Free lunches

At MIT, there is such a thing as a free lunch. There are many free meals available, but some are even better than others.

Every second Wednesday (including this week), I go to a SPICE (Sidney Pacific InterCultural Exchange) dinner. This is just a chance for grad students to gather together over a free dinner, and have a chat about life in their home countries. This week the topic was family histories. There were many interesting stories to tell around the table, from an ancestor who saved the children of a flooded village by swimming them to safety in a giant cooking pot, to two boys (10 and 12 years old) who went on their own from England to visit their father in Canada. There were actually more, but some people might not want their stories published where all can see. Send me an email!

Today I had lunch with Wojciech Zurek, most famous as co-author of the no cloning theorem in quantum mechanics. One of his research interests, and the topic of his afternoon talk, is the transition from quantum to classical physics, commonly known as decoherence (although really decoherence is one approach to formulating this transition). David, my Honours supervisor, had a particular interest in decoherence (he mentioned an experiment aimed at measuring decoherence through nuclear excitations in the interference of below barrier C-C heavy ion reactions as a possible experiment for me if I decided to do an experimental PhD in nuclear physics in Australia - if it hadn't been for three factors I may well have), so I was glad to be invited to the lunch (there is a lottery for people who express interest).

I was glad to hear what Prof. Zurek had to say. The lunch seemed to be half freshmen and half first and second year grad students, and he spent more time explaining things at freshman level. I think this is right: we can usually gain something even from an explanation about things we're familiar with, whereas doing the opposite is nearly impossible. I also liked what he had to say about phase transitions, one aspect of condensed matter physics important to those of both hard and soft persuasions.

I forgot to include these the last couple of times, so here they are.

1 Florida
2 Boise
3 Alabama
4 Iowa
5 Cincinnati
6 Texas
7 Texas Christian
8 Miami
9 Georgia Tech
10 S California
11 Louisiana State
12 Oregon
13 Virginia Tech
14 Houston
15 Oklahoma State
16 Arizona
17 Pittsburgh
18 Pennsylvania State
19 Wisconsin
20 W Virginia
21 Notre Dame
22 Ohio State
23 Washington
24 Auburn
25 Oregon State