Physicists spend a large part of their lives in a state of confusion. It’s an occupational hazard. To excel in physics is to embrace doubt while walking the winding road to clarity. The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.

But en route to explanation—during their search for new frameworks to address outstanding questions—theorists must tread with considered step through the jungle of bewilderment, guided mostly by hunches, inklings, clues, and calculations. And as the majority of researchers have a tendency to cover their tracks, discoveries often bear little evidence of the arduous terrain that’s been covered. But don’t lose sight of the fact that nothing comes easily. Nature does not give up her secrets lightly.

— Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, first paragraph of Chapter 16. [Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2004].

— Wikipedia article about the book

Overall, I’ve been really enjoying this book for how it keeps my head in the space I need it to be in for my thesis.  Sometimes I just open it randomly to read whatever I happen upon, and sometimes I scan for specific topics.  I have almost made it all the way through sequentially, though, or at least I think I have.  I might have to read it again, though, but that’s okay because I really have enjoyed all that I’ve read.

I recommend this book to anyone who is curious about spacetime and the current state of research (well, at least, up to 2004).  I don’t think much has changed since then, except that the Large Hadron Collider is up and running, and it hasn’t (as of this blog post) found anything yet to prove or disprove any of the theories mentioned in this book (specifically: no Higgs particle has been found yet, no evidence of miniature black holes being formed, and no evidence of the extra dimensions required for string theory).

RT @timtfj:

Passive [voice] makes the facts harder to absorb. Disengages the reader.

Harder than in normal non-scientific writing, I mean.

I wonder if anyone’s done the experiment: ”One version of the paper was prepared in passive voice and 3rd person in order to test the reader’s information retention. We wrote the other one in 1st person to test how much you remember.”

You’d take an actual science paper, & keep it exactly the same except for editing all the passives out of one version, then test how easily & accurately people could follow it, what criteria they used to evalute it, etc.

Results would probably vary depending on whether it was a paper in the reader’s own discipline.

—[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

My responses:

Interesting experiment idea, and well-described as well. ;) In that case though, the “we” seems more correct. My case is more vague.

I think passive voice works for mathematical research because it doesn’t matter who sets it up, or even if anyone does.

—[1][2]

I think the results of above experiment described by Tim would also depend on whether the norm for the test paper’s discipline tends towards passive voice or active explanations of what the researchers actually did.

In mathematical physics, there are a lot of situations where it seems more natural (in my humble opinion) to use passive voice.  Specifically, I’m finding this to be true when the only other choice is what I’ve recently learned (thanks @candace_nast) can be called an “inclusive we”, where I mean the reader and myself, for example when I am demonstrating something so that “we can see” whatever it is I’m demonstrating. I’d much prefer to take myself out of the picture, and just state what is being demonstrated, letting the reader decide whether s/he sees it too.

If, instead of opting for passive voice or inclusive we, I take too much responsibility for what I am sharing, it may seem like I am the only person who has ever figured out what I am demonstrating. Obviously, I do need to take some credit for my work, because the whole point of a thesis or dissertation is to put my work on a pedestal. However, I think it would be too distracting to do this within the body of the explanation, where I really want the demonstrated concepts to be the focus. The math speaks for itself, after all, and would still demonstrate the same things whether I was the one who did the calculation, or you did, or we did together, or nobody did it at all.

Perhaps I am just struggling with modesty, which is why I am tempted at times to use “we” to mean my fellow researchers and myself, even though it blurs my own contributions with those of my collaborators. Maybe this is okay for my first draft, after which I can ask my advisor what parts he thinks are my own extensions to his work, and so they would be better described by a more personal pronoun.  Of course, this brings up the question of whether I should then choose the overly-formal method of referring to myself as “the author”, as awkward as that tends to sound…

Ah, the dilemmas that interfere with research are so much fun, aren’t they? :)

This is a diagram of mental states, as developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, showing how challenge level and skill level contribute to various mental states.  I found it when looking up Anxiety, something I am trying to understand in myself.

Please consider the 12h time to be a relic from the dark ages when Roman numerals were used, the number zero had not yet been invented and analog clocks were the only known form of displaying a time. Please avoid using it today, especially in technical applications!

I took a moment to research a little deeper into my discomfort about today being “celebrated” because it can be written in such a way that the digits are in numerical order: 12:34:56 on 7/8/09. What bothered me about it is that the date notation just feels so awkward, because it is not in increasing or decreasing order.

I prefer to write 2009-07-08 for today, myself. But why is that? Someone suggested it might be a Canadian thing, but I was under the impression that the difference between the Canadian and American ways was that one was month-day-year and one was day-month-year, neither preferring to put the year first, and the only way for me to free myself of the mess was to find a different way altogether. A more logical way… or we could even say, CHRONOlogical. And alphabetical too.

It seems I wasn’t alone in this. I discovered a page today that outlines a lot of fascinating information about International standard date and time notation. It also said the quote above, which made me giggle out loud — a sure sign that I had to share it!

Anyways… will you join me in celebrating on ‘09-08-07 at 06:05:04 and 321 milliseconds? (I’ll try to dream of pi.)

It is counter-intuitive … to mutilate literal strings with characters that don’t belong in them.

— Some #funwithgrammar from a guide to hackers’ writing style, which describes how some quirks are for the sake of humour but others are for the sake of clarity.

Here, we are exploring an aspect of writing style that is entirely about clarity: should quotation marks include punctuation, or should the punctuation be left outside? Their argument is that a “literal string” is the entirety of what is quoted, and should not include the end-of-sentence (or end-of-clause) punctuation unless the quote actually includes such punctuation. I agree with this, but the population as a whole seems to be divided on what to believe.

Wikipedia’s style guide agrees with me, at least, and even calls it “logical quotation” style. This style is also sometimes attributed to the British, although apparently some British publications use the so-called American style, placing periods and commas inside the quotation marks even when they don’t logically belong there. (I may be biased, but as soon as logic is evident, I can’t help but support it.)

Today, the logical quotation style was used today on twitter by Brent Spiner, sparking controversy among his followers. When he retweeted the fact that someone “corrected” him, he got even more corrections flooding in. (I tried to be one of them, but I was too slow.)

The argument discussion inspired me to look up more info on this dilemma. The Wikipedia page on Quotation Marks provided me with a surprising revelation: the less intuitive way of punctuating around quotation marks was actually reasonable once, back when typesetters used the end-quotation mark to protect the much smaller comma and period characters. (This was back when typesetting involved actually setting physical character pieces into place in the printing press.)

Now, of course, there is no need to do this, but doing so is still considered “correct” because it has become ingrained in various style guides, whose sole purpose is to encourage consistency and clarity in writing. However, if the other way is more clear (more “logical”, if you will), and there is no longer a need to protect the cute-wittle-periods-and-commas, why should anyone continue doing it?

Some people claim that the comma or period placement is purely a matter of style. This does seem to be the case, but I still hold to my opinion that the logical way makes more sense (hence calling it “logical”). (Also note that in the previous sentence, I kept the period outside of the parentheses as well; I believe that this is also logical, and yet it is not logical to do so in this current sentence.) I guess some people simply have their style too ingrained to change to something that is arguably more logical (especially to those of us arguing in favour of this style point — see here for a full-fledged argument showing both sides).

Wikipedia also mentions that scientific and technical publications (even in the U.S., contrary to most American grammar style guides) preferentially place punctuation outside the quotes, unless it was part of the quote itself. Is this enough to convince anyone that this style is more logical? What about the fact that many other languages* use the more logical style, and it is only English (or even its bastard son, “American English”) that has the controversy? (* – I don’t actually know this fact for sure, but it has been used in other arguments.)

There are indications that the internet is leaning towards demanding that the logical way is the better way, but this will take time, especially since the typesetters’ (aka “American”) style seems to be so ingrained in so many people.

As one person astutely pointed out,

The only real rule of grammar is “be consistent”.

Amen. And thank you for using the logical style in expressing this.

The Clock Paradox illustrates how relativity theory does indeed contain inconsistencies that make it scientifically problematic.

So says Dr Peter Hayes, a senior lecturer in politics (yes, politics), as quoted in an article at Science Centric entitled
“Has Einstein failed physics?”

I am getting really sick and tired of people trying to bring down Einstein. First it was SCIAM with their cover article, “Was Einstein Wrong?” when in fact the article was showing that Einstein’s doubts about quantum mechanics may actually be right. The original title of the article was just “A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity”, but some editor thought it would be cool to make it seem like Einstein was wrong. Einstein knew quantum mechanics was inconsistent with relativity, which is why he was so adamant that quantum theory was incomplete!

This time, I’m borderline furious that some supposedly “science-centric” website is even POSTING something by someone studying POLITICS and claiming that the theory of relativity is just a mere ideology. Relativity has been verified by experiments, including the aspect of time dilation, which is the mechanism behind the so-called Clock Paradox mentioned in the quote above.

But let me quote how the “science-centric” article describes this Clock Paradox:

“…if one clock travels in a spaceship, while the other stays on earth, when the clock in the spaceship returns it will show that less time has elapsed than the clock on earth. This prediction violates Einstein’s own ‘principle of relativity,’ which states that if you are on the spaceship it should be the clock back on earth that slows down. This is a criticism that science has never been able to satisfactorily resolve.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit! And I don’t swear often, only when the situation demands it. This situation demanded that I swear thrice! Grrr!

What actually happens in this so-called Clock Paradox is that the spaceship has to decelerate and accelerate in order to make the return trip. This breaks the symmetry between the two frames of reference. If this symmetry-breaking didn’t happen, say the spaceship was just zooming past Earth and there was some way to compare clock rates, both parties would see that the other’s clock is slow. Thus, in frames with very high relative velocities, there is a disagreement in clock rates, and that’s it! However, if one frame decelerates to meet the speed of the other, relativity can predict exactly what the resulting difference in time duration will be. This is not only “satisfactorily resolved” in science, it’s completely consistent, at least until you try and analyze it without enough background in the subject!

This is just more proof that I need to get out there and fight for true science to be known, instead of this ideology bullshit…

Also in this package, I had to include letters from students willing to support my nomination, and the ones who did were motivational almost beyond words.  Putting this package together was so inspirational that I feel like I’ve won something fantastic already, even though the judging for the award isn’t going to be done until mid-May or so.

This Teaching Philosophy had to be no more than two pages (it printed to just over a page and a half), and it was to address my values and beliefs and how they apply to my teaching practice.

The only thing I added when posting here were the headings (it didn’t seem to look right on my webpage without them, though in print it seemed fine without them!) and a slight addition to one sentence that I realized needed just a little more to complete the thought.

Edit: April 8, 2009 — I made a wordle of the words used in the teaching philosophy!

The Importance of Understanding

Of all the values I hold dear, the one that guides me the most in my teaching is the importance of understanding. I take this concept to mean more than just knowledge itself, but also the context surrounding that knowledge, and how the knowledge has relevance and greater meaning. Thus, knowledge can exist without understanding, but not vice versa; however, understanding can facilitate the absorption of more knowledge.

On a global scale, I believe that it is vitally important for humankind to always be increasing its understanding of how the universe functions on many different levels: physical, biological, mental, and cultural. Pursuit of this increased understanding unites us as a species, providing us with a purpose that is more than just a means to an end. Although this sort of understanding has extrinsic value in that it can be applied to improve our quality of life, I believe the intrinsic value is even more potent: it raises the level at which we understand things, thus improving our collective ability to understand even more.

On a personal scale, I believe that the purpose of the mind is to process its surroundings in order to gain understanding of how things work and how people behave: failure to strive for understanding is a failure to fulfil the purpose of the mind. Also, as people learn more, they become more valuable: they are not only more likely to have insights that benefit the greater goal of increasing human understanding, but they are more interesting to interact with, and thus they inspire more people to join the pursuit of greater understanding. I also strongly believe that lifelong learning is essential for mental longevity, and I not only say this often, but I fully intend to continually lead the way by example.

On an interpersonal scale, understanding refers to a consideration of another person’s perspective. It starts with an empathic guess based on what it seems that person’s circumstances are, and evolves based on inferences obtained from the things that person says or does. I find this sort of understanding to be highly valuable when I’m trying to help someone learn: it creates a connection, thus enabling me to be more of a guide than a fount of knowledge.

Motivating Learning

As I see it, to teach is to transmit knowledge or skills, to educate is to impart meaning and context, and to learn is to incorporate knowledge, skills, and/or contextual meaning into one’s own understanding. Thus, understanding cannot be transferred, but it can be encouraged to grow, and that is what we as educators must strive to do.

I believe that anyone is capable of understanding anything, if they have the desire to learn it. It is certainly a joy to teach someone who passionately wants to know more about a subject, but of course, not everyone feels that way, particularly in my experience assisting students with physics and mathematics. Sometimes a student’s only motivation is to get a good grade, or to be able to apply the knowledge in a particular way, but I always try and spark at least a little bit of awe in how fascinating the subject can be. By doing this, I aim to increase the student’s desire to understand and help them have fun as well, since these can (and usually do!) facilitate the person’s learning of the material.

I also believe that a lot of people have difficulty learning because of a lack of confidence. When a teacher makes difficult material more accessible, or when a tutor confirms that a student is making great strides, student confidence increases. When student confidence increases, there is a decrease in the resistance to developing even greater understanding. Conversely, I believe that when students are led to realize that they actually have some understanding instead of just knowledge, their confidence increases, in turn leading to an increase in the rate of understanding.

How I Teach

Overall, my teaching is driven not only by my own fascination with knowing and understanding, but also by my desire to help others pursue greater understanding in their own unique way. My awareness and respect of individuality has helped me immensely in one-on-one teaching and within small groups, because I have been able to tune into students’ current states and ensure I focus on what is most needed at the time, whether it is clarifying misconceptions, encouraging further review or practice, or guiding in ways that can be applicable to any problem needing to be solved in the future.

For larger groups, I provide teaching materials that I write in a friendly and accessible way, to encourage self-learning first, which by its very nature is very individual. I then strongly encourage questions, emphasizing that no question is too small, and that asking is an excellent way to verify one’s own learning. In my years of experience as a teaching assistant, this personal approach has worked very well for me, as evidenced by the positive feedback I have received. My students, when I’m done working with them, consistently seem to have gained more confidence and optimism, more motivation and perseverance, more appreciation for the subject matter, and of course, more of the understanding that I value so much.

“Can you please explain field, like electric field and magnetic field”

[My response:] A field is a region of space with a measurable physical property that may vary at different points in the region.

For example, an incandescent lightbulb glowing steadily is surrounded by a field of increased temperature. This is a scalar field, because each point in space can be associated with a temperature, which has a scalar value.

For the case of an electric field, at each point it is possible to measure how much electric force would act on a charged particle, and in which direction the force would act. This is a vector field, because each point in space has an associated vector magnitude and direction.

Similarly, a magnetic field is a region of space where a magnetic force would be able to be measured, and a gravitational field is a region of space where a gravitational force would be able to be measured.

I hope that helps! If not, I will gladly explain more.

“How does the current/charge form electromagnetic fields?”

[My response:] A charge could be defined as the source of an electromagnetic field, or the electromagnetic field could be defined as that force field that surrounds a charge. They define each other, and are defined in terms of each other. They each exist because the other exists.

Since a current is just made up of moving charges, the above description covers magnetic fields due to currents as well.

It’s a tricky question, but I hope my answer helped!

If you are moving at the same speed as the charge (that is, you are in the same inertial frame as it) you will only detect an electric field. If you and the charge are in relative motion, you will also be able to detect the magnetic part to the field. This is why a moving charge seems to “create” a magnetic field.

If a charge is moving back and forth in a regular pattern (relative to the observer), the electromagnetic field changes in a periodic way. The changes ripple outwards in waves we call electromagnetic waves — light, radio waves, microwaves, x-rays, depending on the frequency of the oscillations.

These waves move outwards in straight lines, unless something is bending the space the waves are travelling through — something like gravity. Note that gravity is bending spacetime itself, and light just naturally follows the curve of space, and that’s why it seems to bend.

Electromagnetic waves also move extremely fast, though not infinitely fast, and the actual speed depends on the material it’s passing through (usually slower than the speed of light in empty space, which we call c).

Just remember: the “speed of light” or “bending of light” is all about the transmission of electromagnetic field information. Thinking about light as rippling changes in an electromagnetic field might be useful in trying to see why there is a constant speed of light: it is electromagnetic field information that is travelling through space, not just our everyday notion of light (which just happens to be made of electromagnetic waves).

Isn’t it amazing that we can understand this, just from understanding what happens when charges are moving?

The main quote many people gave in their summaries [of the lecture on Special Relativity] is that “space and time are no longer separate”. But what does this mean?

• It means that two observers having relative velocity near the speed of light have different perceptions of time (rate of time passing) and space (positions in space).
• Note that space, in this case, means the three directions that can be used to label a position. This is not to be confused with the idea of “outer space” or “empty space”, the emptiness between planets’ atmospheres and between nebulas and galaxies and all that.
  • The emptiness of outer space just means that there isn’t anything at any of those “empty” locations. Even if you go past these regions really quickly, they will still be empty! However, the three perpendicular directions you use to describe the positions will be different from those of someone moving at a high velocity relative to your own.
• So each observer has their own framework of space and time, which means they each can describe an event by its position (in three dimensions, say, “left-right”, “forward-backward”, and “up-down”) and the time it seemed to occur (in one dimension, which we can call “earlier-later”) according to that observer’s clock.
• Since the two observers’ clocks tick at different rates, they age at different rates, and they disagree on whether two spatially-separated events are simultaneous in time or not. In particular, measuring the length of something involves simultaneous measurements of position, and if two observers disagree on what is simultaneous, they will also disagree on the length of the thing being measured.

This does NOT mean that space and time are the same thing: each observer can always tell the difference between space and time, within each one’s own inertial frame!

• Space and time are just two separate aspects of the same thing: that mysterious-sounding “spacetime”.
• Spacetime (i.e. careful attention to both space and time) is only needed when trying to compare situations from one inertial frame to another, because the two observers disagree on some aspects of space and time.
• What makes them both aspects of the same crazy “spacetime” concept is that the way time dilates (stretches), and the way length contracts (squishes) along the direction of motion, both depend ONLY on the relative speed between the two inertial frames.

So although the idea of spacetime seems weird compared to our normal intuitive way of looking at things, keep in mind that there is a bigger framework that allows the two parts to be mixed together. The only time that this bigger framework is needed is:

• when comparing points of view that are moving at some relative velocity,
• and only if it is some significant percent of the speed of light.

The first law of awesomedynamics would be the conservation of awesome…

via @phil.gs

One particularly amusing day in the twitterverse, the word awesomedynamics emerged from somewhere in the vicinity of Wil Wheaton. Phil’s quote, above, caught my attention because it begged the question: what are the rest of the laws of awesomedynamics?!

I set out to answer the question by investigating the laws belonging to a fairly similar concept, thermodynamics. After all, heat, fire, entropy, and other such concepts are pretty awesome, and thus is it really any surprise that the sets of laws describing them are similar?

Including Phil’s insight quoted above, the entire set of Laws of Awesomedynamics can be summarized as follows:

The Zeroth Law of Awesomedynamics:
Interacting bodies eventually reach awesomeness equilibrium.

The First Law of Awesomedynamics:
Awesomeness is a conserved quantity (it cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in form).

The Second Law of Awesomedynamics:
The amount of awesomeness in a system can only increase, never decrease.

The Third Law of Awesomedynamics:
It is impossible to reduce any system to absolutely zero awesomeness.

The First law, in my opinion, is really the one that is most intriguing. After all, it seems that awesomeness is created all the time! However, if this law is correct, maybe all awesomeness is due to the inspiration of some external or internal source of awesomeness (or even a divine source, if you swing that way).

And what if the actual amount of awesomeness in the universe is infinite? Then it would definitely be conserved, even if it increased.

It would be interesting to consider further implications of these laws! Comments are heartily welcomed! :)