Comments on: Those Little Challenges We Face

By: All Hands on Deck - Asymptotia

All Hands on Deck - Asymptotia — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 22:12:44 +0000

[...] Anyway, so I’m going to try to cover a broad (but not too broad) and interlocking set of topics for them, but not trot out too much of the standard stuff – at least not too linearly anyway. The last time I did this “staying away from the standard stuff”, (see this post) I went quite far in that aim and I don’t think it was well received, since the stringy students wanted standard stringy stuff, and could not see why I spent all that time talking about critical phenomena, scaling, phase transitions, and low dimensional field theory – the condensed matter students probably liked it a bit, but it might not have been “nuts and bolts” enough for them. (I like to think that they’ll thank me one day for giving them a broader education, but I’m sure they won’t see it this way.) So a lot of people are going to show up to try to find out what I’m going to talk about before they register. Wimps. [...]

By: Pause for a Glass of Wine | Cosmic Variance

Pause for a Glass of Wine | Cosmic Variance — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 03:38:00 +0000

[...] Well, I got up early to prepare the final exam for that course I was telling you about a while back. It was not a take-home. Those have their place, but I also like trying to set interesting exams in the classroom, where both the examiner (me) and the examined (them) have a good time. I remember this from my days as a student. I loved interesting exams. You come in the room, the scene of possible triumph or disaster. You’ve prepared, and you’re as ready as you will ever be, and the teacher hands out the papers, and then it is you vs the examiner. Fixed time, and all you have is you, your pen, and your brain. (And your sweat.) You turn over the paper and begin…. Excellent drama! [...]

By: Bodnotbod's Adverse Reaction

Bodnotbod's Adverse Reaction — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:33:00 +0000

#3 :: Glist

“Our shine experts have now created the fifth dimension in shine: Glist 5!” – It’s the scientific breakthrough of the 21st century and you can put it in your dishwasher. That’s what they’re telling me in the UK. Can you h…

By: Clifford

Clifford — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 13:28:47 +0000

Ashton….thanks! No time to try to implement the vblog thing!

-cvj

By: Ashton

Ashton — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:46:19 +0000

Why not post some vblogs of your time lecturing (copy-right permissible) for this class? Of all those teaching that I can think of, who else could better introduce the core d’esprit of D-brane action?

By: Clifford

Clifford — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:26:47 +0000

Hi Robert,

Oh yes…duality and D-branes are all very visible in this context….. All part of the agenda.

Thanks!

-cvj

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 08:12:21 +0000

Great course. You’re really brave!

I have to admit that the first time I understood renormalization beyond the “uhoh, integrals diverge…let’s play some dodgy math tricks, throw in counter terms…results look ok but couplings run” stage was in fact in a condensed matter context (although in a study group with other HEP grad students). It helped a lot that for the 1D Ising model you can write down the exact block spin transformation.

And you can even do duality…nonperturbative physics…everything there…

Did you realize that there are D-branes in condensed matter physics? The Kondo effect is an example: There you have a localised spin degree of freedom and scatter electrons off it. At leading order this is dominated by s-wave scattering so there is really only one spacial coordinate, the radius. So at criticality, you have a CFT in r and t and r is restricted to r>0. So you have a boundary CFT and that has boundary states that look, smell and feel like D-branes.

By: Moshe Rozali

Moshe Rozali — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 06:50:00 +0000

“raft” of students, my goodness…I only have a handful…

sounds good, we’ll be in touch, no hurry (this feels like a private email, but after 2-3 back and forth comemnts like we had, this thread is safely ours…)

best,

Moshe

By: Clifford

Clifford — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 06:01:22 +0000

Ah…. so you know about my secret hideout and laboratory, etc. Hmmm.

And by the way…don’t give up on me….you will be hearing from me about the physics we discussed earlier! And I just took a raft of graduate students for coffee and gave them a long run-down of that circle of ideas, so we’ll see how it goes….

Cheers,

-cvj

By: Moshe Rozali

Moshe Rozali — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 01:18:52 +0000

Clifford, you are the evil scientist of course.

(distinctions between these 3 types of TV shows are fairly minimal, you choose…)