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instrumentalism vs realism
I'm attending an event called Freezing Woman this March, and as part of it I'm planning on putting together some kind of interesting "microtalk". At first, I was thinking this would be similar to talks I've given at Burning Man, which have ranged from 30-60 minutes plus Q&A. But apparently it's supposed to just be 5 minutes. I was a little ( Read more... ) -
wormholes: wrap up
The sci-fi film we've been talking about making at work has to do with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I can't go into details (because they have involved many hours of conversations), but basically it starts from the premise that somehow, a group of hackers tinkering with various electrical equipment accidentally stumble upon ( Read more... ) -
wormholes, part V
Since my last post on this topic, several new interesting things related to this have come to light. And some of the things I mentioned last time I wanted to get to seem less important, so I'm not sure whether I will get to everything. And this whole series may be longer than I thought or veer off in another direction ( Read more... ) -
wormholes, part IV: the Casimir Effect
In part 3, I mentioned there was a difference between the standard local energy conditions which were originally proposed in classical General Relativity and the "averaged" conditions. But I went off on a tangent about quantum inequalities and quantum interest, and never got around to connecting this back with the averaged conditions or defining ( Read more... ) -
wormholes, part III: negative energy
So what is this thing called negative energy (also called "exotic matter", and could it exist somewhere, or if it doesn't exist naturally, is there a way we could somehow generate it ( Read more... ) -
wormholes, part II: Kip Thorne
I started my review of wormholes by reading Kip Thorne's famous paper on them from 1989. Thorne is the T in "MTW" a book by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler called Gravitation, written in 1973 and still one of the most widely used textbooks on general relativity ( Read more... ) -
wormholes, part I
I saw Christopher Nolan's latest film Interstellar a couple weeks ago on opening night. I hadn't even heard about it before, my company just decided to buy us all tickets to see it in IMAX, one of the nice things they do for employees once a month or so. I loved it and it left a big impression on me, and I intend to go back and see it again as ( Read more... ) -
gymnastics and discrete spacetime symmetries
In particle physics, everything is based on symmetry. Symmetry magazine is the main industry newsletter for particle physics. All of the fundamental laws of physics can be expressed as symmetries. Other than symmetry, the only rule is basically "anything that can happen, will happen ( Read more... ) -
gymnastics
I started doing gymnastics in late-2009, after switching to that from a brief flirtation with parkour. The problem is, I moved so much between 2009 and 2013 (from California to Illinois in 2010, then to Pennsylvania in 2012, then to Queens, New York 6 months later, and finally to New Jersey in mid-2013. Every time I moved I had to find a new gym ( Read more... ) -
wandering sets part 10: mystery solved!
When I wrote part 9 I was thinking I was pretty confused and I was not sure I had really made any progress on answering the basic question that I had set out to answer with this series. But I'm pleased to announce that within 24 hours after writing that one, I started thinking and piece by piece, it just all came together. I think I have pretty ( Read more... )