I’m sitting in my living room watching Mike Rowe fix a bridge, and recovering from the two week physics boot camp that is the United States Particle Accelerator School. It was fun, I met some really cool people, and I learned a lot about accelerators.

I have to say, though, that two weeks is a very short time for a full semester of course material, homework, and a final exam. I almost wish the school had a more complete meet-and-greet component, since I met some people that I might be working with in the future, and there’s no telling how many more I would meet if there was a full venue.

But I’m back home, and I watched Germany play poorly and Spain play well with the Germans in the department. Disappointed is a good adjective. And I’m back in New York, back to Aikido and home, to BNL and work, friends. It’s good to be home.

Posted: June 30th, 2008 under Physics, Personal.
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I’m currently sitting in an hotel room at the Doubletree in Annapolis, MD, smack dab in the middle of week one of the United States Particle Accelerator School, where I’m learning about my future Ph.D field from Todd Satogata and Waldo MacKay (pronounced Mac-EYE, as he insisted on the first day). But first, I had to get there, and that meant driving.

I could have flown, but then I wouldn’t have a car that I don’t have time to use, nor would I have gotten to drive for five hours through two of my favorite places in the world: Long Island and New Jersey.

Driving in Long Island, particularly on the LIE, is an interesting activity. You never quite know how fast you’ll be able to get away with, and you see a fascinating mixture of busted ass ‘85 Daewoos and brand new Rolls-Royces or BMWs. Then you hit Manhattan, and your speed question is abruptly shifted to watching your speedo sit just below the 10 mark until you pay about $400 in tolls and cross the George Washington Bridge. Read more »

Posted: June 19th, 2008 under Physics, Personal.
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Bryce DeWitt was a theorist that developed an early form of quantum gravity in an effort to bypass the infinite number of counterterms it seems to require, and, with John Wheeler, wrote down what amounts to the wave function of the universe. That said, a talk he gave entitled “Quantum Gravity, Yesterday and Today”, has appeared on arXiv:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.2935v1

I think my favorite part of this article isn’t his remarkable role in the history of the development of a very difficult field, but rather his anecdote about Wolfgang Pauli:

I was hoping to spend some time as a postdoc at the ETH, so Pauli asked me what I was working on. I said I was trying to quantize the gravitational field. For many seconds he sat silent, alternately shaking and nodding his head (a nervous habit he had, affectionately known as die Paulibewegung). He finally said “That is a very important problem - but it will take someone really smart!”

That’s classic Pauli for you.

Posted: May 21st, 2008 under Physics.
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This fit should be a very, very tight linear fit. It is not a tight linear fit.  

Posted: May 8th, 2008 under Physics.
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    Thursday and Friday, some of the brightest minds in the world converged on Stony Brook in honor of the new Simons Center, and to honor the achievements of C.N. Yang and Jim Simons. Among the speakers were Yang and Simons themselves, Ed Witten, Juan Maldecena, Cumrun Vafa, John Morgan, Shing-Tung Yau, and others. Read more »

Posted: March 29th, 2008 under Mathematics, Physics.
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    I am getting into the regime where I need to start thinking about the writing process of my dissertation. Yes, there’s still the oral exam, and that small issue of having a secure funding source, but the point is, I will be writing something ten times longer than anything I’ve ever put together in my entire life. Read more »

Posted: February 18th, 2008 under Physics.
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After another day of cramming, I feel no more prepared for the comps. I’ve looked over Einstein A and B coefficients, fine structure of hydrogen, optical cavities, etc. etc. etc. I have no idea what will be on the exam, and I am terrified of failing. I have no idea how I can tell my advisers, my family, my friends that I couldn’t pass something that is practically designed to be passed. I just don’t know…

Posted: January 30th, 2008 under Physics.
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    The countdown to the Comprehensive Exams is down to a few days, and since I’ve gotten tired of trying to cram ridiculous amounts of solid state physics into my head for the day, and AMO is for tomorrow, I’m going to post about my personal angst.

You see, the comps are to graduate students the last giant wall to climb before they advance to candidacy. Leading into them, there is distressing uncertainty about the future: what if we pass but our adviser doesn’t have money? what if we don’t pass at all, not even as the masters level? what if I end up vomiting violently during the exam, do I keep going or excuse myself?

Once we get past the comps, we are well on our way to our PhD; it essentially becomes a matter of finishing up writing a thesis, defending it, and cutting through about a month’s worth of red tape in the spare time over the next few years. The Comps are sort of like that uncertainty you get on that first date after the relationship transitions to “serious”, and it has similarly life-altering effects. My career path totally changes if I fail this exam, and I’m still in flux about funding even if I do pass it.

However, come Thursday night, this existential angst is liberated as my fate is no longer in my hands, and I just have to sit back and wait for a few congratulatory e-mails.

Posted: January 28th, 2008 under Physics.
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I spent the day at home while a four foot tall hole in the side of my bathroom was repaired, and while trying to ignore the shriek of copper pipes being cut I pressed forward with my research. I’m beginning to understand why research is such a difficult thing to make headway in. In the merely academic problem I’ve been studying of late, I’ve literally discarded an entire binder of research notes and started over, realizing that methods I thought would work at the time were actually bunk. I had high hopes at the beginning of the summer: to get a publication at least in the rough draft stage by September or so, but that’s just a distant dream now. Now, I’m wrestling with an almost purely academic problem that has literally taken me a month to sort through.

It’s frustrating, watching so far two months of work be able to be summarized in about forty lines of code and maybe five written pages of notes. But I guess, at the end of the day, all your research and all your work will appear as a ten page journal article, so really it’s not a major thing to worry about.

At the same time, I gave my first presentation to a research group. Fraught with typographical errors, it was an effort to explain my research to an experimental group we are collaborating with, only to find that we weren’t talking about the same thing when we were talking.

Posted: July 26th, 2007 under Physics.
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Congratulations to Dominik Schneble and the rest of his group in the basement at Stony Brook. After two and a half years of trying, with one laser problem after another, Dominik’s group (with whom my research is very closely affiliated) have finally succeeded in creating the first Bose-Einstein condensate at Stony Brook. At 5:55 AM Saturday, after a solid week of 24 hour shifts attempting to make the condensate after their laser was finally released from customs, the group observed the characteristic absorption pattern indicative of a BEC in flight. This was done just in time, too. Daniel Pertot, a German exchange student, had left the lab at around 8 AM, noting in the log that “this is not working. I’m going home.” Just ten minutes later, a large note simply said “BEC?!”. At this point, Daniel was called and returned to witness the condensate before he returned to Germany, ending his tenure at Stony Brook with research worthy of a masters thesis. Read more »

Posted: July 16th, 2007 under Physics.
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