. This morning, the programme looked back on the first radio broadcast, 100 year ago on Christmas Eve 1906. You can listen to the programme (in German) here.

The early wireless communication technology invented and pushed by Guglielmo Marconi was based on electrical sparks creating bursts of radio waves. This was fine for transmitting Morse codes, but the signals used a very broad spectral range - it was not possible to tune in to a specific station as we are used to today - and could not be modulated to carry music or voice. The German word Rundfunk for radio broadcasting goes back to this technology: Funken is the German word for spark.


Reginald Fessenden, Radio Pioneer and Christmas Broadcaster (source)

The Canadian engineer Reginald Fessenden had the idea to use a continuous radio wave of a specific frequency as a carrier to transmit a signal. He constructed a high-frequency alternator that produced frequencies up to about 100 kHz, and experimented with this technology in 1905/06. His original idea was to build a wireless telephony system, to offer some alternative to the monopoly of the dominating telephone companies. He had to cope with some problems and drawbacks, but then, to cite from this paper:

Fessenden's greatest success took place on Christmas Eve 1906, when he and his colleagues presented the world's first wireless broadcast. The transmission included a speech by Fessenden and selected music for Christmas. Fessenden played Händel's Largo on the violin. That first broadcast, from his transmitter at Brant Rock, MA was heard by radio operators on board US Navy and United Fruit Company ships equipped with Fessenden's wireless receivers at various distances over the South and North Atlantic, and in the West Indies.
Fessenden and Marconi: Their Differing Technologies and Transatlantic Experiments During the First Decade of this Century, by John S. Belrose; International Conference on 100 Years of Radio, September 1995.

100 years is a long time ago, and for me today, used to sit comfortably on a sofa with my notebook and connected to the internet via WLAN, its is hard to imagine the world before radio broadcasting. But then, I remember my grandparents, my father's parents, who were just kids in 1906. They grew up in a world very different from today, to see so many things happen and change. What will be in 100 years from now?

Merry Christmas to all of you!

The Satire strikes back

It's always nice to be back home. Your family does so kindly remind you of your biggest faults, mine being that I can't keep my mouth shut.

Even though I was stuck in a boeing, I couldn't avoid noticing Scott Aaronson's offer

"I have therefore reached a decision. From this day forward, my allegiances in the String Wars will be open for sale to the highest bidder. Like a cynical arms merchant, I will offer my computational-complexity and humor services to both sides, and publicly espouse the views of whichever side seems more interested in buying them at the moment."

and so, here's my comment:

For those readers who don't know what the fuck he's talking about, let me briefly summarize the status Christmas 2006:

Physics can roughly be divided in experimental and theoretical physics. There's a sub-field of the theoretical part which is looking for the unification of the forces that we observe in nature. This unification is generally expected to also solve the question of how to quantize the gravitational sector. A sub-field of that sub-field of that part has an approach based on one-dimensional objects rather than, as currently used, pointlike objects. This sub-field of a sub-field of a part of the physics community has gotten a lot of attention over the last decade, you might have heard of them, they call their approach 'string theory'.

Since funding in scientific research, especially on the theoretical side, is far too short in Europe as well as in North America, it matters a big deal where that money goes, because people go where money goes. And besides chalk, notepads, and coffee, people is what theoretical physics is made of. Therefore, there's always discussion about who gets what amount of money. Presently, there are fairly many people working on string theory, and considerably less on other approaches, esp. regarding the holy grail of quantum gravity. On no front though, there's noticeable progress. Therefore, we found it's a good idea to start accusing each other of having failed, as to distract us from our every day work which isn't going anywhere.

In a time when public advertisement of research has come to play a role in the distribution of financial support, it is unfortunately quite common to point out the successes, and keep quiet of drawbacks. This doesn't only apply for string theory, but also for many other sub-fields of sub-fields, and I'd call that a consequence of capitalism infiltrating science. A mixture that imho is mutually incompatible, potentially fatal for both sides, and unsurprisingly far more advanced in North America. Look, there's a reason why academics have often been pictured as sitting in an ivory tower. That's because you can't just put your stupid equation on the stock market, advertise it, and if sufficiently many people buy your idea then you're on the cover of Times magazine and made it! Nature decides whether you're right, or you're wrong, and let's not forget, theoretical physics is not about the researcher - it's about understanding the universe.

Now it happened in 2006, that a well known blogger with the name Peter Woit published a book which gives a brief introduction into our quest for the theory of everything, and summarizes some weaknesses of the string theory approach. Overall seen I found the book kind of depressing, you can read my review here.

Only some months later, another guy with the name Lee Smolin published another book, which is less depressing on the scientific side, because he smartly advertises his own pet theories that have later been thrown together and dubbed 'alternatives'. On the sociological side, his book attempts to analyze the reasons for the present lack of progress, and comes to the conclusion that the current policy of financial support doesn't sufficiently guarantee independence of researchers. Which is of course absolutely right, the problem here being that hardly anyone read more of the book than the subtitle which contains the word 'string theory' in connection with 'fall of a science'.

The result of that then being a big fuzz about whether or not string theory is science, religion, or merely media entertainment. Some highlights of the discussion are definitely over on Clifford's blog, look for the teacup series. Repeatedly, string theorists have been pictured as a community blinded by science, suffering from 'group think' that makes them immune against criticism, with charismatic leaders that do little than ingeniously advertising themselves in the media. On the other side, repeatedly the very existence of 'alternatives' has been doubted, and people working on it have been called crackpots. The latter word being one of the most frequently used ones in this debate, so keep it in mind if you want to comment on something. Other words that are of importance here are: predictions, metaphysics, glub-glub-glub, falsifiability, and mountain climbing. As Sean over at Cosmic Variance proudly points out, he has given this debate the name 'string wars' which stuck.

As I've tried to communicate previously, it is of course complete nonsense that string theorists are somehow different from other theoretical physicists. Overall seen, in my experience, they are as smart, stupid, or stubborn as the rest of us, see e.g. my post about the inverse problem. To come back to the reason of this writing, Scott has met some of this species in person and, to his surprise, noticed that indeed they are fairly reasonable and some of them even nice. Now he's confused and wrote a post about his confusion, which contains the quotation above. As one might have expected, his post resulted in several responses, over at Cosmic Variance, at Not Even Wrong, and obviously at Lubos' blog.

Where I think Lubos took Scott's writing too serious, Scott himself maybe wasn't serious enough. I admit that his offer to support whoever bids the highest amount of money did upset me as well. This type of thinking is exactly what will kill science, and I don't find such a statement particularly amusing. Whether or not we support a research branch should not be based on the amount of money they are able offer. If you are a theoretical physicist, your decision to work on a theory should instead be based on a well qualified opinion on the status of that theory.

I have a lot of understanding for people who are in need of a job, and therefore agree to work on other peoples ideas, in many cases this is the bare necessity of life (especially when with family). The way the hiring process is dealt with right now is one place where I locate the problem: researchers are most often selected for a certain task rather than for their qualities. Especially when it comes to postdoctoral researchers, there is the constant need to work on a field where positions are, and a field that gives you the chance to find a position afterwards. In many cases this means you better do what your supervisor finds interesting, or you'll end up without a helpful letter of recommendation, or without prominent co-authors, or both.

However, there is another place where I locate the problem. It is definitely true that people go where money goes, but to a less degree - and with an unfortunate time delay - money goes where people go. Therefore, I have absolutely no understanding for people who sell their scientific opinion for money easily. If anything, then this is my indicator that ethics in science seriously needs to be thought over.

Each time you nod when you want to shake your head you kill a piece of science, each time you say 'interesting' when you want to say 'bullshit' you kill a piece of science, each time you sell your opinion for money, you push us deeper into the dead end. If you don't have an opinion, then say so, or keep your mouth shut.

Merry Christmas.

NORAD tracks Santa

In 1955, a Sears store somewhere in Colorado Springs run an advertisement for children to call Santa on a special "hotline". Unfortunately, the telephone number was misprinted. Instead of Santa, kids reached the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD ). The CONAD staff kindly provided dozens of children with their latest update on Santa Claus' appearance on their radar.

In 1958, the governments of Canada and the United States created a bi-national air defense command for the North American continent called the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) which inherited the Santa Claus tradition from CONAD.

In 2006, you can track Santa online on their website!

• http://www.noradsanta.org/

(Click to watch video)

Thanks to Andi for sending the link :-)

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TAGS: CHRISTMAS, NORAD

Home for Christmas

I was supposed to help my mother decorate the Christmas tree, but I sneaked away to tell you something about the Christmas tradition in Germany (version: how I know it).

Unlike in North America, in Germany Christmas is not celebrated on Dec. 25th, but on the evening of Dec. 24th. The German word 'Weihnacht' is better translated as 'Holy Night'. The official holidays though are the two following days.

(Figure: My mum decorating the Christmas tree. She's complaining they don't sell any longer tinsel made of tin or lead, but only aluminium which is too lightweight to hang properly. Originally, tinsel was made of silver.)

The maximal disaster is when the Holy Night falls on a Sunday, which means you are stuck with your family over the weekend and two more days during which shops are closed, restaurants are overbooked, and there is an endless amount of bad movies on TV (like usually all parts of 'Gone with the Wind' and the like). On the other hand, this means you might actually read the books you found under the tree about Feng Shui for your new apartment or something.

On the 24th, families often attend mass in the afternoon. Even those who usually don't, because it's kind of fun to see the children act the Christmas story. There, you meet all the neighbors and people you know from around town (who will inevitably tell you how you almost burned down the church when you were 6, or do you remember how you painted the school yard in 19-eighty something?)

Back from church, parents will have to occupy the children until 6pm. Presents are not brought by Santa Claus, but by the Christkind (see Lubos' nice post) and are put under the tree. I have no idea why, but for most people I know the Christkind comes at 6pm straight, and before this, grandparents are supposed to read stories, or children have to play Christmas songs on the piano (the only thing I can still play on a piano are these stupid Christmas songs that I had to practice from Easter on or something).

There is no real traditional dinner for Holy Night. My mum says, this year we'll have fondue. For lunch on Dec. 25th it's pretty common to have duck with red cabbage and dumplings.

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TAGS: CHRISTMAS, TINSEL

Stuck in a Boeing

*Yawn*

As Stefan already mentioned, JFK was a mess yesterday. Here's how I killed time while sitting on board of a flight that was #10 in line for take-off.

To be sung to the tune of 'Stuck in a Moment' by U2
(see here for original lyrics)

"I'm not afraid
Of any plane in this world
There's no scary story
That I haven't already heard

I'm just trying to find
A decent window seat
A neighbor who's quiet
And something to read.

I never thought you were a fool
Now you need to use the loo
You've gotta stand up straight
Shift your own weight
This flight is going nowhere, baby

You've got to get your bags together
You've got stuck in a boeing
And now you can't get out of it

Don't say that later will be better
Now you're stuck in a boeing
And you can't get out of it

I will not forsake
The meals that they bring
Since Chicken or Pasta
Is still better than nothing

I am still enchanted
By the movies they brought to me
Though the headphone was broken
And the screen I couldn't see

And you are such a fool
To book flights like you do
I know it's tough
It's been more than enough
Of what you don't really need now
More delay

You've got to get your bags together
You've got stuck in a boeing
And you can't get out of it

Oh love, look at you now
You've got yourself stuck in a boeing
And you can't get out of it

But I will certainly never again
Book a trip with American

I've got to run, which one is my gate,
It's a long way to go, and I'm far too late.

You've got to get your bags together
You've got stuck in a boing
And you can't get out of it

Don't say that later will be better
Now you're stuck in a moment
And you can't get out of it

And if the night runs longer
And if the day won't last
And if your bag got lost
Along the stony pass

And if the night runs over
And if the day turns to past
You'll earn bonus miles
Along this stony pass

It's just a moment
This flight will pass"

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TAGS: U2, BOEING

Manga-Nikolaus

She is here! The metal box from Toronto has brought Bee safely to Frankfurt. And I was amazed by this quite recent, fancy feature of real-time online tracking of flights. I could see that her plane was delayed and just crossing the Irish Sea when I was about to leave home for the airport, so I knew I had to wait one more hour before finally seeing her...


Since all shops in Germany will be closed over the holidays, from Saturday evening until Wednesday morning, we had to do some shopping this afternoon, food etc. Among the typical sweets one can get before Christmas are the Schokoladen-Nikoläuse, small Nikolaus figures made out of chocolate. They are wrapped in coloured tinfoil and have the classical red coat/white beard design.

So, we were quite surprised to see this funny Nikolaus, eh, figure, in a Manga-Look. I know that Mangas have become quite popular in Germany recently, but that they ever would take the job of Nikolaus? And, by the way, we were asking ourselves, is there anything similar to Christmas in Japan right now?

Tagged!

I was tagged by Clifford in a chain-process with the following instructions:

• Grab the book closest to you.
• Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog.
• Name the book and the author.
• Tag three people.

The book closest to me, believe it or not, is Albert Einstein's 'Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie'. The number on the last page of the index is 112. Will you allow I take the next book? Let me try. It has more than 123 pages! Here we go:

"He was amazed. 'How can it be? I passed through three magic gates. I talked with Uyulala, then I fell asleep. But I can't possibly have slept that long.'

'Space and time,' said Engywook, 'must be different in there'. "

From 'The Neverending Story' by Michael Ende.

Ah, now who do I tag? Let's see... I'll have to tag Alejandro, who's destined to have an interesting book near him... Then, oh yeah, lets take Tomasso and Lubos. Merry Christmas :-)

The Longest Night of the Year

Today is the shortest day of the year, followed by the shortest night, also called 'winter solstice'. The sun appears at its lowest point in the sky, and its noontime elevation appears to be the same for several days before and after the solstice. The word is derived from the Latin word solstitium, which combines sol for 'sun' and -stitium, for 'a stoppage' or 'stand still'. Thus, solstice means sun-stand-still.

The exact date of this years winter solstice is Dec 22nd 00:22, Greenwich Mean Time.

Folks, this means that from tomorrow on, days will get longer again!

It will be a very short night for me though, since I'm flying eastwards and loose a couple of hours.

It is generally believed that our date for the Christmas celebration, as well as many traditions are linked to ancient celebrations around the date of winter solstice. At least I can't recall the bible says something about hanging shiny stuff on evergreen trees, or kissing the poor guy who didn't notice the mistletoe. And for me, the days getting longer is a good reason to celebrate!

"In pre-historic times, winter was a very difficult time for Aboriginal people in the northern latitudes. The growing season had ended and the tribe had to live off of stored food and whatever animals they could catch. The people would be troubled as the life-giving sun sank lower in the sky each noon. They feared that it would eventually disappear and leave them in permanent darkness and extreme cold. After the winter solstice, they would have reason to celebrate as they saw the sun rising and strengthening once more. Although many months of cold weather remained before spring, they took heart that the return of the warm season was inevitable. The concept of birth and or death/rebirth became associated with the winter solstice. The Aboriginal people had no elaborate instruments to detect the solstice. But they were able to notice a slight elevation of the sun's path within a few days after the solstice -- perhaps by DEC-25. Celebrations were often timed for about the 25th. [...]

CHRISTIANITY: Any record of the date of birth of Yeshua of Nazareth (later known as Jesus Christ) has been lost. There is sufficient evidence in the Gospels to indicate that Yeshua was born in the fall, but this seems to have been unknown to early Christians. By the beginning of the 4th century CE, there was intense interest in choosing a day to celebrate Yeshua's birthday. The western church leaders selected DEC-25 because this was already the date recognized throughout the Roman Empire as the birthday of various Pagan gods.[...]

Many symbols and practices associated with Christmas are of Pagan origin: holly, ivy, mistletoe, yule log, the giving of gifts, decorated evergreen tree, magical reindeer, etc." (source)

One tradition though remained a mystery for me for a long time. Why do people put an angel on top of their trees? Well, here's why (from PlanetMike.com):

Xmas -- The tree angel tradition

Santa was very cross. It was Christmas Eve and NOTHING was going right. Mrs Claus had burned all the cookies. The elves were complaining about not getting paid for the overtime they had while making the toys. The reindeer had been drinking all afternoon and were dead drunk. To make matters worse, they had taken the sleigh out for a spin earlier in the day and had crashed it into a tree.
Santa was furious. "I can't believe it! I've got to deliver millions of presents all over the world in just a few hours - all of my reindeer are drunk, the elves are on strike and I don't even have a Christmas tree!

I sent that stupid Little Angel out HOURS ago to find a tree and he isn't even back yet! What am I going to do?"

Just then, the Little Angel opened the front door and stepped in from the snowy night, dragging a Christmas tree. He says "Yo, fat man! Where do you want me to stick the tree this year?"
And thus the tradition of angels atop the Christmas trees came to pass........

See also this interesting article about The Ancient Origins of the Winter Solstice, and the Wikipedia Entry on Solstice.

This and That

Some random things put together:

• The arxiv will change its identifier scheme for new submissions beginning January 1st 2007. For more info, see here.



• The well known German radio station 'Deutschlandfunk' (DLF) had a long report on Dec. 17th about 'Strings in the Crisis' (Strings in der Krise). This information was kindly provided by my husband, who actually listens to DLF. I like to call this station 'Depri-Funk', because no matter what they talk about, it's always depressing.
  
  If you know German, you can read the transcript on this site
  
  Strings in der Krise -- Physiker streiten um den rechten Weg zur Weltformel
  
  And if you really want, you can listen to the mp3 here.
  
  Be warned, if you do so, you'll have to endure a female voice intoning poems of the form "A Cosmos of slowness, Time is creeping, [...] Living in slow-motion. Dying in slow-motion [...] A Cosmos in reverse. The end is the beginning. Zebras are spitting grass to the ground. Men are dying [...] A cosmos of darkness [...]"
  
  ('A Kosmos der Langsamkeit.Zeit kriecht [...] Leben in Zeitlupe. Sterben in Zeitlupe [...] Ein Kosmos im Rückwärtsgang. Das Ende ist der Anfang [...] Zebras spucken Grashalme auf den Boden [...] Menschen sterben [...] Der Anfang ist das Ende [...] Ein Kosmos der Dunkelheit.')
  
  Jan Loius and Hermann Nicolai come to briefly express their excitement about string theory, and it is reported that: 'The Canadian physicist Lee Smolin finds in his book 'Zee Trobble Wiz Physiks' that strings are a failed thought experiment'. Later Nicolai says about the string debate caused by Smolin and Woit: "I wouldn't call that trouble, I perceived it somewhat as an amusement" ('Als Ärger würde ich das nicht bezeichnen. Ich habe das zum Teil etwas amüsiert zur Kenntnis genommen.') There is also the to-be-expected mentioning of L. Susskind and the anthropic principle, which is summarized stating that for Susskind it is 'a logical result of the mysterious six extra dimensions' ('eine logische Folge jener ominösen sechs Extradimensionen') that there exist 'universes that are inhabited only by speaking plants'.
  
  Quite interesting though is Thomas Thiemann's contribution in the end, where he briefly talks about his work on Loop Quantum Gravity. 'To describe the area of an A4^* paper, it would take 10⁶⁸ of these loops'. ('[...] um z. B. den Flächeninhalt von einem DIN-A4-Blatt zu beschreiben, bräuchte man 10⁶⁸ von diesen Schleifen.')
  
  Since it is Depri-Funk, they finally come to the conclusion 'The situation [in LQG] is similar as it is in string theory. Researchers were able to properly write down the theory mathematically, but they aren't able to explain the world consistently. Both theories - strings as well as loops - are pure constructs. And both might remain speculations forever'
  
  ('Die Situation ist wie bei den Strings: Den Forschern ist es zwar gelungen, eine Theorie mathematisch sauber aufzuschreiben. Aber beide Theorien scheinen noch längst nicht in der Lage, die Welt schlüssig zu erklären. Beide Theorien - Strings wie Loops - sind bislang pure Konstrukte. Und beiden droht das Schicksal, für immer spekulativ zu bleiben.')
  



• Weird Google searches that lead people to this blog:
  
  
  • Steam not avaible
  • Visual Bra
  • Supertramp song called school
  • Wonders swallow catastrophe
  • Allusers competition
  • How to remove fabric sizing (thanks Uncle!)
  • Marital status
  • Spin 1
  • probability of the world ending tomorrow
  
  
  I also noticed with astonishment that my blog is currently the 4th hit for 'Peter Woit'. How did that happen?
  


• Tomorrow morning, I'm stepping into a metal box in Toronto. It will make funny noises for too many hours, and when I step out of it, I'm hopefully in Frankfurt. That is, you are facing a slow-motion time on this blog.
  


• And in the absence of anything more interesting to say, I'd like to point you towards this interesting blog, which I stumbled across today:
  
  Aaron in Afrika

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* For the US visitors: A4 paper is used in the rest of the world, but is roughly the same size as letter format.