Colloquium

It's been a while since I last posted, because The Gondoliers is keeping me rather busy.

This post, however, is about Thursday's physics colloquium. We have a colloquium each Thursday, and I usually attend, only missing it if I have some more important commitment (eg. Holy Thursday Mass, a large assignment due the next day that I haven't finished...).

This week next year's prospective grad students visited (yes, it's been a year since my trip around the US). Timed (deliberately, I believe) to coincide with this event was the Physics Graduate Students' Council colloquium: no different from any other colloquium except that the speaker was chosen by the PGSC.

He was Jim Gates, a string theorist who studied at MIT and is now a professor at the University of Maryland. Wikipedia claims that he is a legendary physicist but I can assure you he is real. He talked about his attempts to find a second formulation of M theory, in analogy to two formulations of string theory. His initial attempt many years ago was unsuccessful, but he talked about how we approach problems now. In the past, if you had a question you might go to the Oracle, because she knew everything. Now, you take it to the Wikipedia, because it knows everything! He was particularly referring to the tabulation of the properties of hypercubes.

The idea was that if we let points of a hypercube represent types of particle, and the edges interactions, we can get a nice graphical idea of how to formulate M theory. I like this idea more than I generally like string-related ideas. The reason is that I think that people get too caught up in the idea of there "really" being 11 (or whatever the favoured number is today) dimensions. Clearly the world that needs to be described by physics has three spatial and one temporal dimensions, and admittedly no sensible hypothesis tries to say otherwise, but I think they place too much importance on the specific mathematical structure of the explanations. I would say this is like giving too much credence to the existence of a wavefunction in quantum mechanics. Wavefunctions for a single particle can be useful in explaining quantum mechanics, but their comes a point where we can't say they 'exist' in the way that, for example, the electric field exists in classical electromagnetism. Something like Dirac notation, on the other hand, which although not really pictorial is in my view a step in that direction, gives to me a clearer picture of how our universe 'works'. I think the unification candidates are like that: the intricate mathematical details might be handy in calculating certain things, but to understand how our universe "is" we need to stick with the most pictorial representations.

Incidentally, the research I'm currently looking at starts with a very pictorial way of representing the situation. I guess this is the way I like to think as a physicist, and I think it's a good way.

During the colloquium, the MIT concert choir started singing outside. There was a particularly amusing moment when Prof. Gates made an important point, then the choir struck up "Alleluia!" (the famous one, from Messiah). He thought that quite appropriate.

I watched the choir from the balcony of lobby 10 before walking home. I do enjoy choral music: that's one of the main reasons I'm in MITGSP. Choral doesn't exactly describe it, but in general my favourite music is the chorus songs. I particularly like, for example, "Come friends" from Pirates (although it's less 'choral' than much other chorus music), although I'll never have the chance to sing it because it is actually a tenor only piece (the basses are off being policemen).

It was a very enjoyable way to being my evening of rest (G&S activities of one kind or another resume today and run until Thursday).