Suppose you have an idea for a research project. You wonder if someone else has already looked at the problem. You might Google it.
Then you start working on the project. You encounter problems, things you don't understand. You might Google, looking for related problems and solutions.
You get some results. You might Google certain likely phrases, to see if anyone has discovered the same, or related, results by different means.
You think about what journal to send your paper to. You might Google for "journal name" and "project title" to see which journals might go for it.
You wonder who to suggest as a reviewer. Someone who works on related problems. You might Google to find out who that would be.
Or you could just blindly write a shitty little paper without citing any of the tens of papers on the same subject published in the past couple of years, papers which contain every result you claim is new, and written in a much nicer way, and send the bastard thing to the arXiv with an air of distain which borders on the insulting.
And then you might get in your tank and drive over the "insulting" line and rattle off cackling like a banshee into the no-man's-land of "fuck you".
God I hope I get the paper to review. I really really do.
Monday, 13 June 2011
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Brian Cox: (even) better than the real thing
The Now Show has a great segment, about five minutes in, with Mitch Ben taking the piss out of Brian "I was partly responsible for the film Sunshine" Cox and simultaneously explaining the basics of quantum mechanics. Nice.
Listen here, it should be available for the next seven days from the date of this post.
Listen here, it should be available for the next seven days from the date of this post.
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
Sunday, 5 June 2011
It's heating up...
I'm very glad now that I didn't go down the "comment" route. Let's look at someone who did!
First there was this:
A proposal to measure photon-photon scattering
which contains equations in the abstract and was therefore never going to be a fun read. The paper opens with a reference to an unpublished paper by the same author which apparently shows that the calculation of light by light scattering from Euler-Heisenberg is wrong. That's quite a claim.
The gist of the paper is that a bog-standard perturbative calculation gives the correct answer, as you'd expect. There is also a reference to an old, independent, perturbative calculation which reproduced E&H's result, but seemingly can't be trusted as it was fudged in order to agree with E&H.
Interesting so far!
The paper ends though with some dodgy comments on both gauge and Lorentz invariance: for example, they claim that the QED polarisation tensor isn't transverse... I'm pretty sure it is, you know. There's a reference to one of their own papers where they show this. Note that they're using a UV cutoff which doesn't preserve gauge invariance, so it seems to me that they've broken gauge invariance and found that... oh... gauge invariance is broken. Check.
So this morning comes the comment:
Comment on : A Proposal to Measure Photon-Photon Scattering
which, somewhat disappointingly, open with neither a disgruntled "this contradicts my fabulous result" nor a direct "this is HORSESHIT" slap-down. Instead, it rather mildly points out that the "new" result gives a cross section 40 orders of magnitude larger than the old, and that this violates known _experimental_ bounds on the cross-section.
Pretty slap-downy, at a medium pace.
But today also sees the full calculation of the new result! It's here:
Light-Light Scattering
and lays the blame at the foot of an "unphysical gauge condition" which I can't see discussed explicitly. They say that the box diagram is finite in QED... really?! Can an expert on this confirm or deny it? I could get up and open a textbook but, you know, sleepy...
Personally, I'd love it if Euler-Heisenberg was wrong. It would be tremendous fun. I think it's more likely that these trailblazing chaps have just screwed their calculation, either because they've shagged gauge invariance or ... ah, they add three box diagrams together, say "each is divergent but the sum is not and therefore we don't need to regularise." Hunggg. This could be where they dropped the ball. If I have an expression which is finite then clearly no regularisation is needed. However, if I have three dodgy expressions then I can't just add them up and claim the whole thing will be fine. So I guess they've dropped an "infinity - infinity = 0 ball.
Still! Let's hope it doesn't end here. There's plenty of scope for more comments with ever increasing irritation. Physicists -- I know you won't let me down!
First there was this:
A proposal to measure photon-photon scattering
which contains equations in the abstract and was therefore never going to be a fun read. The paper opens with a reference to an unpublished paper by the same author which apparently shows that the calculation of light by light scattering from Euler-Heisenberg is wrong. That's quite a claim.
The gist of the paper is that a bog-standard perturbative calculation gives the correct answer, as you'd expect. There is also a reference to an old, independent, perturbative calculation which reproduced E&H's result, but seemingly can't be trusted as it was fudged in order to agree with E&H.
Interesting so far!
The paper ends though with some dodgy comments on both gauge and Lorentz invariance: for example, they claim that the QED polarisation tensor isn't transverse... I'm pretty sure it is, you know. There's a reference to one of their own papers where they show this. Note that they're using a UV cutoff which doesn't preserve gauge invariance, so it seems to me that they've broken gauge invariance and found that... oh... gauge invariance is broken. Check.
So this morning comes the comment:
Comment on : A Proposal to Measure Photon-Photon Scattering
which, somewhat disappointingly, open with neither a disgruntled "this contradicts my fabulous result" nor a direct "this is HORSESHIT" slap-down. Instead, it rather mildly points out that the "new" result gives a cross section 40 orders of magnitude larger than the old, and that this violates known _experimental_ bounds on the cross-section.
Pretty slap-downy, at a medium pace.
But today also sees the full calculation of the new result! It's here:
Light-Light Scattering
and lays the blame at the foot of an "unphysical gauge condition" which I can't see discussed explicitly. They say that the box diagram is finite in QED... really?! Can an expert on this confirm or deny it? I could get up and open a textbook but, you know, sleepy...
Personally, I'd love it if Euler-Heisenberg was wrong. It would be tremendous fun. I think it's more likely that these trailblazing chaps have just screwed their calculation, either because they've shagged gauge invariance or ... ah, they add three box diagrams together, say "each is divergent but the sum is not and therefore we don't need to regularise." Hunggg. This could be where they dropped the ball. If I have an expression which is finite then clearly no regularisation is needed. However, if I have three dodgy expressions then I can't just add them up and claim the whole thing will be fine. So I guess they've dropped an "infinity - infinity = 0 ball.
Still! Let's hope it doesn't end here. There's plenty of scope for more comments with ever increasing irritation. Physicists -- I know you won't let me down!
Saturday, 28 May 2011
LC2011 - day 4
The day gets off to a rocky start after excessive drinking at the conference dinner, casused by my being outraged at the kind of socially despicable, teeth gringindly irritating, jaw-droppingly rude behaviour of one of the bigshots which I can't really talk about without risking revealing who I am. Which is a shame, because it's a cracking story which exemplifies the kind of despicable behaviour which made me start writing this blog.
The day proceeds to drag out interminably, scheduled to end at 6pm. Fortunately some speakers have pulled out and the schedule remixed, which should speed things up. Unfortunately we are already 30 minutes behind timetable by the time the last coffee break rolls up.
The afternoon session is clearly given over to talks that no-one really cares about. The topics are all `ab initio', or rather, they use lightfront co-ordinates or approaches to solve their problems, without focussing on the fundamentals or intricate details of lightfront methods. A few years ago, this was an integral part of the conference. Now it's an aside -- the community's focus is split between AdS/QCD and, basically, trying to get hadronic physics out of lightfront QCD by calculating extremely complex scattering amplitudes in whatever approximation/model is currently seen as been in fashion.
As a result, the lecture hall begins to empty out after lunch. At least two of the super bigshots are gone by the final coffee break. People are bored and tired. The later speakers must have felt awful looking out at the audience and seeing only a sea of very bored, uniterested faces. Still, one of them decidees that, another 10 minutes behind schedule, it is absoloutely necessary to begin their talk by spending several minutes eulogising the lightfront community.
Fortunately things pick up for the final talk which, clearly relagated to the death slot because of the off-topic topic, is delivered by a buoyant postdoc who manages to engage the audience by, in contrast to way too many other speakers, having put some effort into writing a clear presentation.
The day proceeds to drag out interminably, scheduled to end at 6pm. Fortunately some speakers have pulled out and the schedule remixed, which should speed things up. Unfortunately we are already 30 minutes behind timetable by the time the last coffee break rolls up.
The afternoon session is clearly given over to talks that no-one really cares about. The topics are all `ab initio', or rather, they use lightfront co-ordinates or approaches to solve their problems, without focussing on the fundamentals or intricate details of lightfront methods. A few years ago, this was an integral part of the conference. Now it's an aside -- the community's focus is split between AdS/QCD and, basically, trying to get hadronic physics out of lightfront QCD by calculating extremely complex scattering amplitudes in whatever approximation/model is currently seen as been in fashion.
As a result, the lecture hall begins to empty out after lunch. At least two of the super bigshots are gone by the final coffee break. People are bored and tired. The later speakers must have felt awful looking out at the audience and seeing only a sea of very bored, uniterested faces. Still, one of them decidees that, another 10 minutes behind schedule, it is absoloutely necessary to begin their talk by spending several minutes eulogising the lightfront community.
Fortunately things pick up for the final talk which, clearly relagated to the death slot because of the off-topic topic, is delivered by a buoyant postdoc who manages to engage the audience by, in contrast to way too many other speakers, having put some effort into writing a clear presentation.
Thursday, 26 May 2011
LC2011 - day 3
Craig Roberts starts the day off looking sharp as hell and giving a nice clear talk. Apparently there are no flux tubes between light quarks! The argument why escapes me, but the result is very interesting. Violent changes in the analytic properties of quark propagators, it seems.
The proton mass is apparently 98% dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. Who needs the Higgs? Higgs also irrelevant for light quarks. Sadly Dyson-Schwinger turn up and I drift away....
There are BaBar anomalies which cannot be explained by QCD, apparently. Suspect we just don't know how to calculate.
I will never understand physics.
Marvin points out that we don't live in minkowski space, but in some kind of FRW universe. Apparently the instant form is tricky in such a universe, and the lightfront is really hard. Question is, does the lightfront approach make any sense at all for scales larger than that of the solar system?
A mobile phone rings. The same phone rings again. Sigh.
This girl refuses to answer questions. Not a good idea. Her response is "that is not my part of this project, so I refuse to answer the question". Idiot. And she over-runs. And the chair does nothing about it. And she says she has no intention of stopping. Her arrogance is astounding.
The proton mass is apparently 98% dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. Who needs the Higgs? Higgs also irrelevant for light quarks. Sadly Dyson-Schwinger turn up and I drift away....
There are BaBar anomalies which cannot be explained by QCD, apparently. Suspect we just don't know how to calculate.
I will never understand physics.
Marvin points out that we don't live in minkowski space, but in some kind of FRW universe. Apparently the instant form is tricky in such a universe, and the lightfront is really hard. Question is, does the lightfront approach make any sense at all for scales larger than that of the solar system?
A mobile phone rings. The same phone rings again. Sigh.
This girl refuses to answer questions. Not a good idea. Her response is "that is not my part of this project, so I refuse to answer the question". Idiot. And she over-runs. And the chair does nothing about it. And she says she has no intention of stopping. Her arrogance is astounding.
LC2011 - day 2
Today begins with a 24-hour-too-late attempt to reveal the meaning of the acronyms GPD, PDF, TMD, F2B and 5DOG9, amongst others.
I'm probably wrong but I don't think the fundamentals of QCD lie in incredibly detailed, complex, messy, ugly, poorly understood calculations of pion-pion-proton-J-rho meson scattering.
Apparently you can completely localise a relativistic particle in at most two dimensions (living in 3+1 of course). Nice.
Five minutes over time at the end of the first session the speaker announces that's he taking five further minutes. He doesn't even stop when the chair finally assembles the balls to pointedly stand up. 10 minuets later we get access to coffee.....
Lattice...lepton-lepton collisions. People seem to be worried about final state interactions. In QED this seems to correspond to accounting for the Coulomb cloud around electrons. What people here don't seem to realise is that that Coulomb cloud (together with the fermionic matter field) IS the electron. Dirac showed this in 1930 or something and then everyone forgot it. If you actually did scattering with physical fields rather than the Lagrangian fields then all this final state bollocks would be automatically taken care of. But no-one cares about that.
It's day 2 and the sodding laser pointer still doesn't work.
People might thank you for giving nice talks, but they won't cite you. The people who are cited are the people who give bad talks.
People are still shuffling infra-red divergences into things they're not looking at and then forgetting them.... QFT has come a long way. Hmmm. Other people think their made up bullshit is correct, while experiment is wrong. Humility is lacking at this conference.
A couple of choice nuggets from today:
"If you're in your right mind, you would never think that!"
"Oh! I'm out of time. I'll go quickly..."
I'm probably wrong but I don't think the fundamentals of QCD lie in incredibly detailed, complex, messy, ugly, poorly understood calculations of pion-pion-proton-J-rho meson scattering.
Apparently you can completely localise a relativistic particle in at most two dimensions (living in 3+1 of course). Nice.
Five minutes over time at the end of the first session the speaker announces that's he taking five further minutes. He doesn't even stop when the chair finally assembles the balls to pointedly stand up. 10 minuets later we get access to coffee.....
Lattice...lepton-lepton collisions. People seem to be worried about final state interactions. In QED this seems to correspond to accounting for the Coulomb cloud around electrons. What people here don't seem to realise is that that Coulomb cloud (together with the fermionic matter field) IS the electron. Dirac showed this in 1930 or something and then everyone forgot it. If you actually did scattering with physical fields rather than the Lagrangian fields then all this final state bollocks would be automatically taken care of. But no-one cares about that.
It's day 2 and the sodding laser pointer still doesn't work.
People might thank you for giving nice talks, but they won't cite you. The people who are cited are the people who give bad talks.
People are still shuffling infra-red divergences into things they're not looking at and then forgetting them.... QFT has come a long way. Hmmm. Other people think their made up bullshit is correct, while experiment is wrong. Humility is lacking at this conference.
A couple of choice nuggets from today:
"If you're in your right mind, you would never think that!"
"Oh! I'm out of time. I'll go quickly..."
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