Spacebreaker

The sound of silence has never been so devastating. Hush and watch. A space shuttle is dying. It disintegrates into silvery slivers, dismembers in disgrace, spewing its innards into the void. As debris strikes, stress propagates through the wing, buckling and shredding in its wake. The shuttle revolves in a graceless agonizing pirouette, its angular momentum ruthlessly dictates its course. Caught in a maelstrom of projectiles are astronauts in twilight. They are tiny. A wing detaches. A mute groan. Sandra detaches.

The center of mass is simple to define, ubiquitous in solids, entirely unremarkable. Until Sandra transforms this abstraction into poignancy, as she tumbles and wheels through a world without friction. She is making a beeline to nowhere in particular, but straight is straight, and inertia immutable. As hope diminishes with each revolution, numbing inevitability mounts.

Hope dies.

I got you.

Bursts forth.

This is my fantasy of momentum. I must have nursed this for years. I am in the middle of a frozen lake, whose surface is so slick as to make walking unfortunate. All I have are stones in my pockets. All I need are stones in my pockets. I watched my fantasy unfold on screen, as Sandra commandeers space with a fire extinguisher.

I’ve never felt closer to space, after Gravity. A movie that is ripe with tech, but is not weighed down by it, instead uses its tech humanistically, propels itself to space untrodden, it transcends belief and enters the realm of dreams. A spacebreaker.

Catch, release, float.

Zuker speaks of the silence of the cortical field. We rulers of mice, we cannot yet control their dreams, but we can make them confuse sweet for bitter.

These are the dimensions of taste: sour, salty, umami, sweet, bitter, carbonation. Carbonation?

To each dimension, a type of receptor. To each receptor type, a cell type, and then a distinct pathway to the brain. The telephone lines don’t mix. Imagine transplanting receptors for sour into cells for salty, and vice versa. Mice can experience sour while biting down on salty.

Each pathway leads to a distinct localized region in the brain. If the umami region is silenced, the mouse will lose its ability to taste umami. Mice hate bitter as much as we do. While the critter is tasting water, inject a laser with pinpoint accuracy into the brain region for bitter. Have you ever seen a mouse cringe?

Though his successes loom before him, Zuker speaks of humility. Of expanses in ignorance. His longstanding goal: to understand how the senses create an internal representation of the outside world. I am only beginning to understand what this statement even means, its Structure would otherwise have been lost.

Physics Weddings Party

"Another successful day of procrastination," Sincere declares with cheer. He proceeds to craft and send out the following invitation.


Fellow graduate students,


It has come to our attention that several of our friends, have gotten married over the summer without telling us. Not wishing to be the Snowden of Princeton Physics, I feel that I am not at liberty to reveal this information. Thus, instead I am inviting all of you to party it up and celebrate for completely unrelated reasons.


Join us this Friday evening, October 18th, after 9pm at 206 East Stanworth to celebrate International Necktie Day.


"The modern necktie spread by Europe traces back to the time of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) when Croatian mercenaries from the Croatian Military Frontier in French service, wearing their traditional small, knotted neckerchiefs, aroused the interest of the Parisians."


We plan to drink and listen to Balkan music. If there's someone I missed that you wanted to invite, let them know they're welcome! Hopefully this party will be so cool that we'll form a Bose-Einstein condensate and thus have enough space for everyone in our house.

Sincere

PS: make sure to BYOB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



PPS: there will be Soul Caliber

Three dimensions

A passage from an influential thesis:

In many ways, we are fortunate to be living in a universe with exactly three spatial
dimensions. It keeps us from falling apart, allows us, if we are willing, to see things
as they really are, makes it possible, perhaps with some practice, to communicate in
a clear and coherent manner, and it provides some of the more advanced members of
civilization with the ability to tie their shoes [1, 2].

Perhaps these frivolous statements deserve some explanation, or at least a translation from their seemingly nonsensical form into something physically meaningful. We begin by pointing out that Newton’s 1/r^2 force-law [3], which arises for Gaussian
central potentials associated with gravitational and electric point charges, is particular to three spatial dimensions. As shown in [4, 5], a Gaussian central potential in D
dimensional space generates a 1/r^(D−1) force law, and this only permits stable orbits
when D = 3. Indeed, this implies that without exactly three spatial dimensions, we
would lose the stable orbits that keep our structure intact from astrophysical scales
down to atomic scales. (Similar results arise from such considerations in the framework of general relativity [6].) Another point of clarification is that transmission of
information signals via light or sound waves is only reverberation-free and distortionless for radiation in D =1, 3 spatial dimensions [7]. Finally, another seemingly
innocuous, but rather important, fact is that three is the exact number of dimensions
that permits nontrivial knots to exist. Any fewer dimensions, and it is impossible to
form a knot in a strand, since there is no “under” or “over,” just “next to.” Any more
dimensions and there is too much spatial freedom, which will make knots unravel,
since one can always move one strand past another by pushing it into one of the extra
dimensions, where it may pass unhindered.

Knowing that three is an interesting dimensionality for space that grants some
rather nice properties, one might be inclined to ask whether three might also be
an interesting dimensionality for spacetime. Indeed, this turns out to be the case,
primarily because of the property regarding whether nontrivial knots are allowed to
exist and the effect this has on particle statistics. In fact, it is exactly this property
that requires particles in three (or more) spatial dimensions to exhibit only the well-
known bosonic [8, 9] and fermionic [10, 11] statistics that play such a crucial role in
the structure and interaction of matter in the universe.

Socks and shoes

Higgs got it today. Poor Phil was credited for "setting the stage." Most notable about the Nobel report: "It matters the order in which one performs a non-Abelian gauge transformation, just as it matters with socks and shoes." I smiled my way home.