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

Faraday Discussions

Last week I participated in Faraday Discussion 142: Cold and Ultracold Molecules, presenting a poster there. For those of you who don't know, what Faraday Discussions are I will describe it in two words.

The conference is organized by the Royal Society of Chemistry, it has a centennial history and takes place a few times a year nowadays. This time it was at Durham University, UK. Faraday Discussions are not "real conferences" with long plenary talks and short student's contributions. Actually, they are nothing but... discussions.

People submit their abstracts well ahead of time, about one year before the conference. The best abstracts are selected for oral presentations and the lucky guys are asked to submit full-length papers about their work. Then, after the peer-review process, preprints are sent to all participants, who are expected to read them carefully before coming to the place.

Talks at the discussions are limited by only 5 minutes - it should be just a "reminder" to people, who already read the preprints. This rule is quite strict: there is a special guy sitting next to traffic lights, which are green when you start a presentation. After four minutes the lights are switched to yellow, and they turn out to be red after five minutes. At this point you are interrupted at half a sentence - no other way around.

Presentations are scheduled in such a way that they are more or less about the same subject within a single session. So, a few five-minutes talks are given one after another. Then the discussion begins - the most interesting part, taking about one hour. People ask a lot questions, both technical and general ones, but "comments" are also possible. The latter are short presentations, also restricted by the traffic lights, which are relevant to the main contributions. For instance, a theorist, who came up with some explanation after having read the experimental preprint, can briefly describe his idea and show some slides with results.

All questions, answers and comments (along with the papers themselves) are then collected and published a few months later as a volume of Faraday Discussions, a journal having quite a good impact factor, about 5.0 these days.

I find this kind of format to be much more efficient, than usual conferences, where people may have no questions simply because they haven't got the idea of the work during the talk.

On my webpage you may find my poster as well as two preprints about our project (0903.0811, 0904.0567).

arXiv endorsement

Many years ago, the arXive was successfully working without any peer-review. But at some point, they started to get a lot of really odd submissions from science freaks, about new "theories of everything", violation of general relativity theory and other things of this sort.

Therefore, an "endorsement" mechanism was introduced, so anyone who submitted a few papers to archive can recommend a preprint of a new guy to be accepted. This is not a true peer-review, the endorser is only expected to check whether the preprint is about science in general, like it doesn't pretend to prove how stupid Einstein was. Not all the archive sections require endorsement - I guess, only fundamental topics, like high-energy physics do.

I'm an endorser for the atomic physics and chemical physics sections, which is quite useless, since no endorsement is needed there. However, today I've got the first "can you endorse me, please?" kind of message, and, yes, this is one from a science freak. I don't know what to do, I must confess. :-)

My scientific webpage

Following the advice of my supervisor, I've finally got a scientific webpage. That's it, essentially. :-)

Chemical Physics vs Physical Chemistry

At one of the last conferences I've attended, we've got a nice informal discussion about a usual subject "what is the difference between physical chemistry and chemical physics". We concluded that there might be a following way to distinguish between those. If you measure/calculate the reaction cross section, you are definitely a chemical physicist. But, if you multiply the cross section by the velocity, and therefore measure/calculate the reaction rate, you belong to the physical chemistry community. What is your opinion on that?

Is PRL Too Large to Have an ‘‘Impact’’?

Recently there was published a PRL Editorial with such a title. The main message is that only a small fraction of Letters are really highly cited - if one publishes them separately, they will have an impact factor of about 20, while PRL's number is about 7. So, this might be a good idea to reject more papers and accept only revolutionary contributions. However, the problem is that nobody can actually predict how many times a given article will be cited in a few years...

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.

Yuja Wang plays the Flight of the Bumble-Bee

You have to see that:

A new way for science popularization

Galileo's finger goes on display in Italy - an article by Daily Telegraph:

"The digit will be part of a landmark exhibition marking the 400th anniversary of his first observations of the skies...The finger was removed when the astronomer's body when it was exhumed from his unconsecrated grave and transferred to a mausoleum in a Florentine church in 1737. It is usually on display at Florence's Museum of the History of Science."

Do you really want to become a great scientist?

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.

Solving problems: theorists vs. experimentalists

A problem:

How they solve it:

via Talk like a physicist

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.

Phil Anderson on computations

Here is a quote from a Nobel Lecture of famous condensed-matter theorist Phil Anderson:

"...Very often such, a simplified model throws more light on the real workings of nature than any number of “ab initio” calculations of individual situations, which even where correct often contain so much detail as to conceal rather than reveal reality. It can be a disadvantage rather than an advantage to be able to compute or to measure too accurately, since often what one measures or computes is irrelevant in terms of mechanism. After all, the perfect computation simply reproduces Nature, does not explain her."

While Anderson gave his lecture in 1977, this seems to be even more relevant nowadays.

Another theorist, Phil Bunker, while giving talks, often describes somebody's work as "...these guys with small brains and big computers!"

Yeah, well, I'm gonna go make my own ranking, with blackjack and hookers!

... In fact, forget the ranking!

This is perhaps what the Futurama's Bender would say, while working in Moscow State University. 

In 2008 MSU took the 70th place in the World's university ranking held by Shanghai university. In 2007 and 2006 these were 76 and 70 places. This is actually not bad. For instance, MSU was ranked as 186th university in some other ratings.

What one can do with it? It's kind of simple. The university president decided to make his own ranking, and now MSU has the the 5th place (Russian). The lucky guys that took first four places will be announced this month. 

That's probably a good way to push science and encourage scientists...

Doing physics as states superposition

(via Shores of the Dirac Sea)

But what the f(t) function looks like? On my opinion, in the vicinity of deadline it may be estimated as

f(t)=Floor(0.5*Cos(t^2) + 1),

with Floor(x) giving the greatest integer less or equal to x. 

Are they some less rough approximations?

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.

Old books with Google

I never mentioned that apart from partial preview, Google books offers some full-text books to read and download. For, instance, here are books in math, which are out of copyright and can be read for free. Of course, most of them are old, and even ancient as, for instance, "Arithmetical Tables Fitted to the Capacity of Such as are Unskilled in the Art of Numbers" by Henry Walrond, published in 1663. The book describes how to work with numbers, add and subtract them. 

What is interesting for me is the old English, this book is written in. Previously I thought that it will be extremely hard for me to read such old printings. But, surprisingly enough, there is no big difference with the modern language. There are some funny words there, for instance "shew" and "your self", instead of "show" and "yourself".

I wonder why Google finds many more copyright-free books in mathematics, than in physics or in chemistry...

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...

Things I don't like in Mathematica. Part II: A writing tool.

Here is what I think about writing in Mathematica. For quite a long time I thought that Mathematica can be used for nothing else but calculations. Later I came across a post of Terry Tao "Write professionally", where (among other good things) he states:

"The standard format for mathematical papers is TeX, AMS-TeX, LaTeX, or AMS-LaTeX; other formats such as Word or Mathematica can cause technical difficulties (and will ultimately need to be converted to a TeX format), and so should be avoided."

The first thing I thought was "No way, I do not believe that somebody uses Mathematica for writing papers." I know a few experimentalists who submit articles in .doc format and are happy with it, due to lack of equations. But, as far as I know, using something but TeX is considered as kind of "mauvais ton" in math community (please tell me if I'm not right).

This post is not really about some disadvantages of Mathematica interface. But such useless options of notebook formatting as e.g. "Journal Article", "Preprint", "Report", "Book" and "Monograph" can inculcate a bad taste of writing papers in students, who may postpone learning TeX. 

Nevertheless, as mentioned by Philip, Mathematica notebooks can be used to write up some daily results with the following data analysis. For a final draft it is better to use something else, though.

Pure mathematics

From Abstruse Goose.

Things I don't like in Mathematica. Part I: License.

In my daily work I use Mathematica, and I like it very much. About 7-8 years ago, during first years of university, we were mainly using Maple for analytical derivations. Mathematica was considered to be better for numerics, since it was impossible for Maple to do them more or less fast. But nowadays (on my opinion), Mathematica is the best instrument to work with analytical stuff.

However, it is absolutely useless to write about "what I like", so I better describe things which I don't like, and which I hope will be changed soon. First I thought that it will be a little post with a list of disadvantages, but it looks like there is no way to make it short. So, there will be a few posts, and here is the first part - about the license.

In our relatively small and, in general, experimental institute we have about 20 online Mathematica licenses. In other words, twenty people can connect the server and perform calculations in the same time. 

One of my roommates was doing quite extensive computations, often lasting several days. Sometimes his calculations were stopped during the night, because Mathematica suddenly decided to check the online license, and simply interrupted the ongoing evaluation before doing this. 

Why are guys from Wolfram so agitated about the copyright? I guess I know the reason. For instance, in Russia one can buy a DVD with the last versions of Mathematica, Matlab, Mathcad, Origin Pro and other stuff (of total cost more than 10k Euro) for about 5 (yes, five) Euro. And people usually do. Furthermore, the illegal software is widely used for teaching in high schools and universities even nowadays. Hopefully, in Germany this is not the case.

Piracy is a problem. But do you really think that interrupting computations is the best way to attract new users?

The described above was actually the reason for my boss to buy me two home-licenses. But even activating home licenses is usually a pain in the neck, as mentioned in comment of BiophysicsMonkey to Chad's post, and I agree with it. Even updating licenses on both of my computers once a year is some kind of a problem I have to waste my time on, not to mention if you have a lot of machines as Chad does.

I'm completely ignorant in commercial software development, but I do not believe that there is no easier way to preserve the copyright.

Links for 18.01.09

1) The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life the Universe and Everything

2) Library of Heidelberg University - a lot of stuff in open access.

3) Quantitative Finance - a new section of arXiv

4) How the credit crisis spread - physics arXiv blog

5) Origin of name "Cast Lead" 

6) The Italian Man Who went to Malta - a funny video about English as a foreign language.

7) Defining Science - by Chad Orzel

Nature Chemistry

Today I found a little advertising brochure from Nature in my mailbox. It is about a new journal, Nature Chemistry, starting this year (a first issue will appear mid-March). I hope that apart from biochemical articles there will be a bit of usual chemistry in there...

Some photos from Zürich

(Ensuring security)

(Free entrance for everybody? No.)

Took it from here (Russian).

I wonder whether this applies to students, postdocs ad guest scientists as well...

Links for 11.01.09

1) The Fine Line Between Plagiarism and Necessary Repetition by Chad Orzel.

2) Next generation search engines could rank sites by “talent” - in the physics arXiv blog.

3) Think atheist - a social network for those who has no shame being an atheist.

4) A Staged Scene in a Gaza Hospital? - a CNN video of a twelve year old boy, dying in the hospital, with remarks of a specialist. The (most likely) fake video, was later withdrew from the CNN website with no further comments.

The greatest math problem ever

This is a problem, which can be easily solved by children before entering elementary school. If you want to give it a try, please forget everything you have ever studied. Here it comes:

8809 = 6
7111 = 0
2172 = 0
6666 = 4
1111 = 0
3213 = 0
7662 = 2
9312 = 1
0000 = 4
2222 = 0
3333 = 0
5555 = 0
8193 = 3
8096 = 5
7777 = 0
9999 = 4
7756 = 1
6855 = 3
9881 = 5
5531 = 0

2581 = ?

I took it from here (Russian)

What to do with deleted sections?

When we write an article, we almost always have to omit some material, which has a lot of work behind it. There may be some restrictions to the article length, as in the case of letters to the editor. Also, a referee may ask to shorten appendices and skip insignificant details. An he/she will be right - a short paper is most likely to be read.

So, one usually has a choice: on the one hand an article should describe new and interesting results, without technical stuff interesting for 5% of readers or less. On the other hand, It might be a good idea to keep all the relevant material in the same place. This may be useful for further work of authors, or also for somebody else, who wants to learn from the paper or to work out something similar.

Recently there was a post by "How many deleted sections do you write?", where Daniel Lemire proposes a good idea what to do with deleted pages. Daniel suggests to put them in the article's supplementary material, with a reference in the article. In such a way, one can expect the article to be easily read with an access to all necessary details.

Another way might be to keep all the omitted material in the arXiv preprint, and cite it in the forthcoming paper.

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.

25 amazing people celebrated by Google

I came across a collection of Google pictures designated to scientists' and artists' birthdays. Here is the one for Louis Braille:

I wonder whether anyone has a collection of all Google pictures...

Links for 21.12.08

• Politics, South Korea-style by LA Times - recent fight in the Korean parlament

• Physics Textbook by Dot Physics

• Essay: Fifty Years of Condensed Matter Physics