Tag Archives: science

Discoveries at the Dibner

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This past summer, our quantum thermodynamics research group had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Dibner Rare Book Library in D.C. Located in a small corner of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, tucked away behind flashier exhibits, the Dibner is home to thousands of rare books and manuscripts, some dating back many centuries.

Our advisor, Nicole Yunger Halpern, has a special connection to the Dibner, having interned there as an undergrad. She’s remained in contact with the head librarian, Lilla Vekerdy. For our visit, the two of them curated a large spread of scientific work related to thermodynamics, physics, and mathematics. The tomes ranged from a 1500s print of Euclid’s Elements to originals of Einstein’s manuscripts with hand-written notes in the margin.

The print of Euclid’s Elements was one of the standout exhibits. It featured a number of foldout nets of 3D solids, which had been cut and glued into the book by hand. Several hundred copies of this print are believed to have been made, each of them containing painstakingly crafted paper models. At the time, this technique was an innovation, resulting from printers’ explorations of the then-young art of large-scale book publication.

Another interesting exhibit was rough notes on ideal gases written by Planck, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. Ideal gases are the prototypical model in statistical mechanics, capturing to high accuracy the behaviour of real gases within certain temperatures and pressures. The notes contained comparisons between Boltzmann, Ehrenfest, and Planck’s own calculations for classical and quantum ideal gases. Though the prose was in German, some results were instantly recognizable, such as the plot of the specific heat of a classical ideal gas, showing the stepwise jump as degrees of freedom freeze out. 

Looking through these great physicists’ rough notes, scratched-out ideas, and personal correspondences was a unique experience, helping humanize them and place their work in historical context. Understanding the history of science doesn’t just need to be for historians, it can be useful for scientists themselves! Seeing how scientists persevered through unknowns, grappling with doubts and incomplete knowledge to generate new ideas, is inspiring. But when one only reads the final, polished result in a modern textbook, it can be difficult to appreciate this process of discovery. Another reason to study the historical development of scientific results is that core concepts have a way of arising time and again across science. Recognizing how these ideas have arisen in the past is insightful. Examining the creative processes of great scientists before us helps develop our own intuition and skillset.

Thanks to our advisor for this field trip – and make sure to check out the Dibner next time you’re in DC! 

Techs in flux & Rock & Roll

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Each year, 10000 physicists descend on one of America’s finest inner cities in a ritual known as the American Physical Society’s March Meeting. If you are thinking that this is going to be one big nerd fest, you’re about right. From my experience, the backpacks, poster tubes, non-brand clothing, and distracted looks will be very easy to distinguish among the inhabitants of downtown LA (this year’s location) come next week.

However, with that many physicists, you will find a few trying to make science cool, or at least having fun while they try. One relatively untapped market in my opinion is montages. Take the Imagine Dragons song Believer, whose music video has lead signer Dan Reynolds mostly getting his ass kicked by veteran brawler Dolph Lundgren. Who says that training montages can’t also be for mental training? Sub out Dan for a young graduate student, replace Dolph with an imposing physicist, and substitute boxing with drama about writing equations on paper or a blackboard. Don’t believe it can be cool? I don’t blame you, but science montages have been done before, playing to science’s mystical side. And with sufficient experience, creativity, and money, I believe the sky is the limit.

But back to more concrete things. Having fun while trying to promote science is the main goal of the March Meeting Rock ‘n Roll Physics Sing-Along — a social and outreach event where a band of musicians, mostly scientists attending the meeting, plays well-known songs whose lyrics are substituted for science-themed prose. The audience then sings the new technically oriented lyrics along with the performers. Below is an example with the Smashmouth song I’m a Believer, but we play all kinds of genres, from power ballads to Britney Spears.

This year, we have an especially exciting line-up as we are joined by professional science entertainer, Einstein’s girl Gia Mora! Some of you may remember Gia from her performance with John Preskill at One Entangled Evening. She will join us to perform, among other hits, the funky E=mc^2:

The sing-along is run by the curator of all things related to physics songs, singer and songwriter Prof. Walter F. Smith of Haverford College. Adept at using songs to help teach physics, Walter has carefully collected a database of such songs dating back to the early 20th century; he believes that James Clerk Maxwell may have been the first song parody-er with his version of the lyrics to the Scotch Air Comin’ Thro’ the Rye. You can see James jamming alongside Emmy Noether, Paul Dirac, and Satyendra Bose below to questionable lyrics. The most well-known US physics song pioneer is Harvard grad Tom Lehrer, who recorded his first album in the 50s. Contrary to the general nature of scientists to be constantly worried about preserving their neutral academic self-image, Lehrer tackled edgy topics with creativity and humor.

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The sing-along started in 2006, where the only accompaniment was a guitar and bongo, growing into a full rock band later on. The drums were first played by a Soviet-born physicist named Victor, and that has yet to change today despite it being a different person. The rest of the band this year consists of Walter, his wife Marian McKenzie on the flute, Lev Krayzman from Yale on the guitar, Prof. Esa Räsänen from Tampere University of Technology on the bass, Lenny Campanello from the University of Maryland on the keyboard, and of course the talented Gia Mora on voice. We hope that you can join us next week, as this year’s sing-along is sure to be one for the books!

March Meeting Rock-n-Roll Physics Sing-along
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
9:00 PM–10:30 PM
J.W. Marriott Room: Platinum D

See you there!

IQIM Presents …”my father”

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Debaleena Nandi at Caltech

Debaleena Nandi at Caltech

Following the IQIM teaser, which was made with the intent of creating a wider perspective of the scientist, to highlight the normalcy behind the perception of brilliance and to celebrate the common human struggles to achieve greatness, we decided to do individual vignettes of some of the characters you saw in the video.

We start with Debaleena Nandi, a grad student in Prof Jim Eisenstein’s lab, whose journey from Jadavpur University in West Bengal, India to the graduate school and research facility at the Indian institute of Science, Bangalore, to Caltech has seen many obstacles. We focus on the essentials of an environment needed to manifest the quest for “the truth” as Debaleena says. We start with her days as a child when her double-shift working father sat by her through the days and nights that she pursued her homework.

She highlights what she feels is the only way to growth; working on what is lacking, to develop that missing tool in your skill set, that asset that others might have by birth but you need to inspire by hard work.

Debaleena’s motto: to realize and face your shortcomings is the only way to achievement.

As we build Debaleena up, we also build up the identity of Caltech through its breathtaking architecture that oscillates from Spanish to Goth to modern. Both Debaleena and Caltech are revealed slowly, bit by bit.

This series is about dissecting high achievers, seeing the day to day steps, the bit by bit that adds up to the more often than not, overwhelming, impressive presence of Caltech’s science. We attempt to break it down in smaller vignettes that help us appreciate the amount of discipline, intent and passion that goes into making cutting edge researchers.

Presenting the emotional alongside the rational is something this series aspires to achieve. It honors and celebrates human limitations surrounding limitless boundaries, discoveries and possibilities.

Stay tuned for more vignettes in the IQIM Presents “My _______” Series.

But for now, here is the video. Watch, like and share!

(C) Parveen Shah Production 2014

 

Quantum mechanics – it’s all in our mind!

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Last week was the final week of classes, and I brought my ph12b class, aka baby-quantum, to conclusion. Just like the last time I taught the class, I concluded with what should make the students honor the quantum gods – the EPR paradox and Bell’s inequality. Even before these common conundrums of quantum mechanics, the students had already picked up on the trouble with measurement theory and had started hammering me with questions on the “many-worlds interpretation”. The many-worlds interpretation, pioneered by Everett, stipulates that whenever a quantum measurement is made of a state in a quantum superposition, the universe will split into several copies where each possible result will be realized in one of the copies. All results come to pass, but if we are cats, in some universes, we won’t survive to meaow about it.

Questions on the many-worlds interpretation always make me think back to my early student days, when I also obsessed over these issues. In fact, I got so frustrated with the question, that I started having heretic thoughts: What if it is all in our minds? What if the quantum superposition is always there, but maybe evolution had consciousness always zoom in on one possible outcome. Maybe hunting a duck is just easier if the duck is not in a superposition of flying south and swimming in a pond. Of course, this requires that at least you and the duck, and probably other bystanders, all agree on which quantum reality it is that you are operating in. No problem – maybe evolution equipped all of our consciousnesses with the ability to zoom in on a common reality where all of us agree on the results of experiments, but there are other possibilities for this reality, which still live side by side to ‘our’ reality, since – hey – it’s all in our minds!
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Redemption: Part II

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Last week, a journey began to find the solution to a problem I could not solve as a seventeen year-old boy. That problem became an obsession of mine during the last days of the International Math Olympiad of 1997, the days when I also met the first girl I ever kissed. At the time, I did not have the heart to tell the girl that I had traveled across the Atlantic to compete with the best and brightest and had come up short. I told her that I had solved the problem, but that the page with my answer had been lost. I told my parents the same thing and to everyone at school who would ask me why I did not return with a medal from the Math Olympics. The lie became so powerful that I did not look at that problem again until now. So, you may be wondering why a blog about Quantum Information Science at Caltech includes posts on problems from Math Olympiads. And why I would open the book on the page with that one problem after fifteen years… Continue reading →