Paris, Brussels, and around

I feel a sudden urge to get back to the blog, which has been in hiding for longer than I care to calculate. Not having internet at home is the primary cause of the silence, plus the fact that the relatively sedentary lifestyle of Munich doesn't much inspire blogging at the moment. The odd street fair here and there, a particularly nice walk in the English garden, a trip to one of the surrounding lakes have punctuated the last few weeks, plus a very pleasant trip to Salzburg a few days ago made for a good, relaxing day, but none of these deserve an expansive post. I have a friend who has been staying here for the last couple of weeks, and because said friend enjoys good food (no euphemism intended) but not necessarily the actual process of cooking, I've been in full culinary mode in the evenings and have a couple of great new recipes to put up here soon. A Thai green curry recipe in particular takes some serious preparation but is infinitely better than anything I've produced before - I'll have to ask permission from the source of the recipe before divulging here, but this was stage two, after some dry-frying:

The last true travel adventures took me to Paris and Brussels a couple of weeks back. In Paris I gave a talk at the Institut Henri Poincare on my last paper and chatted to a few old friends about possible new projects, while eating as much steak tartare as I thought was advisable (ok, maybe a little more than was advisable) and sampling a good number of new Paris hangouts. Chez Denise, near pont neuf was a new restaurant for me, but one that I can highly recommend - the lambs kidneys were superb.

I got a few pictures with a new perspective on an old favourite here, but wasn't quite in the mood for intrusive street photography which Paris is generally so great for.

From Paris I went to Brussels, which in itself was a rather strange experience. Having lived in Brussels in 1989, I hadn't been back in over two decades, and my memories from the age of 9 were pretty faded. I remembered very little of the city, apart from the Grand Place, which was certainly less Grand than I'd seen from my slightly lower perspective, but the food I did remember, and the steak au poivre brought back floods of memories and pangs of nostalgia from an age where my visions are now mixtures of confusion, change and some not inconsiderable growing pains.

The conference itself was one of the best I've been to for a while, and the highlights from Shiraz Minwalla, Yuji Tachikawa and Jonathan Heckman made the trip well worthwhile.

From Brussels I took the train back to Munich where I've been for the last two weeks, and will be for the next two, until I head back to Southampton to complete a paper with collaborators there. Hopefully in the mean time I should have a new paper out with the team from Munich which has been in the pipeline for the last couple of months and has caused all manner of numerical headaches in the process. This'll be a good one to let loose.

Anyway, for now I'm waiting for a friend and collaborator who is visiting to go for a beer where we need to catch up on a number of physics threads before he disappears off again back to Princeton.

Lunar halo over Oxford

I just came back from a long, tiring but very enjoyable day visiting the University of Southampton where I did my PhD. I went down there to give a talk and spent a long time chatting with the students and postdoc, and my former boss about a miscellany of ideas and possible resolutions to current problems. It was a positive visit and people seemed enthused by the talk.

It was also a good chance to catch up with an old friend that I see far too infrequently these days, so we went for a curry and chatted in one of our old haunts, while freshers drank themselves into a stupor around us.

I got back home to Oxford after taking four trains around midnight and saw, as I got into the drive, a halo around the moon. I got the tripod out and went into the back garden and took a few shots. The halo itself was delicate but lovely, made all the better by Jupiter, just to the bottom left of the moon. Uranus, just above Jupiter couldn't be seen with the flare from the moon.

While we're on the subject of atmospheric optics and ice halos I'll post up a photo I took from the airport in Vienna on Monday evening as the sun was setting and the plate crystals in the split cirrus clouds reflected and refracted the light toward me:

Tomorrow I head back to London to check on my visa situation, and then on to the wedding either tomorrow night or Friday early morning. In the mean time there are calculations building up which will be tackled in transit.

The low down

The calculation I've been working on all day every day for the last couple of weeks pretty much wound up today and, along with finishing packing up my flat, all boxed up and labeled ready for shipping at the end of September, I feel almost ready to head off again on Thursday for another few weeks of adventures. Upcoming: Wedding in England, two weeks at a program on AdS/CFT and the quark gluon plasma in Vienna, a talk in Southampton, another wedding in England, and then back to Santiago for a week before taking off once more. I'm thoroughly looking forward to spending a couple of weeks grounded in Vienna, the birthplace of my Grandfather, and by the sounds of things, a rather lovely physics institute.

For now a quick picture, again with thanks to Gerardo for the use of his camera, on the evening kayak trip through the lakes of Bariloche in Patagonia. We arrived back after dark, with the stars out and the light from the snow on the mountains marking out way.

The Muse on the hill

The sunshine has returned to Santiago but for now I have to make up for lost time and plug on with calculations. I've spent almost all day every day plus a fair few nights in the library this week and the same is true this weekend. Progress is not bad but there are still a few puzzles in the current work which I would like to get sorted today.

Friday night was an exception and I was able to make it to the Muse concert up on Monte do Gozo overlooking the city with Venus setting over the stage and Jupiter rising behind us. I'd been wanting to see Muse for a few years and was one of the lucky few (tens of thousands) to get a ticket. The crowd was huge as this was the main event of the biggest time in the most important year in Santiago's calendar and so the youth of the city had turned out in force. The concert itself was the first big concert I've been to since seeing Sonic Youth in Beijing three years ago and it was worth the wait. If you haven't seen them, Muse is one of the most impressive groups to see live these days and the production was really incredible, just about undifferentiable from the albums.

Anyway, fullsimplify has stopped so I'll just post up another photo from Bariloche I took on the cycle ride around the lake as a passed some workmen burning some recently felled trees, the crepuscular rays streaming off the still-standing trunks and branches:

Full circle to Buenos Aires

My South America trip has come full circle and I'm back in Buenos Aires, having flown from Santiago de Chile this morning. The last few days have been exciting and surreal and for some reason, still unknown to me, I had my 15 minutes of Chilean fame (ok, mild fame, but I'll take that too). The last two days have seen interviews with three different papers, including one which promises to go into Chile's biggest magazine, El Mercurio, a videoed interview and a couple of rather odd photoshoots. This was all in relation to my talk on Atmospheric Optics which was the first in hopefully a series of talks for the general public in Andres Bello University, one of the top private universities in Chile. The talk itself went pretty well, with plenty of questions once the students got their confidence up and my first experience of being simultaneously translated. I ran through the basics of the talk with the translators beforehand to make sure there wasn't too much jargon, and the only thing they wanted in the end to look at in detail was the quote from Descartes which I include on the section about rainbows:

"A single ray of light has a pathetic repertoire, limited to bending and bouncing (into water, glass or air, and from mirrors). But when rays are put together into a family - sunlight, for example - the possibilities get dramatically richer. This is because a family of rays has the holistic property, not inherent in any individual ray, that it can be focused so as to concentrate on caustic lines and surfaces. Caustics are the brightest places in an optical field. They are the singularities of geometrical optics. The most familiar caustic is the rainbow, a grossly distorted image of the Sun in the form of a giant arc in the skyspace of directions, formed by the angular focusing of sunlight that has been twice refracted and once reflected in raindrops." 

Still the most poetic explanation of a rainbow I've come across.

Anyway, there are still adventures galore to catch up on, but these, as normal will have to wait. For now I thought I'd share some of the photos I've just put up on Flickr from the trip across the Andes by bus from Bariloche to Valdivia, where I gave an enjoyable two hour talk. The seminars in Valdivia are legendary for their questions and the idea, which I highly approve of, is that there should be no time limit, but that the talk goes on until the speaker wants to stop, or the audience truly understands what is being said. The atmosphere is really wonderful and although there are a huge number of questions, none of them is aggressive, and I get the impression that the members of CECS in Valdivia really have a deeper understanding of a larger range of subjects than the average group of theoretical physicists, largely due to this atmosphere of probing questions.

Anyway, the trip to Valdivia was stunning (I was lucky enough to see the Andes from above today as we flew straight over the top with perfect clear skies. I sat in my seat itching to get the camera out but there's no moving around until you're clear of the peaks) and although from the bus I didn't manage to get any good shots of the higher mountains themselves, the snowy scenes were pretty spectacular. This was the lake skirting Bariloche town centre as we pulled out early in the morning, with the morning fog resting on the water

And the tree lined roads leading up into the Andes:

Getting to Valdivia I met my Couchsurfing host and we went for a quick stroll down the river where the sealions were basking in the rather unusual sun (Valdivia is reknowned for its constant rain):

So, I leave South America on Sunday, though I'm sure I'll be back. It's been a good trip for giving talks, a fascinating trip for talking with lots of great physicist, an excellent month for thinking of new ideas, but in terms of sitting down and calculating, it's been pretty tough. Moving from place to place isn't conducive, at least for me, to deep concentration and now I'm really looking forward to getting back and having two weeks in Santiago to try and finish some long overdue calculations before heading off again for weddings and a two week stay at a long term program in Vienna...it doesn't stop.

Buenos Aires-Bariloche-Valdivia

I'm now in Valdivia, Chile, having skipped out, blog-wise on the last couple of legs of the journey and only given cursory details of any of the last two weeks. I've just arrived at a hotel after staying with a great couchsurfer in a very very cold house last night. I'm slowly defrosting, but was glad to have the chance to spend some time with local residents for an evening at any rate.

Before this I spent three days in Bariloche, though it felt like a good week given the amount that was packed into the short time. Bariloche is where Juan Maldacena spent a few years studying before moving onto Princeton. I was the guest of hist former supervisor Gerdardo Aldazabal who was an excellent host, both in terms of organising my physics activities but also as a keen outdoors activities man who made my stay really special. Given that I was giving talks on the last two days of my stay, having arrived at 2am on Wednesday morning I wanted to take full advantage of the Wednesday to see some of the Patagonian countryside. Staying on the campus of the centro atomico it was a short roll out of bed and into the office to chat with Gerardo about a possible route for the day, and I soon found myself alone with a rented bike, a thin pair of gloves, several layers of clothes plus a good calorie intake from a Welsh breakfast (there are large Welsh communities in Patagonia and a few valleys where Welsh is the predominant language, Welsh teahouses are a common sight) ready to head around the lakes.

The Ciruito Chico takes you around the gently rolling countryside through the occasional steep section or dirt road, around a series of stunning, crystal clear lakes, flanked by snowy mountains and dense forests. I spent the first two hours or so going around taking pictures and stopping occasionally to warm up my icy fingers, before turning back three quarters of the way around the lake when the traffic started increasing and made my way to a restaurant in La Colonia Suissa, a Swiss community with wooden houses, and plenty of traditional Alpine regalia to dine on the famed Patagonian trout in Las Siete Cabritas, an outlandish restaurant with some of the best prepared food I've eaten in Argentina. A coffee and a lemon meringue pie later and I was ready to get back on the bike and take the dirt road section back to the start. 45 km and two very tired legs after having started (I haven't cycled seriously since the Land's End to John O'Groats trip a decade ago - though I plan on starting again in Munich) I gave the bike back to the rental company and chatted for a while with the owner over a cup of tea. Given that it was still early and it was the only day to be able to sight see I walked up the road to the start of the hill trail to the Campanaria watch tower and started pushing my legs up the extremely steep path.
A few pictures from the trip:

Passing a controlled bonfire in the forest:

Some icy proof:

This slightly strange looking photo was taken by resting the camera on a icy pond in front of the lake. The ice you can see stretches for about a meter in front of the camera but looks to go much further because of the unusual perspective:

After the cycle ride my legs were none too fresh and the half hour scramble up was quite a struggle, but the view from the top made it well worth it, as I emerged from the undergrowth to be greeted by the crowds who had come up by cable car. The panorama of the lakes and mountains is really one of the most stunning scenes I've seen and I would highly recommend this area to anyone coming to Argentina. The light wasn't that easy for photography, but I got a couple of pictures to try and give the general impression. Here's one for now

 

Back down the hill and into the centro atomico for a quick shower, before heading into the town centre to take a look around. It's a ski-tourist haven and a chocolate-lovers dream, somehow giving the impression of a Patagonian Swiss Alps and the usual crowds of skiers fills the streets lined with restaurants serving trout, lamb, deer and a few other local delicacies. Sadly by the time I got back to the lodgings it was too late to go out again so I popped to the local supermarket to munch on some empanadas before bed.

Thursday was a full-on work day and I was in the office and getting on with some calculations in the morning before my talk in the afternoon. The group is quite diverse and so I had to change my talk a little from the one I've been giving recently, adding a few slides of introductory material and bulking out a few explanations. Of the 20 or so in the audience, I'm not sure I saw a single sleeper which I count as a good performance in a technical seminar. With the snow gently drifting outside and a positive audience with good questions, I left relieved that at least some people had understood, and happy to have been able to give a talk in such stunning surroundings. Tomorrow incidentally I'll be giving my talk in Valdivia, famed for talks which can last for many, many hours so I'm not going to get complacent yet about my seminar-giving abilities. Anyway, Thursday night I managed to find a table at an asado restaurant and sampled the Patagonian lamb which was very very good.

Friday was time for the colloquium on atmospheric optics, and not only the whole of the centro atomico but also the whole of the town had been told about it. Half an hour before I was due to start I was introduced to a journalist with whom I gave a quick interview. It was a good chance to try and explain a little about atmospheric optics in Spanish, and also a chance to realise that my decision to not give a Spanish version of the talk in Santiago de Chile in a few days was probably the right one. Although I could explain about the different effects to the journalist, it was with a lot less of the technical precision and detail than I like to be able to give in English. For the talk, I guess there must have been a few over 50 in the room which was a nice sized group and they seemed to enjoy the images and explanations. It's a pleasure to be able to tell people about things which are always around them and therefore get to change the way they see the world a little on a day to day basis!

The talk over and a little more work later and it was time to get in the car with Gerardo and head out to the lakes for the Friday evening kayak session. In sub-zero temperatures we were well-prepared with several layers of neoprene, hats and gloves although I wouldn't have wanted to get any more than my feet in the icy waters. I shared a double canoe with Gerardo and we headed out into the lake, with the mountains looming around us and the sun gently setting as we paddled our way from the shore. Although I used to canoe a lot when I was around 10, I've done it only a handful of times in the last 20 years and although it was really wonderful to be doing so in such surroundings, my shoulders burned constantly for the two plus hours that we were out on the lake. It felt like a really serious workout but thankfully I haven't been aching since, the only complaint being the lack of skin on the inside of each thumb. Gerardo had brought along a water resistant camera and so I'll try and put up some photos when they're available.

After a lovely dinner with friends at Gerardo's house I got home and prepared for an early start the next day, to take a morning bus over the Ande's and into Chile where I am now, but I think that that will have to wait. I have to prepare a few more things for tomorrow but will see how things  go later today.
 

Fading memories from Croatia

Where to start? It's only been two weeks but the littlest things that caught my attention and I wanted to write about have slowly faded and I'm left without the words that came to me at the time to explain as vividly as I'd like quite what went on.

Talking of vivid however, I was hoping, as I walked into work a couple of days back that the cirrus clouds and the quickly rising sun would do their dance and end up giving us something special towards midday. As we went to lunch at around 1.30, the white crests below the sun which had risen above 58 degrees started glowing with vibrant reds, yellows and blues as I got my first ever display of a circumhorizon arc. These, most colourful of halos, are only visible in the summer when the sun rises high enough in the sky, and therefore there is a latitude above and below which they can never be seen. The Northern Europeans may get the best winter halos but we get the best summer ones! No pictures of the CHA itself, but I got a few shots later in the day as the clouds maneuvered themselves into and out of the local optical geodesics. I have to do a little more reading up at the moment on this subject as I'll be giving three or four lectures on atmospheric optics in Argentina and Chile over the coming month.

Anyway, step back a couple of weeks and the last post saw a rather sleepy me sitting in a North London front room waiting for my taxi to Stansted. I've since discovered that the taxi costs almost as much as getting a discount room in the Hilton right next to the airport, which is what I did on the way back. The slightly later time to get up, along with the gym, sauna and swimming pool made this a much more pleasant way to not get much sleep!

So, I flew from London to Dubrovnik where the sun was fierce and the drive along the coast from the airport gave a hint of the stunning blue, green waters which would be the site of a few wonderful afternoon swims over the coming days.

I checked into my hostel which had been pre-heated to boiling point and wandered into town where I got my first taste of tourist prices thanks to a few slices of smoked salmon and some notably tasty horseradish hollandaise. Over the next couple of days I met a bunch of interesting people in the hostel from around the world and spent time reading papers and books in the old town. Two good friends from Santiago also turned up and we spent a couple of perfect afternoons reverting to teenage years by jumping off cliffs and reveling in the ease of swimming in salty water.

(The walk from the hostel to the old town:)

and the view from the cafe Alex and I were working in in the centre of the old town:)

Time to relax ran out fast as we headed up the coast to Trpanj (emphasis on the Tr with a slightly rolled r and the nj sounds a little like a Spanish ñ) where the school on black holes was being held (we had somehow held court the previous day when we met an American woman who discovered she'd lucked out with a bunch of scientists and we gave an impromptu lesson on the practice and philosophy of modern theoretical physics - this happened on a number of occasions when I mentioned what we were doing in Croatia). Trpanj is a town on a T-junction which would be a lot worse were the vertical not to lie in the valley of two mountains and the cross-bar not to meet the Adriatic sea. The main road plays host to a bunch of almost identical restaurants which serve a fairly small range of pretty tasty meals.

The same view at night with a 30 second exposure - the colours are not altered in this shot:

In terms of food we realised pretty quickly that although similar to the Croatian fare, the most famous Bosnian restaurant in Dubrovnik, the curiously named Taj Mahal, seemed to offer a much better selection of dishes than any local restaurant we could find - the cheeses and steaks were really superb.

Anyway, the school itself was fantastic, with the most relaxed atmosphere of any school I've been to. Although there was a rough time-table drawn up, the lectures started and finished when the dynamic in the room dictated and so all of the talks (which were given on the black board) had a good pace where the lecturers could really expound to their heart's content. For me the highlight of the school was a series of talks by Gaston Giribet on 3-dimensional gravity. I'm hoping to be able to learn some more on this subject in South America over the next few weeks where much of the early work on this subject was pioneered.

The final talk of the school was a discussion session led by Holger Nielson (Of backwards causality from Higgs production at the LHC fame). While I may not subscribe to all his thoughts on black holes, he's an extremely knowledgeable guy and the session turned out to be thoroughly thought provoking, leading to a good deal of chat about black hole information as we walked away from the blackboard towards another meat-heavy meal.

After the school I headed back to Dubrovnik, hitchhiking from Trpanj with Alex and on arrival we were propositioned by an elderly lady asking if we'd like to stay at her house. Strange as this may sound it actually turns out to be by far the best way to stay in Dubrovnik, and from what I understand, this holds true for much of Eastern Europe. We had a whole apartment to ourselves and paid less than we paid for a bunk in a smelly, hot room in a hostel.

We spent the last couple of days seeing a few more sights and kayaking around one of the local islands, before saying our goodbyes and heading in separate directions. Having spent a good deal of the last half a year with Alex and his family, discussing physics till early in the morning, cooking outrageously tasty meals and getting into plenty of adventures it was a rather sad goodbye, having already had to say my farewells to Eliina and Sahtah (wife and daughter) a short while earlier.

So, I find myself now back in Santiago with a couple of new projects on the go (we're up to four at the moment) and several talks to write for South America. Come Thursday I'll be heading back to England for the stag do of one of my good friends before leaving on the 15th for Buenos Aires where a great mix of adventures and physics awaits me during a month of intensive travels - Tickets are booked for the various legs of the journey and I can't wait to get there and indulge my physics/travel passions in one fell swoop.

Rocket launch and some vintage papers

Back in my local, back to the Chinese, the weekly routine continues as inevitably as the Galician rain outside. This week has flown by faster than ever, with a few breakthroughs in work coming in short spaces of time, with periods of treading water in between. Still, the treading of water allows subconscious processes to explore parameter space, or so I I like to kid myself.

In the last few weeks we've set up a student and postdoc vintage journal club, looking over the most important papers in the field from the last few decades. Yesterday was my turn to discuss Gross and Neveu's 1972 paper on dynamical symmetry breaking in asymptotically free field theories - a fascinating and important paper coming directly after the discovery of asymptotic freedom in non-abelian gauge theories. It's been many years since I calculated a Feynman diagram in anger and this gave me a good chance to remember the wonders/horrors of renormalization, away from the AdS/CFT context. It was also a good chance to talk on a subject that I don't work on, and although I hadn't formally prepared anything to say, it took around an hour and a half at the board to get through the bulk of their work.

I'm finding the process of going through these truly foundational papers extremely useful. The Gross and Neveu paper alone deals with so many things which have to be on the tips of our tongue in day to day research: large N expansions, goldstone's theorem (especially its caveats in two dimensional theories), the emergence of tachyons and the study of false vacua, the study of perturbatively exact generating functionals and much more. We have a list of around 20 or so papers to go through over the next few months and I can see this being extremely profitable as a time investment.

Anyway, I really wanted to write a post as an excuse to show the following video, seen on Badastronomyblog yesterday. This is an incredible phenomenon I've never seen before.

There are a few different explanations on BABlog, but this was my interpretation:
As the rocket passes the cloud layer, a region of sky where the pressure, temperature and humidity are just right for the condensation of water vapour, the shock wave from the rocket creates a ripple of low and high pressure through the layer of air. Those areas which were just on the point of condensing water suddenly condense as the ripples pass and the result is this inverted rock in a pond effect. The fact that there is a sundog there meaning that there is ice in the layer of cirrus makes for some other explanations but the above is my take on it. Any additional thoughts are welcomed.

Santiago-A Coruna-Leon-Oviedo-Ferrol-A Coruna-Santiago

I'm busy these days reading up on a new line of research with some of the others here in Santiago, and enjoying it hugely. It's nice to see things afresh and coming across a few authors whose work I have never read before but I find to be superb writers is a pleasure. Anyway, as I let the new thoughts sink in I thought I'd update the last weeks events.

Last weekend I headed away with a Couchsurfing friend to Oviedo, in Asturias (just East of Galicia) via Leon, where we enjoyed some rich morcilla and fine embutidos before gorging on Asturian fabada and some of the finest cheeses in Spain. Both Leon and Oviedo have picturesque, traditional old centres, centering around a Cathedral, with windy streets leading off, easing into the newer areas of the cities. On a Sunday afternoon, when everyone else is with their families or siestaring, these are lovely places to walk aimlessly around.

Getting back to Santiago was a rather mammoth task as we took the train (Feve), six and a half hours through the lush Asturian and Galician countrysides, up along the Northern coast. The view is stunning and if you are not in a rush I would highly recommend taking this trip. The train arrives into Ferrol which, at 9.30 at night, is not well connected to Santiago so I found myself couchsurfing in A Coruna before heading back early the next day to Santiago on the train.

Anyway, now we find ourselves at Friday once more and the weekend looks to be full of reading, but from where I'm sitting this is quite an enjoyable option for now.

I'll leave you with a few photos taken from my flickr photostream. More can be found here and all can be seen in larger format.

The cathedral roof in Leon:

and that of a church in Oviedo:

plus a little fun with the zoom lens above the Cathedral in Oviedo:

and Santa María del Naranco, a pre-Romanesque shrine overlooking Oviedo:

Currently the first photo on the stream is that of yaure, a Cuban friend whom we met in Oviedo. A trumpeter who, when asked if he had seen the Bueno Vista Social club responded coyly that he was IN the Buena Vista Social Club! We will definitely be seeing them next time they are touring in Spain!

Anyway, for now have a great weekend!

AdS/CFT and novel approaches to hadron and heavy ion physics - Beijing KITPC program 2010 - an advert

While in Beijing for an academic visit in the summer of 2008 I spoke with my old boss and director of the KITPC, Yue-Liang Wu about the possibility of organising a program on an AdS/CFT related subject. I got the support of the director, got together a team of people for an organising committee (Stanley Brodsky, Nick Evans, Hong Liu, Craig Roberts, Dam Son, Xin-Nian Wang, Urs Wiedemann) and over the last year have been going through several stages of proposals before getting confirmation of support and the go ahead to start inviting people. We've been sending out invitation letters over the last couple of weeks and have a few people now confirmed internally (the names are only viewable currently to the organisers) and thought that now would be a good time to advertise via the blog.

The program will last for seven weeks from the 11th of October until the 3rd of December  2010 and we hope to get as many people interested in AdS/CFT applications to hadron and heavy-ion physics and those involved in these subjects from other perspectives to come along, collaborate, speak, and integrate their ideas in order to advance the field through interdisciplinary works. The idea is for people to come for at least two or three weeks in order that there time can be relaxed and there's plenty of opportunity to build up lasting collaborations.

One of the main problems of the field as I see it is that there are many groups trying to essentially deal with very similar questions but with such different languages that collaboration is often difficult. One of the aims of this program will be to give people the platform and time to reduce this difference and for ideas in diverse areas to be exchanged and discussed in a nice environment, with a good cross-section of international researchers.

The abstract of the program can be found here and I would highly recommend anybody interested in this field to apply to the program, to come and chat with a lot of like-minded people and to explore Beijing, a truly incredible city with a diversity of cuisine, history, language, music, art, architecture and nightlife unlike any I've experienced anywhere else in the world. I love this city, and am hugely looking forward to not only working with a lot of people on a fascinating topic in physics, but to sharing the city with many newcomers.

If you have any questions at all about the program then please ask and I will be happy either to answer directly, or to find out anything you need to know from the staff at the KITPC who are organising all the local details.

Ireland way

Feeling pangs of blog neglect these days but I'm spending every evening reading up on a range of new subjects that I'm currently interested in. I'll explain when possible, but in the mean time it simply means that life is twice as full as ever before and that blogging rears its head only when something time-dependent is closing in, or when the guilt gets too much.

I'm off to Dublin via London tomorrow where I'll be giving a talk and spending plenty of time talking with my friend and collaborator at the IAS. Flight prices mean that it's actually cheaper to spend a couple of days back in the UK on the way back so I'll be popping home briefly before coming back for the final week of the year in Spain where I have another talk lined up which I'll explain nearer the time - a slightly unusual one.

Anyway, finishing off my Dublin talk now and pondering the woes of dispersive media from holography.

Lecture on gravitational waves and their detection

A little advertising for a seminar next Wednesday here in Santiago if you're around. A talk on the fascinating subject of gravitational waves and their detection which I'm told will be at the divulgative level. These experiments are truly spectacular in terms of their mind-boggling precision, measuring the length of a vacuum chamber several kilometers long when the distance changes by one-hundred-millionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom! These mammoth experiments are designed to detect the gravitational waves given off when extremely violent astronomical events occur, such as the merging of black holes (see the LIGO website and and VIRGO website for more details).

One o'clock in the department of physics on the South Campus of the university of Santiago de Compostela (presumably in Spanish).

CERN winter school 2009 lectures up online

Sadly I'm not able to attend this year, but it looks like there are a great group of lecturers giving talks on topics related to string theory. Unlike last year the lecture videos are being posted online immediately and there are already the first couple of days worth uploaded.

Take a look here to learn about fluid dynamics from AdS/CFT, the black hole information paradox, beyond the standard model physics, and more.

A quick update from Gijon

Just a quick update to mark the silence. I'm currently at a three day conference in Gijon, in Asturias where I'll be giving a talk tomorrow. The crowd of around 30 people here, mostly working in gravitational aspects of strings and branes, make up a pretty hardcore crowd of theorists from my perspective, but there are some interesting talks, in between the indix juggling and and miscellaneous mathematical acrobatics.

This is my first time in Asturias (around a five hour drive North East of Santiago), and we managed to sample the local delicacies of cabrales (a strong goat's cheese) and cider, oxygenated by pouring from a great height, or spraying out of some complex piece of cideroxygenating machinery (as seen on this page).


I have a bunch of other projects to be getting on with for now, and have had to retreat from the last lecture today to finish some things before dinner.

Anyway, had better get on, but in case you were wondering, this is where I'm at.

Saturday loose ends

Santiago is still standing after the storm yesterday which caused a couple of blackouts through the night (link from here).

I fear that this means that my code which was running overnight will not have been saved, so I'll have to go back and restart that some time this weekend.

In the meantime I've been trying out a new piece of software: Mnemosyne, which is similar to the interval learning software, Genius, which I wrote about some time back. The benefit of Mnemosyne is mostly that there are plenty of ready made word lists in Spanish and Chinese (amongst many other languages). The interface takes a little more time to get comfortable with, mostly due to its simplicity, but it seems like another good system for interval learning. (NB. See also Kevin's page with some great links to more Chinese files for Genius)

This morning I also found a series of lectures at the Perimeter Institute (as I followed a link from Bee's blog) which look excellent. In particular, this course from Alex Buchel which is an ongoing course on String theory promises to be a valuable resource for those starting off in this subject without any other directed learning. Also check out the extensive course on Quantum field theory.

(Random, no context link to a multigigapixel panorama from the Online Photographer. I shan't be processing anything like this any time soon!)

Anyway, another busy weekend beckons including the promise of plenty of good Chinese and Korean food tonight with a Korean birthday to go to. Kimchi supplied by yours truly.

Madrid in a flash

I returned last night from Madrid, where I've spent the last three days at the Christmas meeting where I was giving a talk and talking with some of the local researchers with whom we hope to start something in the New Year. The workshop was good, but intense and included a variety of topics, from the latest from the Pierre Auger cosmic ray observatory in Argentina, to the latest excitement on the M2-brane mini revolution. We also had a very interesting talk on the accident at the LHC whch gave an idea of the scale of the damage and what was now being done. Indeed the weak-links between the magnets are now being fixed in a number of other possibly vulnerable sectors. The good news was that there were spare magnets for every one which was damaged and it looks like this hasn't pushed the project into the red in any way.

Anyway, a quick picture I took on the way back from the workshop on Friday of this amazing leaning tower close to the Plaza de Castilla.


Anyway, last night my flight back to Santiago made a total of 26 trips this year which could go some way to explaining my current state of exhaustion. I still have a few things to finish off before Christmas including two conference proceedings which just have to be checked a final time, and a couple of calculations I'd really like to get done before I relax completely.

Tomorrow I head back to England where I'll spend a few days at home before running around the country to catch up with friends I haven't seen since doing the same thing last year.

The New Year holds a feast of possibilities which certainly can't be fit into a 12 months so I'll have to see how my time-stretching abilities are working and perhaps give up something to make a little more...sleeping should be first out of the window.

A couple more updates due before Christmas, but for now there's lots to be organised before heading home.

Lunacy and more

For those of you foolhardy enough not to have Universe Today bookmarked in your feedreader, then you may not know that today the moon is at its closest approach to the Earth this year. It will be 14% larger and some 30% brighter (for those who are not, like I am, in overcast venues) than the moon at its further point this year. This is good for moon watching, but not so great for the Geminid meteor shower which will be somewhat obscured by the extraterrestrial light pollution.

As for me, I'm feeling pretty tired after a busy but successful few days, other than spending 20 minutes trapped in a lift on Wednesday morning. Trust me to be in the lift when there's a powercut. The emergency light was sadly neither bright enough to let me read, nor to take a photo of myself in my encarceration.

I'm currently writing up a review for a conference proceedings which I'd like to get out of the way before 't Hooft turns up next week to give a couple of talks (both departamental and public) and before I go off to Madrid to the Christmas meeting where I will be giving a talk. I'll simply link to my paper from this week with no more commentary for now than the fact that this was an extremely enjoyable paper and one of the best collaborations I've been in, given that all of us bought very different skills to the table. We already have several more ideas on the go and hope to get more done soon.

Atmospheric Optics talk in Santiago

I gave my talk on atmospheric optics today to an audience of perhaps 40. It was smaller than expected, but enjoyable nonetheless and I had more questions than I normally get for a string theory talk! I had been a little rattled by the fact that not only was the talk being advertised heavily around the university, but also on the regional weather station meteogalicia. Still, every Galician and her dog did not turn up and the fears of the previous night were not lived out. In fact combined with a fairly unpleasant day ahead of me tomorrow (triple chalazion excision) I worked myself up into a bit of a sweat and only managed an hour's sleep last night. Still, it's been a good experience and I'd be happy to give this talk again.

My talked introduced the physics of: ice halos, glories, heiligenschein, opposition effects, all sky crepuscular rays, mirage sunsets, green flashes and rainbows, including a few animations to discuss the detals of the optics for several effects. I spent most of this week digging into atoptics to get more information, and Les Cowley who runs the sight has been extremely helpful.

In looking for a little more information last night I came across an article by Sir Michael Berry (of Berry Phase fame and winner of an Ignobel prize for frog levitation). I remembered he gave a talk when I was an undergraduate in Bristol on his favourite things in the world of physics and this had included a section on rainbows. I tracked down an article he wrote for Physics World on a review of a book on rainbows, which included a quote from Descartes. This was exactly what I needed to complete the rainbow section.

Before Newton understood about the splitting of colours by a prism, Descartes had introduced his law of refraction (though this had been discoverd many centuries previously) and had used this to understand the basics physics of rainbows. I'll leave you with this quote of Descarte's, written in 1637, which, as with much of Descartes' writing, sums up the ideas eloquently and gets right to the heart of the matter.


"A single ray of light has a pathetic repertoire, limited to bending and bouncing (into water, glass or air, and from mirrors). But when rays are put together into a family - sunlight, for example - the possibilities get dramatically richer. This is because a family of rays has the holistic property, not inherent in any individual ray, that it can be focused so as to concentrate on caustic lines and surfaces. Caustics are the brightest places in an optical field. They are the singularities of geometrical optics. The most familiar caustic is the rainbow, a grossly distorted image of the Sun in the form of a giant arc in the skyspace of directions, formed by the angular focusing of sunlight that has been twice refracted and once reflected in raindrops."

Interlude

Now in Dublin after a long day yesterday. I spent a tiring but surprisingly enjoyable five hours at the airport in Madrid waiting for the second leg of my journey but a discussion of the strange mix of mathematics and neuroscience I had a chance to read will have to wait.

I'll be giving a seminar tomorrow but will try and write something up tonight if my talk is looking in shape by then.

Monte Pindo and the end of the Earth

It's been a ridiculously busy week this week, though some things never change. We finally got our paper out on Monday, though I have another two somewhere near the end of the pipeline and hope to have them out before Christmas. The rest of the week was busy with getting these a little closer to completion, though Monday night I went out to another film at Cine Europa to see Breath (Soom) by Kim Ki Duk, one of my favourite Korean directors.

Breath is not a film of clear logic and linearity, but it is a beautiful film of deep sentiments and powerful imagery. Kim Ki Duk manages always to lighten his dark subjects with the absurd, and wonderful scenes of a women in a seemingly continual battle with the past singing a love song to an unknown, suicidal man on death row are so full of confusing feelings that you can't help but laugh. The film is going to leave you with questions, which probably don't have answers, but for me I'm happy with this. I would recommend this film if you want some answers to the questions that Herzog was contemplating.

Today has also been a long day as 12 of us, mostly from Couchsurfing, headed out to the coast of Galicia for a day of hiking to the top of Monte Pindo, a rocky hill, some 600m high (11 mile round trip) right on the coast, overlooking Fisterre to the North and the Atlantic to the West. It took us some four hours, including breaks, to make it to the top of this very rocky mountain, but the view was well worth it. In fact this is without a doubt the most stunning view I've seen in Galicia. I have a lot of photos to go through today but I've put together a panorama from the top for now. The large size is pretty huge, and there are still some artifacts from the large contrast in light that can be seen in the sky. Still, click through to see the whole thing in full detail.


In fact, coming down we watched the sunset from half way and the last quarter of an hour was in almost complete darkness. We were exceedingly lucky that we left without a single twisted ankle!

Anyway, tomorrow I have to get on with some work for my trip to Dublin next week and will be cooking in the evening for a bunch of Korean friends. If my kimchi dumplings aren't just like their mothers' I'm going to be in some trouble!