Harry Potter course at Durham University

That's basically it. Durham University offers a course in Harry Potter to the students. That reminds me of the Starcraft course taught at UC Berkeley.

Take care,

Misha

Links for 29.04.09

1) A theoretical physics FAQ by Arnold Neumaier 

2) A book by Arnold Neumaier "Classical and Quantum Mechanics via Lie algebras" is available here. It will be published soon by Cambridge University Press.

3) Motion Mountain, The Free Physics Textbook by Christoph Shiller

A terrific lectures course

If you work in AMO physics and you are out of reading, here is an excellent course in modern atomic and optical physics by Misha Lukin (Harvard) - the first link here.

Mathematical Tools for Physics

Yesterday I came across a wonderful lecture notes of math methods in physics for undergrads, namely "Mathematical Tools for Physics" by James Nearing. There is a lot of simple math in there, but with really good explanations where in physics this may be of use. Also James gives a lot of funny math tricks.

I wish I had such a lecture course while studying in university.

A new book on QM

A very, very strange book appeared in arxive a few days ago: "Quantum Mechanics" by Hitoshi Kitada (University of Tokyo).

Here are the names of some chapters: "Quantum Mechanical Time Contradicts The Uncertainty Principle", "Definition of local time", "Motion Inside a Local System", "Principle of General Relativity", "Inconsistency of Mathematics?", "Stationary Universe", "Existence of Local Motion", "Local time exists", and so on.

Hm, "stationary universe" in the QM course... Let's take a look at this chapter:

"By nature what is called the universe must be a closed universe, within which is all. We will characterize it by a certain quantum-mechanical condition.We consider a metatheory of a formal set theory S. We name this metatheory M_S, indicating that it is a Meta-theory of S as well as a Meta-Scientific theory as Ronald Swan [46] refers to. The following arguments are all made in M_S....The class φ is the first world, the Universe, which is completely chaotic. In other words, φ is “absolute inconsistent self-identity” in the sense of Kitarou Nishida [41], whose meaning was later clarified by Ronald Swan [46] in the form stated above. In this clarification, φ can be thought “absolute nothingness” in Hegel’s sense."

Oh mein Gott, "in Hegel's sense"... I wonder whether physics students at Tokyo university have to pass an exam on this.

Links for 01.02.09

1) A calender with naked French politicians - by Roland Hours.

2) Is massively collaborative mathematics possible? - Gowers's weblog.

3) Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars - a terrific project.

4) Lab-initio, a lot of funny science pictures.

5) Italian history of physics archive - some old scientific journals are accessible after free registration.

6) Leningrad Siege: Now and then, from English Russia - shows how Saint Petersbourg waw looking during WWII.

Starcraft Course in Berkeley

UC Berkeley students can now take a course in Starcraft game. 

"This course will go in-depth in the theory of how war is conducted within the confines of the game Starcraft. There will be lecture on various aspects of the game, from the viewpoint of pure theory to the more computational aspects of how exactly battles are conducted. Calculus and Differential Equations are highly recommended for full understanding of the course. Furthermore, the class will take the theoretical into the practical world by analyzing games and replays to reinforce decision-making skills and advanced Starcraft theory." 

[link]

Yes, calculus and differential equations are needed. I guess the same phrase appears in the Introduction chapter of quantum mechanics books.

UPD In one of Taiwanese universities there is a porn course. I wonder whether differential equations are still recommended...

Why one needs peer review?

A few days ago Michael Nielsen published an excellent post "Three myths about scientific peer review". Briefly, in the nonscientific (and sometimes in the scientific) community it is usually supposed that:

i) Peer review system was used since very long time ago. Actually, it was not. For instance, Albert Einstein, while living in Germany, was not used to "independent referees" - in such journals as Zeitschrift für Physik the decision "whether to publish a paper or not" was always made by editors. And, as far as I know, before WWII this journal was considered as much better place to publish than Physical Review. After moving to the US, Einstein had withdrew one of his contributions from the Physical Review, because he "has not authorized the editor to show it to specialists before it is printed". I wrote a little post about this story before.

ii) It is reliable, in other words "it nearly always picks up errors, is a very accurate gauge of quality, and rarely suppresses innovation". Of course, no one can predict the future, and say which piece of work will be a "citation classic" in ten years. Furthermore, there is probably no way to discuss the reliability of peer review since we simply don't know how many revolutionary papers were never published (or were, but in some obscure journals) due to negative referee reports.

and

iii) It can show what is right and what is wrong in science. This is also not true, because it is impossible to check all math in the manusript, redo computations, not to mention repeating experimental results.

The post of Michael was followed by interesting comments of Daniel Lemire, "The purpose of peer review", induced by another comment of Peter Turney to Michael's post: "I’m sympathetic to much of what you’re saying, but, on the other hand, I know that peer review has immensely improved many of my own papers."

Being nothing but graduate student, I absolutely agree with Daniel and Peter: at least two from three papers, written during the first year of my PhD, were substantially improved after referee's comments. Apart from submitting  the papers, we have always sent preprints to some good friends from our field - always getting positive feedback (some of them may be the referees in the same time, but this we don't know).

In my opinion, the fact of peer review doesn't mean that the article is reliable, correct or "interesting to a wide community of scientists" (as it should be e.g. for Nature and Phys. Rev. Lett.). But, the review process is some kind of necessary (but not the sufficient!) condition for paper to be read and cited in the long-time future. After publication the scientific community will make it clear, whether such a condition was actually sufficient - there will be a lot of readers  and time for it, much more than two referees having three weeks to submit a report.

Of course, no one can read all journals in his field, even if the field is small enough. Let alone that articles show what was done about one year ago, but not now. Almost no one is actually reading journals - conferences and arXive give a perfect taste of what is going on. But if we come across an arXive preprint dated back to 2007 without any journal reference - this looks strange, doesn't it?

And last, but not least, it seems that reviewing good papers is an excellent way to learn how to write good papers.

Links for 14.12.08

• Spot the math errors! - some false mathematical proofs. Can you see the mistake?

• Musicians condemn use of their songs as instruments of war by The Guardian - popular songs were used for tortures in Guantanamo. "Some prisoners have said it can be even worse than more traditional methods of physical torture, including waterboarding."

• Burlesque Matinée at the Max Planck Gesellschaft - A good answer to "why is it important to learn foreign languages?"

• Physicsworks - an interesting collection of physics-related links.

• World Lecture Hall - free online course materials from around the world.

You can find many more links I find interesting on my delicious webpage.

Mendeley - some suggestions

As I mentioned before, I signed up to Mendeley, here is a link to my profile. In this post I just want to mention some improvements, that (I believe) will make Mendeley even more useful than it is now:

1) As I wrote earlier, the metadata transfer for arXiv preprints doesn't work properly.

2) On the one hand, all of us are used to publish arXiv preprints prior to publications, but one should not mix preprints and peer-review journal articles in the CV. Therefore, it will be great if the "preprint" option will be added as an article type.

3) Also, one may want to distinguish "conference proceedings" from "conference abstracts" (which may be also presented as posters).

4) A useful thing might be to add a list of conferences, visited by scientist, with a type of contribution (invited talk/oral presentation/poster) as an option.

5) Looks like a little bug: when I type my location, the list of suggestions appears. But, If I ignore this list and type "Berlin, Germany" by myself (which is exactly the same thing as given in the list), the following message occurs: "Sorry, we don't have details for the location you have entered. Please select one from the drop down list."

6) If I see a green cross near "add entry", I immediately want to click it. But it doesn't work, one has to click "add entry" itself.

I hope these issues may be fixed...

Mendeley

In comments to my recent post Jan Reichelt brought my attention to another academic collaboration tool, called Mendeley. The idea is a bit different from those of 2collab, and therefore one cannot directly compare these two things. While 2collab is a bookmarking tool, dealing with articles somewhere in the web, the heart of Mendeley is an online library, where you can upload and organize your .pdf files. You can also create your profile with CV and publication list, as well as join different groups. The online library can be synchronized with files on your computer using the offline tool, Mendeley desktop.

Surprisingly enough, Mendeley correctly reads almost all the metadata from .pdf's. However, it doesn't work correctly with arXiv preprints: what I had is the arXiv link read as an article title (e.g. arXiv:0809.3331), and the blank field of publication name (where the journal title should be). Hope that the authors can fix it soon.

Another point is that at the moment there are only very few users of such services as Mendeley and 2collab are. However, I believe that in the nearest future using "academic social networks" will be as usual as, for instance, having a personal webpage at institute website nowadays.

2collab

I came across an interesting service - 2collab, a tool for scientific bookmarking, sharing and collaborating. It looks like an academic analogue of delicious. This project was started by Elsevier, and therefore any article from Elsevier journal may be immediately bookmarked using an "add 2collab" button at the journal website - and all the bibliographic data will be automatically transferred.  Unfortunately, at the moment no other journals have such buttons. Of course, one can bookmark absolutely any webpage, but in this case one should write up the bookmark description (title, etc.) by hands, which can take a while.

For this day, 2collab seems to be not very popular among the researchers, but I hope it will change soon.

Scholarpedia

Surprisingly enough there is a peer-reviewed alternative to Wikipedia, called Scholarpedia. The authors pretend that 

"...Scholarpedia articles could be cited, articles are not frozen and outdated, but dynamic, subject to an ongoing process of improvement moderated by their curators."

So it is supposed to be better than Wiki, due to the peer-review system, and better than any printed issues, because they cannot be changed.

I wonder whether Scholarpedia will really become a source of "articles that could be cited".

Links for 19.10.2008

Useful:

• Springer Online Reference Works - online encyclopedia of math
• Advanced physics forums

Interesting:

• Why LaTeX is like Latin - by Paul Goldberg. "LaTeX, like Latin, does not prevent one from writing down a statement that is incorrect. ... But it does help to prevent vagueness."
• Essay: Fifty Years of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics in Physical Review Letters - by Serge Haroche.
• The complete work of Charles Darwin online
• Old scientists never clean out their refrigerators - the story of the Miller-Urey experiment
• Website of Michio Kaku, and his opinion about the last Nobel Prize.

Blogs:

• How you can save the world - an interesting blog, written by many well-known contributors, string theorist Michio Kaku among them.

Funny:

• Iran minister admits holding fake Oxford degree
  
• 'Punch drunk' pony rescued from swimming pool
  

The teacher's day

Today is a Teacher's day in Russia (also in Pakistan and Philippines :-), and www.google.ru looks like this:

The date is chosen to coincide with the World Teacher's Day, defined by UNESCO.

Wolfram support

I was surprised by fast and friendly support that Wolfram offers to Mathematica users. The last two days I was bothering with a problem, which occurs when you try to calculate an alternating sum consisting of big numbers - the precision was not high enough and I always obtained a "noisy" curve instead of the smooth one. I played with accuracy and precision, but nothing helped. Finally, I've sent my notebook to Wolfram support, and have got an answer within a few hours, with a correct notebook attached. Now it seems to work - it is a bit tricky, though. 

Why is mercury liquid?

The answer is clearly presented here. I find very interesting that mercury does not crystallizes at the room temperature not only due to the filled atomic shells (the Hg configuration is [Xe] 4f14 5d10 6s2), but also because of relativistic effects, which decrease the radius of the 6s orbital.

Mercury is a liquid at room temperature because the "relativistic contraction" of its atomic orbitals makes it behave chemically almost like a noble gas, not wanting to share electrons with other atoms, even other mercury atoms! Note that mercury is monatomic in the gas phase, just like a noble gas. Of course this should not be pushed too far; mercury is not a noble gas. There are enough outer-electron interactions for mercury to remain a liquid (radon, 22 amu heavier, is a gas), to conduct electricity, and to participate in ordinary chemical reactions...

Academic reader

One of the Michael Nilsen's projects is the so-called Academic reader. After a first look I was curious about its difference from standard RSS-readers, like Google Reader for instance. A bit later I found a little post about it:

"In the existing site, the main difference between the Academic Reader and RSS readers like the Google Reader is that we have a variety of ways of searching and browsing older papers. This means the Academic Reader allows you to both (1) keep abreast of your current reading, and (2) look back into the past, discovering older papers and so on. RSS readers typically focus on just the first of these problems."

Since a new tool contains all metadata from journal archives, it looks like a hybrid of an RSS-reader with some offline library like (my favorite) Papers.

Six rules for rewriting by Michael Nilsen

Very helpful post by one of the pioneers of quantum computation, Michael Nilsen. Here are the ideas which I find the most interesting:

1) Every sentence should grab the reader and propel them forward: Academics are wont to ignore this rule, believing the reader should be willing to endure any pain for a sufficient payoff. Of course, academics aren’t paid per reader. Good bloggers and journalists know better.

2) Use the strongest appropriate verb: Identify the verb in every sentence, and ask if you can improve it, perhaps eliminating adjectives and adverbs in the process. This is simple and mechanical, but often yields great improvements with little effort.

3) Beware of nominalization: A common way we weaken verbs is by turning them into nouns, and then combining them with weaker verbs. This bad habit is called nominalization. Contrast the wishy-washy “I conducted an investigation of rules for rewriting” with the more direct “I investigated rules for rewriting”. In the first sentence I have nominalized the strong verb “investigated” so that it becomes the noun “investigation”, and then combined it with the weaker verb “conducted”.

Probably we can generalize these rules as:

"Avoid the official, bureaucratic language in your articles. Surprisingly, science can be easily understood as an interesting story, without useless overcomplications."

Knol

Сегодня Google Scholar известил меня о том, что появился новый проект от Google, называется Knol. Кноль - это единица знаний, от слова knowledge. В общем, каждый желающий приглашается туда написать статью о том, что он знает. На данный момент, я не совсем понимаю цель этого проекта... Разве что, при должном пиаре, он может составить альтернативу Википедии. Отличия, безусловно, есть: отправить статью может кто угодно, редактировать её просто так нельзя, но можно послать еще одну, от своего имени. Короче говоря, время покажет.