Peter Steinberg

Across the Water

Here's a brief travelogue of my trip to MIT for a workshop on Fluctuations and Correlations in Relativistic Nuclear Collisions.

OK, so it's not the Red Sea (yes, passover started last night!) but the Long Island Sound is just big enough that taking the ferry really cuts down quite a bit of driving when travelling from Brookhaven to Massachusetts.  Although it's quite a trip, taking about an hour shore-to-shore, it's really spectacular to be aboard during a sunny day, or even as the sun is beginning to set.  And once they get internet on these things, I have yet another reason not to go to work.

Anyway, it was a very nice meeting and very nice to be back at my PhD alma mater.  There were quite a lot of talks, and it was a workshop so the speakers did not skimp on technical issues, but we did get some entertainment, including a Bruno Rossi Commemorative talk by James Cronin (Nobel Prize winner for discovery of CP violation at Brookhaven in 1964) on the Pierre Auger cosmic ray observatory in Argentina.  Given the subject of the workshop, the use of variables that study correlations of particles produced together, I was amused by Cronin's discussion of an early Rossi measurement where he studied properties of air showers using 3 phototubes, 2 in coincidence to identify a shower track, and a third to study the size.  It's a long way from there to Auger, a truly mammoth project.

Another unexpected bit of entertainment was poking around the new Frank Gehry building sitting atop the site of the venerable Radiation Laboratory, which I always thought was a landmark, despite its obvious tendency towards crumbling.  But who is to argue with a major upgrade to MIT, and a fun new building -- one that looks remarkably similar to how it did during construction, and will probably look similar when they eventually tear it down.  OK, just kidding -- I'm a huge Gehry fan, but I've always suspected that his contractors might not be.  The engineering of this structure was truly unbelievable, but appeared unimaginably exacting in both choice of materials (note the mirrored stainless steel cladding to the right) and geometry (note the skewed tower near the top).

Although I try to avoid acting like a wedding photographer during meetings, I find myself feeling a strange sense of duty towards documenting these sorts of things, since otherwise all we have left is a lot of powerpoint slides and a book of proceedings.  These two things capture precisely people's thoughts before the conference (the slides), and after the conference (the writeups), but rarely the mood or atmosphere of the meeting as it happens.  Moreover, I've always found it easier to beg forgiveness than to get permission, so pre-emptive apologies if anyone shown here would rather not be!  Anyway, thanks again to the organizers for inviting me, and apologies for being too busy to get a talk together (and it's not because I was blogging). 

What's New? [Updated]

I'm at MIT for a workshop this week so posting will get light (mainly since they shut off the network during talks - a good idea, i must admit!)

Anyway, for years, I've been keeping up with other fields of physics and the intersection of the same with the political machinery by reading Bob Park's weekly "What's New" mailing (to my taste, a proto-blog).  As of this week, I can keep up with myself:

3. RHIC: NEW RESULTS INDICATE SOMETHING INTERESTING IS HAPPENING.
If it's time for a new energy bill, it must be time for some amazing new results to come out of energy laboratories, and behold, the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC, may have created a quark-gluon plasma in the collision of gold ions. Or maybe it didn't, because a clear signature for such a state is not really known.  But it did make some really dense stuff that seems to behave more liquid-like than gas-like, with very low viscosity.  And all of this might be related to string theory.

Ouch. 

Update: Bill Zajc, a Professor at Columbia University (full disclosure: a former employer and colleague of mine) and spokesman of the PHENIX experiment, has responded publically to Park's insinuation that the timing of the announcement was based on ultimately cynical motives.

"Turn Us All To Jelly"

At around 11:30pm last night I was just packing it in after watching "Cry Freedom" (the story of the newspaper editor who befriended Steve Biko just before his death at the hands of the Apartheid regime, and who had to leave the country to write his book...), when my colleague Marguerite sent me an instant message that Jon Stewart had just name-checked BNL on The Daily Show.  She also had pity on me and my need to catch up on sleep (my tenure case is ramping up, so I hear you, Caolionn) by taping the rerun at 1am and transcribing the interesting part.

So here it is:

Robert Reich & Jon Stewart
The Daily Show, Comedy Central
April 18, 2005.

RR: Do you know that ... there was a survey recently taken, and there are more people who believe that the earth will end in their lifetimes than who call themselves liberal
JS: More people who believe the earth will end in their lifetime...That could be not just religious-based, that could be anything.
RR: That could be anything.
JS: That Brookhaven could come up with some crazy particle accelerator that will turn us all to jelly
RR: That's just it, it's irrelevant.
JS: It's irrelevant.
RR: An irrelevant statistic.
JS: You, as a secretary of labor, should not be quoting irrelevant statistics.

We become more powerful every day in the mind of the public, who are clearly obsessed with doomsdays of various sorts, and all we think we're doing is making a near-perfect fluid. 

Dr. Evil Reference Guide

In the first-as-tragedy-and-then-as-farce department, I just noticed this post yesterday on Collision Detection (a really great blog by journalist and my one-time DIY music tech guru) Clive Thompson.  His question: "Ever wanted to indulge your inner evil genius?"  His answer: "Sam Hughes, a 21-year-old math student in England, has assembled a list of the currently most-feasible methods for ending life as we know it".  And the featured method in CD: "2. Gobbled up by strangelets".  It's a Monday morning of the soul.

And yet, despite my gnawing fear that continued blogosphere discussions of this will eventually have some seriously negative relevance to my career, this is great and very funny stuff.  Not "stuff" as in world-destroying stuff, but as in "material".  No, wait...

Needless to say, I am going to tackle the strangelet issue in this blog, and soon.  It's my (unpaid) job and the World Year is going fast.

Going Public

Really, even 5 years ago, who would have thought that colliding nuclei at ultra-high energies would make a fluid of strongly interacting degrees of freedom, rather than a gas of quarks and gluons, as one might have naively expected from the idea of asymptotic freedom (an insight awarded a Nobel Prize just this last October)?

Some of you may have noticed my brief allusion to the Tampa APS meeting in a previous post.  Of course, I knew something that non-RHIC people didn't, that we were going to finally "go public" with our excitement about the physical picture emerging from interpretations of the RHIC data.  This is timed with the final acceptance of our "White Papers", that I've mentioned before, and which can be found on my BNL home page.  All of this is very exciting, since it's finally presenting some of the emerging conceptual issues (e.g. the string theory connection) to both the public, and our colleagues from other fields of physics. 

Anyway, here's the press release from the BNL site.  Very encouraging words from DOE and lab directorate.  There are also some nice illustrative figures, especially the one above which tries to illustrate the difference between a gas and liquid and some animations which try and make those images more dynamic. 

One subtlety about this that continues to baffle me arises when I look at the "liquid" side, and ask myself what those "lines" are.  I know they are supposed to represent an effective force between the red/blue/green quarks; still, one must always remember that relativistic quantum mechanics (i.e. quantum field theory) teaches us that the "force lines" are themselves carried by particles, as every particle physicist knows.  Thus, it's not so obviously exactly how to describe the fluid aspects of the matter in the particle language of QCD at the moment - there are clearly collective modes that we need to understand better.  Is this where the string theory dual description could help us?

The Book Nobody Read

I'll avoid the "I read The Book Nobody Read" puns, mainly since I wouldn't imagine this recent book by Owen Gingerich, a historian of science at Harvard, would ever have come out in paperback without avid readers. Then again, I hadn't really considered the various difficulties of writing, printing and distributing books in the sixteenth century, so I shouldn't ever take for granted how books make it from inspiring idea into trade paperback format.

And inspiring it was: this book is less about the details of Copernicus' work (although there's a fair amount of this as well - I especially enjoyed finding out that Copernicus still used epicycles, and that Ptolemy didn't need as many as generally reputed...) than about the attempt at reconstruct the impact of his book during his time and just thereafter.  This was done by Gingerich not by reading others' accounts of Copernicus' work, but by searching out first and second editions of De Revolutionibus in various libraries and collections around the world and examining carefully the notes inscribed in them by their various owners (who are not always easy to identify!).  In the meantime he gives insight into the vicissitudes of the rare book market as well as the jet-setting world of science historians (extreme even in the context of some of the QD blogs...).  A real labor of love, and fascinating stuff, with a breezy anecdotal tone for most of the way (OK, things slow down a bit by the end...).

One World Day in Science

It seemed a reasonable challenge to somehow document the Australian "World Day in Science".  If only it weren't Tax Day as well.

Anyway, here goes.

Although I spent an hour or so straightening up the apartment, most of the morning was spent "at work", either chatting with a reporter early on, or phoning into a 2 hour group meeting (while simultaneously rigging up my very own flickr-style "transparent" screen background...).  This took until 12:30 or so (the meetings, not the flickr thing)

The early afternoon was spent up in my neighborhood in New York, first at lunch at the newly renovated Coral Diner, which after years as a first floor venture has now expanded onto the 2nd floor.

I wandered over to my sister's apartment, which is several blocks from mine up in Washington Heights (in upper Manhattan) to finish up my taxes and play with her older daughter.  We at least managed to construct a house, which is probably the most useful thing I achieved all day.

I then went to the ever-faithful US Postal Service send in my taxes. Every year it's the same: you have to write a zillion addresses a zillion times.  When will someone manage to join the flexibility of snail mail with the convenience of email, eh?

On the way back I took in some of the atmosphere of lower Washington Heights.  It's a mainly Dominican neighborhood and the number of little stands selling oranges peeled in a distinctive spiral was incredibly large.  I'm definitely getting one of these before the summer begins.

I had a little time to work, so I wandered into a recently-opened bar/cafe in my neighborhood, the High Road Cafe (shameless plug).  Nice little place with espresso and free Wifi.  I began to formulate plans to never drive to work again and spend every afternoon there.  Not sure how this will play out.

After a brief trip home to get my stuff together, I headed down to Chelsea to attend a friend's art opening.  On the way I saw the densest parking lot ever, with cars suspended 4-high on a scaffolding.  I can't see any way to avoid extensions of this concept.

On the way to the gallery, I passed under the infamous High Road, an unused train track that cuts through many buildilngs in Chelsea.  I have been an enormous fan of this now-abandoned structure for years, especially since I heard there were plans to establish a proper park there.  I managed to wander up there a few years ago (despite the enormous amount  of broken glass, I really didn't realize it was illegal at the time) and it's amazing; it truly deserves a full restoration. 

My friend's show was at one of these enormous gallery buildings on 26th st. on the west side of Manhattan.  The number of actual galleries was itself enormous - lucky I actually wrote down the right place, but I was starting to bump into old acquaintances as soon as I entered the building.

Here is a shot of Abraham Brewster, an old college friend of mine, with some of his work in the background.  This is his first NYC gallery opening, I believe, and the place was packed with friends, family, artists, public, etc.  Very impressive work, with meticulous rendering techniques as well as some strong conceptual underpinnings. 

I had a particular interest in this piece, since it somehow reminded me of Edgerton's photography, in this case a blurrier version of the famous image of a bullet caught piercing an apple.  After a recent google search, I now am convinced that I may be mildly delusional, but something triggered an association, so I'm not giving up so easily.

The gallery was on the 7th floor, so I took the stairs down to the street level on the way out.

While we spent a few hours at a nearby bar, the evening had to wind down eventually.  This was especially true for me, as I'm making yet another trip to Chicago tomorrow afternoon.  So ends my 4/15.

FWP NYC

Terrible photo, but very interesting evening.  This was taken in a room on the 7th Floor of one of the buildings in the Rockefeller Building complex, just inside from cocktails at sunset seen from the roof garden.  Unfortunately, I was too way busy to get a photo of the view since I was way too distracted by a very curious high-school reunion - of several generations who attended my school...in Chicago (Francis W. Parker, or FWP).  It seems that just enough of us have been filtering east to NYC for the last, say, 20-30 years to warrant a serious visit by the principal (seen in the background here), to raise money for additional school construction and the endowment fund. 

It was certainly a substantial crowd, with 4-5 people from the various years above and below me, and I was really pleased to make contact with the folks who showed up.  We also got to experience the promotional video, which, for every nice memory it invoked in someone a particular teacher, invoked another to exclaim (in a completely-audible whisper) "but he/she made my childhood a nightmare!".  For my own part, I was heartened to hear the increasing emphasis on math and science, which was definitely not in the program when I attended in the late 80's.  Honestly, we cranked out more than our share of movie stars (not kidding), but very few scientists.  It's an indelible part of my development as a physicist that when given the chance to take physics in high school, I took photography instead (yeah, my dad loved that idea).  And yet, given the way things turned out (and the terrible picture I took, above) I've often wondered if I made the right choice after all.

Heisenberg Strikes Out

With the 2005 baseball season ramping up in this World Year of Physics, it's good to remind ourselves of ways in which the worlds of Physics and Baseball have intersected, if not nearly collided.

There have clearly been some efforts towards bringing the physics way of seeing the world to understanding some aspects of the game, such as this book by Robert K. Adair (who taught my sophomore E&M class back in 1992), or these studies of airflow around a knuckleball I found on Google.

There have also been stranger encounters, such as the infamous one between catcher Moe Berg and Werner Heisenberg.  Berg (whose life is easily accessible via a Google search).  Berg graduated from Princeton in the 1920's, played in the major league throughout the 20's and 30's, graduated Columbia law school in the late 20's, and even toured Japan with baseball All-Stars like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

Things connect back up with physics when we find out (in perhaps the only mention of a physicist on espn.com - besides Bob Adair...) that Berg was sent by the OSS (the precursor to the CIA) to kill Werner Heisenberg, who was thought to be leading the effort to produce the German atomic bomb:

Berg, according to one biography, was prone to blunders: getting caught trying to infiltrate an aircraft factory during his training, dropping his gun into a fellow passenger's lap, and being recognized by wearing his O.S.S.-issue watch.

Despite these mistakes, Berg was well-regarded enough to have been chosen to carry out one of the O.S.S.' more ambitious endeavors - a plot to possibly assassinate Werner Heisenberg, the head of Nazi Germany's atom-bomb project. Berg, who spoke German fluently, was sent in December 1944 to Zurich to attend a lecture by Heisenberg. Berg's assessment of the situation was that Germany was not close to having a nuclear bomb, and there was never an attempt to kill Heisenberg.

Or as another website put it:

And if Moe Berg had called fastball instead of curve, Heisenberg, innocent (or not) would have been murdered. That was then.

Ironic in the way it was the assessment of an observer who would have ultimately decided Heisenberg's life or death (indirect shades of Schrodinger's cat).  And this observer was not just a secret agent, but a representative from baseball, an expression of purely classical mechanics.  I wonder on how many levels Einstein, with his initial support of the US nuclear program (based on his fear of the German one) as well as his lifelong skepticism about (and even antagonism towards) quantum mechanics (even after having invented it, in some sense, in 1905), would have reacted to Berg pulling the trigger?

Let's Try This Again

While I'm not an expert on wormholes or time travel, I am easily amused by intrusions of humor into normally-dry scientific discourse.  I'm even more amused when it shows up as a hyperlink on the arxiv.org server, which normally just has copies of abstracts of papers submitted to journals.

This one was clearly different:

gr-qc/0504039
From: Leonard Susskind [view email]
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2005 19:08:20 GMT   (4kb)

Rebuttal to a Paper on Wormholes
Authors: Leonard Susskind

In a recent paper on wormholes (gr-qc/0503097), the author of that paper demonstrated that he didn't know what he was talking about. In this paper I correct the author's naive erroneous misconceptions.

I've seen some polite implications that an opposing author might not exactly be an expert on an issue, or that a mistake may have been made, but nothing prepared me for the target of that link. 

gr-qc/0503097
From: Leonard Susskind [view email]
Date (v1): Wed, 23 Mar 2005 02:10:21 GMT   (6kb)
Date (revised v2): Sun, 27 Mar 2005 04:02:05 GMT   (6kb)
Date (revised v3): Fri, 8 Apr 2005 19:54:25 GMT   (6kb)

Wormholes and Time Travel? Not Likely
Authors: Leonard Susskind
Comments: 5 pages, remark added about time delay in identification. Reference   added

Wormholes have been advanced as both a method for circumventing the limitations of the speed of light as well as a means for building a time machine (to travel to the past). Thus it is argued that General Relativity may allow both of these possibilities. In this note I argue that traversable wormholes connecting otherwise causally disconnected regions, violate two of the most fundamental principles physics, namely local energy conservation and the energy-time uncertainty principle.

Yep, same (famous) guy.  Now, note the various revisions.  So we're talking about someone who posts a paper only 2.5 weeks ago, discovers he disagreed with himself, posts a rebuttal, and then goes back and revises the previous paper to forward-reference in the future rebuttal.  So why does he suggest time travel isn't likely?...If April 1 didn't fall in the middle of this whole story, I wouldn't even know what to think of this.  And when do I get enough accumulated career credit to do this myself?