Stephon Alexander

Nothing Special

I had a hard time sleeping the other night cause I was thinking too hard about what I work on-Cosmology.  For the whole day I was depressed about the continual realization that there was a time in the past when no planets, galaxies and stars were around.  Yet we humans get so caught up in our views, politics etc etc.  There was a time when none of this mattered-the Universe didn't give a damn.  I started to think about myself, my mortality.   Was I encoded in the blue print of the universe, before I existed?  Or are we all just mere fluctuations in the quantum soup, a transient blip. 

So, naturally, I was unable to sleep.   But when I woke up in the morning, I forgot all about these worries and just wanted a strong cup of coffee at Farleys up the hill.

I'm working late tonight-I still have to convince Michael that the dark matter model we've been talking about is worth something-or nothing.

I've Returned

Just got back from a trip to Cal Tech and Duke where I gave some talks and my first departmental colloquium. What an adventure. First, I came down with this horrible flu the morning of my talk at Caltech. I barely got out of bed, despite drugging myself up with $50 worth of cold medicine. When I got into Caltech, it turned out that Roxanne Springer (a prof at Duke) noticed how sick I was. Knowing what was to come over the next couple days, Roxanne aked Mark Wise (Theory Prof at Cal Tech) to take me to the Emergency room. The Doctor gave me this really expensive antiviral, which actually worked and my talk was very successful. It was great to see my two friends and colleagues, Clifford Johnson and Marc Kamionkowski in the audience. Marc, of course asked hard questions.

The next day, I went to visit Duke to give a Colloquium. I was greeted by Horst Meyer a retired Faculty at Duke. He greeted me with oranges and a warm smile. Again the talks were successful. My colloquium was entitled "Beyond Inflationary Cosmology." The point was that even though cosmic inflation is the best model we have which gives us a framework to explain how structure formed in the Universe, it is still incomplete. But the cool thing is HOW it is incomplete. You see inflation improves
on the standard big bang model by explaining the tiny fluctuations that we see over 10 billion years in the past which grew into the galaxies we see (and live in ) today. But the very success of inflation has in it the seeds of its inconsistencies. Most models of inflation (there are literally hundreds) all suffer the same fate in that they require a long expansion period (reffered to as e-foldings) to generate the necessary properties of gaxaxies observed today. But inflation also predicts that these fluctuations should originate in the Planckian time epoch-which really require Quantum Gravity to fully understand how to even formulate inflationary initial conditions.

My talk then went into how String Theory/Quantum Gravity can address this problem amongst others-such as the singularity and cosmological constant problem. Next time I'll tell you more about the Cosmological Constant problem-some thing that I also think a lot about.

But, I must for now sign off and pack to attend the annual National Society of Black Physicist Conference to give a talk about Dark Matter and Cosmic Strings. I am not looking forward to this overnight flight especially since I did not recover fully from my flu.

Non Stop Action

I just returned from an intense two day faculty interview at Penn State University. This is the moment I have been waiting for since I was a dreaming college student. When I was a graduate student, I recall having one of those random conversations with the great Mike Kosterlitz (the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition). I was considering being his graduate student and was talking about the interface between biology and condensed matter physics. Suddenly out of the blue, with his Scottish accent he remarked
"To be a good theorist requires one to have an unusual belief in ones ability." This image has embedded itself in my consciousness.

Along the way there have been many obstacles, most of the time self inflicting. Everyone around me is 'so much smarter, faster, prepared'. Seriousy, 99% of my ideas are flat bullshit. Yet the 1% that survives into a calculation with some hopeful connection to the real world is completely fueled by 'one's belief in ones ability/self.' Whats the lesson? BELIEVE IN YOURSELF, corny but true.

The interview? It was incredible. These things are grueling in one sense but exhilirating and exciting because you're selected from hundreds for a possible faculty gig. You get to define a research programme, have colleagues, students and postdocs to work with and get to teach-something I really love to do! I can't wait to teach, my style-which will most definitley be jazzy but rigorous. And Sean, I promise to use your funky General Relativity book when I teach undergraduate GR-as long as I get a free copy that I ASKED you for....:)

There is the down side to this whole faculty job search situation, from my perspective. It's a far too complicated issue for me to discuss on this Blog at the present moment. It concerns the failure of Universities and in particular majority faculty to truly realize the value of having brilliant and deserving minority (African American, Latin) and women on their faculty-just because we're 'different'. The argument "there simply aren't enough" is crap. We're out here and all but few institutions seem to really care. Wake up! Its 2005-not 1970 and the numbers/statistics haven't changed much. We can't point our fingers at other places in the world crituiqing their civility-cause when it comes to the issue of TRUE faculty diversity, if we're willing to really be honest, we should really reevaluate at our attitudes. Enough of that-perhaps in some future Blog, after I get a positon, I'll write something more serious-maybe a book? Nah, I should leave that up to Jim Gates, he has a much more interesting story. Oh how I wish Professor Einstein were around, he would understand my frustration. . .

Anyways... I gotta go back to the cosmological constant problem and CP violation.

Untop of my visit, I had the rare opportunity to meet one of my heroes in physics Abhay Ashtekar. The man was just vibrating with genius.

Oh, I also finally met and spoke about embedding the Relativistic MOND paridigm, with Jacob Bekenstein another hero of mine. What a great week. Here is a picture of me, Jacob and other physicists after his talk at Stanford's ITP.