work vs. research

My new project involves developing a beam optics code based around a spreadsheet. The job is basically to convert this program from Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic to something based on Open Office Calc. Now, despite the fact that open source is nice, and open office seems to be pretty quality stuff, there is something decidedly unsexy about spreadsheets. They suggest doing a large number of small, not particularly interesting calculations. An emphasis on detail, an office setting, and a sense of the mundane come to mind.

But this area of beam optics and particle tracking is a mess. There are multiple codes with lousy interface and difficult interconnection. People become experts at particular codes, and this is what accelerator physicists do. The expertise, however, is often more in the technicalities of the mess- the bureaucracy of the multiple organizations and the history of the field, if you like. Its called research, or physics, or dynamics, or something exciting, just to motivate people to do this rather boring work.

Thus, to me, developing an optics code based on a spreadsheet is confronting this fact about this field honestly. We are managers of many small formulae, doing rather well-known things.
The point is that perhaps this project will allow one to more easily separate what is well known from what is a bit more difficult. In other words, we can train people to do those parts of this work that are already figured out. The operators in the control room should be able to change the quadrupoles to reduce the emittance, or affect a change in the optics to reduce the beta function, or play around with the weights on the non-linear dynamics properties. This isn't research, but it still takes effort, care, and can be done well with pride.

So I see this project less as a research project, and more as providing a tool that will separate out the known from the unknown- give people a tool with which the known aspects of this field can used, in the same sense that knowledge in finance, medicine, or nutrition might be utilized.
At the same time, in order for a field to be healthy, there must be this transition of knowledge into the arena of easily available, well known information. I think this is the value and nature of science, as described in "Laboratory Life" by Latour and Woolgar for example.

I don't want to say that there is no research to be done in this field, but just that there is a lot of known stuff, and it should be made easily available. It may not be popular with those who would rather keep the mess of obscurity. But I think its necessary if there is to be development.

moving and the symplectic camel

Yeah, yeah, more about this tedious moving process, whereby I reduce my digital, physical and mental footprint, so that I can cross the sea and find peace in a new land.
A recent paper someone forwarded to me:
"Symplectic capacities and the geometry of uncertainty: The irruption of symplectic topology in classical and quantum mechanics"
One of the main points is the story of the symplectic camel, that sad creature who could not pass through the eye of the needle. It is in fact a relatively recent rigorous result (Gromov's non-squeezing theorem) about symplectic geometry.
Basically it says that whatever your initial projection onto the different phase planes, a canonical transformation will never decrease, only increase them.
So, yes, I suppose this means that I should get rid of stuff. The connection is obvious, right?

On a different, not really related subject, I just finished reading Alan Watts' "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are".
Some parts really resonated with me, though at times it put me in that kind of trance where he could say just about anything, and I'd nod slowly with a blank stare. No, actually, it did that remarkably little. The image of self as the universe playing hide and seek with itself is an interesting one.

frequency amplitude dependence

So, consider a dynamical system that has an elliptical fixed point. The eigenvalues of the map linearized about the fixed point gives the frequency associated with rotation about that fixed point. Move away from the fixed point and the frequency changes. This is one definition of a non-linear system. A pendulum, for example, has this property; and this changing frequency explains why it doesn't make a perfect clock.

This simple property is what I am trying to get to the bottom of. It becomes less simple when one wants to think of this continuum of frequencies as the spectrum of some operator. So the operator has become rather more complicated from the simple matrix expanded about the fixed point. Suddenly it has taken on an infinity of eigenvalues! Once we say this, however, we are left with the question of what the eigenvectors mean. Are they functions that are basically delta functions except where the orbit is? This is a rather messy singular quantity. How about the eigenvectors of the adjoint operator? These are the quantities we've been looking at, but they seem to be rather strange.
This is the line thinking I've been following lately. I'm hoping I can find a simple reference that explains all this. But I can't seem to.

trimming books

I'm trying to get rid of books. The problem is that many are unfinished. I start too many that I don't finish- then they sit there as reminders of work I should still do.
I need to figure out how to keep track of what I wanted from a given book, even if I don't keep it.

Item: "Flim Flam: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and Other Delusion" by James Randi.
If I start to give a postmodern open to everything, relativistic view of science too much clout, then a book like this is an antidote- confident, documented. But really the value of this is that it is one of the places where the Maharishi (Mahesh Sharma?) is described in a skeptical light. Anyway, it has now been recorded, and I can get rid of it.

forming a working web: vague thoughts

What does it mean that the center doesn't hold in a dysfunctional situation? It means that there is nothing one can say that is constructive that doesn't piss someone off. So the situation is just constantly exhausting. But as long as one continues a certain level respect for all people involved, then one can just continue talking, continue communicating, until maybe, just maybe, the resentments get smaller. This ability to pick away at a difficult situation and not give up, and never fully lose respect for the elements (people, concepts, etc. ) involved; perhaps this is something I am good at. I think that its not necessarily a recipe for reconciliation. Perhaps its just a recipe for personal survival within a difficult situation. If one chooses to stay, instead of leave, perhaps this is one way to not be totally consumed.

Social media have been dominating lately. I don't know whether I have an unhealthy dependence. I think that they allow new possibilities. They extend your social life in new directions perhaps. But they certainly don't replace the need to develop meaningful deep relationships. Perhaps that depth can contain some elements of these new digital communications, but it seems that they can easily distort and make shallow appear deep.

Workwise, and socially, I am scattered, but using electronic media to make something more solid of this web. I've been trying to say no and yes at the same time. No to certain sustained commitments (because one can only make so many of these), and yes to a more loose form of electronic collaboration. Whether this latter turns out to be an illusion or not remains to be seen. But the saying no part has been hard. Painful and sad, and requires every ounce of my energy.

map analysis

In a circular accelerator, if you look at a single beam position monitor (BPM), or say, a couple of them, to give you phase space, you essentially looking at the properties of the one and many turn behavior of electrons. The value of the Hamiltonian -free description, the map description, is that it treats the machine as a whole, without necessarily thinking of how that map comes about.
This is analogous to solid state physics and scattering analysis. You define various quantities of the material that can be probed via scattering stuff off it. You don't need to know the position of every atom in the material in order to define these quantities.

Why has this approach not developed further in accelerator physics? Because there aren't enough accelerators. Each one has its own peculiarities, and so people think more about how to change those peculiarities and effect certain global behaviors rather than be more creative in defining the global behaviors. It would be like analyzing ten space ships, each of which was rather different from the other. One would probably not extract a general theory of space ships out of this.

Tower of Babel

At some time, I'd like to try to lay out the genealogy of particle tracking codes in accelerator physics. Looking about the CERN site for MADX, we find a presentation on the Universal Accelerator Parser for the Accelerator Markup Language. Here, we see the status of accelerator codes described by Sagan as a "Tower of Babel". But, to be honest, at this point, I would not say that this accelerator markup language has caught on that widely.

I don't know why, but I keep trying to construct some kind of epic narrative about this topic. If the field of particle tracking codes is the tower of Babel, then we might refer to the shutdown of the SSC as the "hand of God" coming in and crushing the unified human effort to pierce Heaven for the glorification of Man.

Yes... dangerous waters. There is already far too much implicit religious metaphor pervading this field.

In any case, let us hope that something like the UAP/AML can help put the pieces back together again.

I should also mention another effort in this direction, the UAL, Unified Accelerator Library. I don't know the best link for this, since the BNL site seems to not be online anymore. Here's a paper, or here for a SPIRES search.

mathematical methods of accelerator physics?

There is a post by Mark at Cosmic Variance requesting ideas for topics for a course on mathematical physics. I added a comment suggesting non-linear dynamics for storage rings could make a good topic.
Thinking it through a bit more, perhaps this would be tough. I myself am in the process of trying to understand this field better and pick out what is and isn't essential. So maybe its not ready for someone to pick up outside the field.
The references I mentioned were to Dragt's online book and to the book by L. Michelotti called “Intermediate Classical Dynamics with Applications to Beam Physics”. The wikibook might still be a good place to sort this out.
Perhaps if one is talking about Lie Algebras or Lie Groups, this is nice to know that they are not just used in particle physics, but in classical mechanics as well. And classical mechanics is such a broad subject. It is almost the same as mathematical methods of classical systems.

I also mentioned that the maps with their resonance islands and separatrices and chaotic and non-chaotic regions had made their way into atomic and molecular physics through the quantum accelerator modes. Here is a link, first from google, but I haven't looked into the field enough to judge it yet... A topic for more investigation. I do know that the name of Shmuel Fishman comes up a lot with respect to this research area.

(Added comment: This topic did make it into several articles in Journal of Mathematical Physics. For example, see an article by Forest here.)

machines

We accelerator physicists are the builders and caretakers of machines. We build machines that bring charged particles to very high energies, small sizes, strong currents. These flows of charge smash into each other, produce light, smash into targets and produce neutrons, are guided with great precision to be measured with great precision. We seek to control the flow, the identity, the environment of our charged armies. We build electronic systems, and software control, we protect, clean, and raise money for, and mourn the death of our machines. We are machine physicists. We create families of quadrupoles and sextupoles. We analyze power consumption, and ground vibrations. We deliver our beams shining and controlled, coherent and stable. We talk to the users of these beams- the scientists, the doctors, the patients, the companies. They want our beams- bright, stable, and on time. But we know that we need our machines to accomplish this.

facebook and tmfree

Will MUM become a more open place?

bottom up/top down organization

I recently read "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations " by Clay Shirky. It was a very refreshing book that made me feel like I got a bit of perspective on the changes we're encountering as we become more used to internet communications. He gave several examples of ways in which new things are possible in self organization with internet tools- basically, group forming and communication becomes easier, and because the technology to form these groups is essentially part of the web infrastructure, there is minimal cost associated with their formation.

As I've been thinking about jobs and where to go with my career, I've been seeing that there is a tension between the organizations that may want to hire me, and the connections I have and projects I can see to work on that cross organizational boundaries. I see the field of accelerator physics and how fragmented it is, and think that the internet could really facilitate some formation of commonality. At the same time, the reason the field exists is to build and operate accelerators that serve specific purposes or user communities. The building and running of such a facility is a rather expensive operation, and though there are new challenges for any project, many of the methods and technologies are already developed. So, from the facility perspective, a large amount of rather well-defined work needs to be done. This perhaps can only be done with the help of a more traditional top-down organization.

So I'm trying to understand how these two types of organization can work together- bottom up, spontaneous, informal, and multifacility on the one hand, and top-down single purpose, long term planned on the other hand.

anchors across the sea

Trying to make a home, or at least imagine a home while working at BNL is challenging.
Firstly, there is Long Island itself, which is not an easy place to live for a Californian.
Some of it seems cultural, some is the landscape, some simply the lack of time and the feedback loop of too much work and lack of engagement.
Another aspect is the transiency of the people I meet in similar situations as me. The graduate students and postdocs are often only there for a few years and either plan to go back to where they came from, or on to somewhere else beyond BNL. Many are from across the Atlantic. This is a difficult situation. Its not that I don't want to travel to Europe, and can imagine living in Europe, but there is still a gap. If I were to live in Europe, it would be a jump. And my approach seems to be to continue moving in some direction. I feel like I need to consolidate rather than expand. So I make friends with those with anchors elsewhere, and I'm pulled. At the same time I search for grounding in this sandy land, and it seems rather inhospitable. And somehow, I feel that there is still something to learn, connections to be made before moving on.

commissioning a machine

For complex machinery such as a synchrotron light source, one of the major considerations is the commissioning process. This is the process where all of the diagnostics need to be turned on and calibrated and the machine is tested component by component. This is what the LHC is going through right now, and what its recent problems relate to.
I keep trying to avoid some realities about this field I am in. One is the size and complexity of the machines. In order to come to terms with this, I have to come to terms with the commissioning process. I suppose the basic idea is to do it step by step. First you commission the linac and get the electrons looking good there. Then you inject into the booster and see if you can ramp it up to high enough energy. Then you inject into the storage ring, turning on your BPM's and trying to get a good orbit.
Somehow this seems so engineering oriented, I want to run away from the whole thing. I guess the problem for me is the stress level involved. I worry that there aren't enough people, and it will just turn into a mess. It also sounds like the end of research for me. The process also seems backwards, in that I'm building something without really knowing how it works first.
For practice, looks like I may be able to be involved with/observe the PETRA III commissioning.

blogging at work

My friend Josh's blog no dna control.

Conference goals

1) get papers in proceedings and present posters
2) find out directions that field is going
3) get myself some job offers or leads on jobs
4) meet other theorists in this field and see what they are doing and
how they make it.
5) See what universities hire accelerator physicists and what the
options are.
6) Find out whether anyone has done the same thing on this non-linear dynamics problem.
Explain it to people.
7) Tell people who I am- get to be better known in this field.
8) Talk about wiki and openness in field.

science is for people!

As I try to write up work and look at the plots I create and the documents, I realize that these are for reading. A good part of the work was making files that could be passed back and forth between computer programs. I also realize that there are perhaps different styles and I was working with someone more on the autistic end of things.
So I'm finally looking at this work and trying to view it as natural language and as images.
What an odd path I have been through.
Have I been trying to turn dysfunction into function? Or simply a system I didn't understand into one I did?
I'm still not there, and even writing this is perhaps a form of procrastination. But being able to speak, think and look clearly about my work has been missing, so this is just a piece of the process that will or will not finish on time...

work

Sometimes I get the feeling that I'm not supposed to be a human being at work.
I feel like only the technical work is valued and the collaborative work and work at helping others understand things is left implicit. Its true that a certain minimal level of expressiveness and clarity is required in documenting. I sometimes find that if I really take the technical work seriously, I'm left without enough energy left to pull it together and explain it properly. I then appear to have done very little work.
I guess the point is that these abilities to pull things together and put them in a reasonable context require you to be a more complete human being. And this isn't nurtured in this environment. The time I need to feel like a more normal person just isn't allowed.
So this means I should change jobs?
Or just keep at it, and hope that I can straddle both worlds?
Regardless, it only makes sense to sacrafice being a full person for so long... and one hopes that by the time you remember to stop sacraficing so much, there is still enough of you left.

Day as theorist

Theory is a rather lonely profession.
And what is my approach?
I want to contribute to non-linear dynamics.
I approach it from this funny corner of technology/history/discipline called accelerator physics.
There is a body of insight here that is stuck and is a mess. If straightened out, it may be some important results can come from this.
Or perhaps it is just a cult-like curiosity?
I wonder if those who leave cults have a similar experience of trying to relate what they learned within the cult and bring it to a larger audience?
This is my basic question: am I actually doing something interesting, or is my main achievement simply survival within a difficult insular group?

papers

Papers continue.
Slow progress. Somehow, out of disfunction and unfinished work, something more solid seems to form. I call this field unscientific. I complain a lot.
Maybe this is just how it goes.

I apply for jobs. I head towards staying where I am. I try to gather enough perspective, to see clearly enough that the choice feels like my own. Progress comes during the dark times, reveals itself after the difficulty.

I keep trying to find words and clarity. I keep feeling trapped and not wanting to trap others. I see every limitation and weakness in others as a potential cult. I question science, don't want to be managed. I look at this and it seems to point to a questioning of the notion of progress, of the value of any organization. I know that I go too far, here, and so I just float from day to day. My papers are like a mantra in a meditation. I put my attention on them, only to find my mind veer off. But what is satisfying is the fact that they don't go away. They are there to return to.

mess

I am trying to finish a paper.
In fact, I don't know how far along I am.

Let me be self-indulgent. I would like to say that the mess I find on my computer as I try to make improvements and clarifications is not entirely my own.

I try to find the text files describing the data I used in my sometimes blurry plots. What I find is a maze of changed directions, desperation. I think back over this time and how I've responded to the challenges. I sought outside resources and survived. But it is a story of trauma rather than excellence. Survival rather than triumph. At the same time, it is not entirely my own story. I confuse parts of others with myself. There is lack of clarity here.

So, how do I make progress amidst my own mess which I accept to be partly the mess of the community I have involved myself with? Taking it easy on myself seems to be a good part of this. I have tried to have high standards amidst a decaying science. I have mined the labyrinths of the minds who have contorted themselves in this history.

So, I keep starting over, each time having a higher standard for clarity, and hope, and hope for progress.

physics from control theory

One of the challenges I have been dealing with in my current position is trying to remain true to my scientist interests while working in a largely engineering environment. See e.g. here for some of my thoughts/struggles with science vs. engineering. Specifically, I had the feeling that a control theory methodology was killing the science outlook in my group.

Recently a colleague recommended an article on control theory in Review of Modern Physics:
(sorry, you need a subscription..) entitled "Feedback for physicists: a tutorial essay on control".
The author John Bechhoefer covers quite broad ground in this review article. I've just read a little so far, but a paragraph in the conclusion caught my eye:

What is perhaps most interesting to a physicist is the way new kinds of behavior arise from the structure of control loops. The tracking property of integral feedback comes from the structure of the feedback loop, not the nature of the individual elements. In this sense, it is a kind of "emergent phenomenon", but one that differs from the ones familiar in physics such as the soft modes and phase rigidity that accompany symmetry breaking phase transitions. Thus, engineering provides an alternate set of archetypes for emergent phenomena... (p. 832)

What Bechhoefer is pointing out is a way to go beyond control theory as purely an attempt to control, but instead to look for examples of control mechanisms in nature. He gives biology examples, and even suggests some quantum mechanics examples. Here is engineering giving back to science, at a conceptual level. Looks like the start of a more healthy collaboration!

wikibook

Collaborating on a wikibook on non-linear dynamics in accelerator physics:
Guide to non-linear dynamics in accelerator physics
Nice to just start getting some of this material out there.

working with focussed people

Scientists are often people with very narrow focus. They like for a problem to be defined for them externally, and then within those contexts, use all their energy and creativity to find a solution.
This can go wrong when there is no clear direction to go in. People are so anxious to get to work. They want to create big things and just go go go. But it may be that the center doesn't hold in all this. That hard work just creates heat. And sometimes organizations and environments perpetuate this by rewarding hard work in itself. This is the case if the organization doesn't have a good grasp on what it is trying to do, or if it underestimates the difficulty or misunderstands the foundations of some of the work being done. Then people rise to power by simply making a lot of noise, pointing out flaws in others and making very confident sounding statements.

deceleration

I sometimes feel stuck in accelerator physics. I am running computer codes, reading papers and thinking about particles in storage rings that have been accelerated up to high energies. The machine I am working on for example, has electrons with energies of 3 GeV. This corresponds to a relativistic factor gamma of around 6000. Its a strange phenomenon to work at these extremes. Its not very grounded. There is not a feeling that you really understand things.
One of the aspects I've studied have been off-momentum dynamics. Whether particles with slightly different energies or momenta will still stay stable. Particles scattering for example causes a change in their energy and this can cause the particles to be lost.
As I finally start thinking about the relevant equations for off-energy particles, I imagine the deceleration process, the returning of these electrons to rest.
Even electrons themselves are hard to picture, and the whole field has an air of unreality to it.
I guess it says I've been too much of a theorist.

value of analysis

What is the value of finding simple formulas to explain things?
Our minds, in the midst of this computerized landscape, sometimes seem small and insignificant.
If a program exists to simulate a system, what is the value of searching for simple ways of looking at it? One answer is that it cuts down on the number of cases one needs to simulate. Getting at the important parameters limits and sharpens the questions and makes on more effective at using the simulation. But what if one can somehow ask the computer to do this? To write such a nice interface to the code that new structures are created based on results from running the code.

The research topic I'm involved in has a funny history with computation. I think that some of the people involved in the early days had something against mathematical reasoning, and the slow process of analysis. One can try to guess at the reasons. Perhaps they'd observed too many mathematicians or theorists making grand statements on practical problems where the methods were simply inadequate and did not actually solve the problem. Or maybe they were not great analysts themselves and just trying to keep the power in their own hands. Regardless, the closing of the SSC precipitated a battle that is still going today between computation and analysis. There is excess on both sides. The theoretical structures one sees are overly grandiose. There are lie algebras and differential algebras and non-standard analysis and geometrical concepts such as tensors and fiber bundles. These are spoken of both with reverence and spite. Those who invoke such concepts either are trying to appease those theorists who they admire or prevent people from thinking critically and trap them into a self-serving view. Some of the original theorists had good motivations and indeed a broader set of questions they were looking at where such abstraction may have been helpful. On the computing side, one sees object oriented computing concepts such as polymorphism, linked lists, discrete algorithmic type approaches, control theory, optimization, SVD, model theory.
Viewing physics from an information theory, algorithmic approach. It sounds modern and laudable in some sense, but behind it is a desire to kill analysis.

This snake's nest of buggy concepts and software in the end often solves the problems good enough to get by. But one sacrafices understandability in entering this field. One speaks of minimizing terms and higher order calculations where exactly what kinds of objects these terms are members of and sometimes even what is meant by order is typically murky. It resembles a religious cult or a radical political group more than solid physics. But the rhetoric is getting old.
So I've gotten a bit specific here. I meant to try to explore the value of analysis. I feel that clear analysis is the only way out of this mess, but just what that means and whether it is adequate is not always clear.

slogans

"Tensors make me tense"
"Resonance driving terms drive me crazy"

normal form

A cross-roads. A meeting of the old and new.
I see other people's lives and I want to jump into them. I don't know if I can finish what I started.
My own work seems dark, slow, difficult.
But its because I always look elsewhere. If I look back on my own experience, I see my room at my dad's house, the oak tree outside, the hill with the curving gravel road leading steeply through forest to the small cabin. Behind it was the field which led to further paths with madrone berries, bay laurel leaves, blackberries. I would look down through a clearing and see the surface of evergreen trees covering the hills, and I wanted to fly down the mountain. I could almost taste it all, it was almost edible: the sights, the experiences, the possibilities.
And today I read through papers that describe procedures and equations and survival strategies. And I see strength and weakness and unfulfilled potential. And I try to do something with all of this, to put it into my own terms, to make each piece come alive. I reread the same difficult papers and try not to lose my balance. I follow the paths that lead to cruel tricks and powerful constrained mysteries. And I try not to get too lost, to always keep the common ground in mind, or at least the attempt to build common ground.

arnold diffusion

Definition by Mathworld:
The nonconservation of adiabatic invariants which arises in systems with three or more degrees of freedom.

Yes, another dynamical systems topic.
Yes, it seeps into my life.
Near the origin of phase space, in enough dimensions, the tori do not hold.
The particles slip and slide out, in between.
And so, even when I try to be as normal as possible, as regular and elliptical as possible, I still escape. The regularity presses against me. It tries to constrain me, but I am one of many.
And don't even get me started on the homoclinic tangle...

KAM

Its snowing outside.
I try to read a bit about the KAM theorem.
But those clever people switch it to KAM theory. Like string theory, its not so definite. It becomes an attitude, a community attached to solving some problems, not a solution.
What once seemed like a set of problems to be solved dissolves into history and definitions.
And perhaps all I've been doing is trying to find the calmest places amidst all of this, to navigate without being pushed over.

keep going

How does one do something new in a contentious area?
How do you contribute when your words are being scrutinized for their relevance to long-going battles?
One option is to stay out of the fray. You simply don't follow the daily fights. You withdraw, and build up your own form. You design your own notation, and find as much as you can with that notation.
The danger of this approach is either irrelevance, or prolongation of the battle. There may well be much that is rich and interesting that has not been formalized, but is assumed by one side or another. It may well be that the outsider doesn't get far enough. On the other hand, if there is much that is assumed, but is wrong, if the whole edifice is mud and cotton, then a solid arrow may simply pierce through and head off in a new direction, leaving the participants simply more injured than before leading to more fighting and misery.
The other approach is to move very slowly. To take in a few contentious issues at a time, and one by one connect them to more solid ground. Develop a few new colorful pebbles, but make sure these pebbles lie on solid shores and sparkle brightly enough to capture the attention and content of battlers.

academic

Wikipedia on Academia:

Academia is sometimes contrasted pejoratively with "practice", such as daily living, employment, and business. Critics of academia say that academic theory is insulated from the 'real world', and thus does not have to take into account the real effects, results, and risks of actually performing the actions which academics study. Academic insularity is sometimes referred to as the ivory tower. This often leads to a real or perceived tension between academics and practitioners in many fields of knowledge, particularly when an academic is critical of the actions of a practitioner. Depending on the degree of criticism, the practitioner's critique of academia could also be seen as anti-intellectualism. The balance to the view from the practitioner is that even if academia is insulated from practice in the real world, that does not mean academic study is valueless. In fact it is often seen that many academic developments turn out only much later to have great practical results. However, given that among practitioners there is a perception of academic insularity, it may increase the value and impact of the academician's studies and or opinion if they take that insularity into account when discussing or offering criticism of a practitioner or a practice in general.

I've been struggling with this question of the value of academia within an intensely practical fast-paced development environment. There are two aspects in which one's work may be judged overly academic. First, the topic itself may be perceived as useless. Secondly, too much emphasis on clear writing may be seen as a waste. The main issue here is time. Both of these things take too much time compared to the immediate needs.

From this perspective, however, an academic approach can be seen as a long term approach. On the one hand, tools are developed that may not be immediately necessary, but will provide fuel and resources for years to come. Secondly, communication without a delineation of context is also short-termed. It assumes a shared understanding that is rather fragile. People reading at a later time may well misunderstand.

Its this second goal that I've been most reluctant to give up, and I question the split. I don't want to give up clear writing, both for its practical benefit and for its personal benefit. Writing poorly takes the power away from the person writing. The truth is that there is a personal story here related to the group I am working in. I'd like sometime to try to write this out more clearly, but its probably better not to give too many details.

As a thread to follow up on, one of the books I read in high school that was influential was Herman Hesse's "Glass Bead Game". I've been meaning to come back to this book. I felt like Hesse had read my academic dreams and then put them into a larger context together with a warning to not become overly isolated.

Great first line to a technical paper

In the last few years, our vision of the dynamics of the Solar System has notably changed, and the picture of the planets moving around the Sun in a regular quasi-periodic motion has suffered many outrages.

J. Laskar, ICARUS 88, 266-291 (1990)
"The Chaotic Motion of the Solar System: A Numerical Estimate of
the Size of the Chaotic Zones"

finishing things

I've been trying to do things more quickly. To just get things done, even if they're not great.
This involves knowing that I put, say, an hour into something, and what I came up with is reasonable for an hour's work.
Some things I just take forever on. I was trying to understand why. I have this image of certain important things that are very fragile and complicated. I picture a many armed Hindu God carrying many plates, each with a crucial element that needs to eventually be combined with something else. But this God is on rather shaky footing, and must hop continually in order to avoid dropping one of the plates. Anything that touches on this domain must be treated very carefully, because it won't be a top priority. It needs to make sure it doesn't break anything, and the very process of doing it may involve helping to combine together some of the plates.
I don't think there's anything to be done accept to realize when something can be done independently of this blue creature. Then it can just be finished in its usual partial messy way, but not cause so much damage.

correspondence

When to write?
This evening, I am tired. I have made progress on big messy things that are not very satisfying. I have moved forward two steps through oatmeal and piles of string.
I tell myself, just take it easy. Don't bring in more stimulus, and the passage of time will bring new views. So I am deciding that my thoughts are not important for the next 10 hours.
And where do I find myself 1/2 hour later? Writing to people long overdue emails, and putting my disowned thoughts down on this blog.

chapters

What always shocks me about language is how obvious and powerful some words can be.
And when I think back to the time when my mind was in a knot, I imagine these words and what they would have meant to me then.
"I just can't believe how valuable people are."
This thought has such richness, and wonder how I could possibly maintain the tightness in its presence. But such a thought was unthinkable. All words were gray. All passed over piles of theorems and jagged bits of past and little jabs.

Paperless

I spend a lot of time on my laptop. Many documents are available there, and many transactions can be performed. At the same time, I feel like there are hidden problems.
My laptop even replaces watching TV sometimes. Last night, instead of watching a DVD on my TV, I watched the Simpsons on my laptop. The difference was that I can put the screen anywhere I want. On the one hand, TV has sentimental value to me. But further, the idea of a screen that is watched for certain purposes being located in one place has its role. Its like organizing our space. What happens when we open up the possibility of continually changing spaces?
How do we live? We are creatures of habbit.
This is something I have a problem with. I tend to get myself into continually changing environments. Yet there is a good part of me that this doesn't work for. How can something grow, when its environment is always shifting? I grew up with two houses, going back and forth between my father's and mother's, transferring twice a week until high school. Each place was different, with different rules and expectations, positive and negative aspects. I trace a lot of my scattered approach to life back to a coping mechanism for this lifestyle. My parents tell me that it was what everyone was recommending at the time for divorced parents with kids. However, the opinion later changed. A topic for future research/discussion.
Back to paperless. Despite all the benefits and time that I do indeed use digital media, it scares me. There's an underlying fear that the bottom has fallen out. That Borges' image of the infinite library is at hand. At the heart of this is perhaps the requirement for new skills at maintaining ourselves and new dangers to recognize. But for myself, I try to recognize the same patterns that I see in my approach to people, research, and organizing my life in my digital/paper approach.
Here is a random document I found in my search for the term "paperless office" (a review of a study called "The Paperless Office" by Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper). In the conclusion of the review, this line caught my eye:

Second, the digital alternatives to paper need to be better designed. Until that happens, until paper is used as an analytical resource for the design of technologies, paper will almost certainly continue to be the medium of choice.

It just reminded me to be wary of the hidden costs of using digital media. Paper hasn't been around for ever, and our current digital technology and metaphors won't be around forever, but technology shouldn't be quite as powerful in its role as dictating what questions we ask and what kinds of collaborations we pursue.

Sorry for rambling. Let me again blame the medium. Or more precisely, this medium seems to make this kind of shallow jumping around easy to do.
Finally, let me just add, as a "direction for further research", that perhaps where digital media fall short is in their very lack of physicality. We have a lot of intuition about our three dimensional world. To quote from my undergraduate thesis (on adiabatic invariants!) "We are largely concerned with getting ourselves from here to there and moving other things from here to there." The computer desktop metaphor is just that, a metaphor, not a reality. It is still largely a two dimensional model, with links between different chunks of 2-D space. You may argue that a book is also largely two dimensional. But the links between the different pages occur truly in space. The flipping of pages and the locating of later pages deeper in the book than earlier pages, is something that screen reading does not fully replicate.
Its surprising, but I find myself having to mount a defense for our poor 3 dimensional world!!

standards

I was recently told that I should lower my standards. That I take too long to get things done because I want perfection. There's some truth to this, but I think really I need to aim lower. Shoot for smaller things. If the project is too big then if you fail, you fail spectacularly. It is just totally useless, the work you put into it. There's a point when something is clearly pretty good: most of the pieces are in place and it basically is what it claims to be. Now, by lowering my standards, I certainly don't want to not achieve that level. Standards should come in at the final stage: how well to polish.

The problem is that I tend to end up with lots of partial results that each require a lot of work to even get to the "pretty good" stage. Its confusing because I look and see lots of work that I've done, but none of it seems to amount to much. There's a temptation when the time comes to account for what you've done, to paste together all these partial results and try to pretend that its one grand whole. Doing this would indeed be lowering my standards, but I don't think that this is the right thing to do. It doesn't leave you with much, unless you spend half your time tricking people and confusing them and convincing them that any holes in your argument are due to their lack of reasoning ability.

santayana

I've been finding audio lately.
Here's chapter 3 of George Santayana's "Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy".
I haven't absorbed it all yet, but the first part on separation of duties between experts and scientists (thinkers?) is right along the lines of what I have been thinking about and dealing with.
Later he concludes that relativity is a welcome, acceptable revolution in science, but with it must come humility. I'd like to understand better what he's saying here.

knot

I'm always drawn to traumatic history.
The topic I'm involved in is one part physics, three parts scattered remnants of trauma. The question is whether there is anything left of me before this knot dissolves. The poison infects everything eventually. Now my current collaboration is getting sucked into the old mess. The same issues of credit, hurt egos, unfulfilled dreams rear their heads. But perhaps this time they occur in a vacuum where they don't actually have effects. And after playing themselves out, sadness can be felt and people can move on. But again, this really doesn't seem to be the normal role for people in physics, and I wonder how much reality there is to this crazy quest.

today

I have been pushing hard lately. Just get things done. But nothing very specific. Many small things that set the stage for other things. Too abstract.
Today my dad told me that he thought I am a bit lost. That he's never before seen me without a clear path forward. But has my path ever really been clear? It has certainly not seemed that way.
Today I was at Barnes and Nobles for awhile. I saw people from within my isolation and didn't talk to them. But I feel like some processes are playing themselves out that have been hidden and pushed below. I think some of this is good. I was actually looking at this feeling of isolation, and deciding not to fight it in that moment. One thing I have come to realize about myself is that I am basically an introvert. I've learned to be an extrovert, but its not always so natural to me.
I picked up a book called "Loneliness" by John Cacioppo. I read the description of a New Yorker who started a relationship with an old girlfriend who was not thriving in the city. In the midst of the ensuing misery, he is staring out the window and sees the image of a sad, lonely person. At first he thinks this is himself, but then the image moves backwards, and he sees it is someone mirroring him out the window! This connection pulls him out of himself, allowing him to see his situation more clearly.The story made me cry. Ok, just a little.
Here's an interview with Cacioppo.
Actually, I'll add that while reading this book, I was noticing the focus on statistics which was annoying me. There's an interplay between personal antecdote and supposedly objective analysis. It was also the discussions about genes that bothered me. Like the gap between these two ways of understanding is too great.

a name for yourself

I seem to be pretty good at pushing things close to completion and then leaving them there. I somehow lack that spirit to really run with something. The way I think of it is that I build up structure so that I can enjoy the benefits of things in a relaxed way. Having to jump up and down in glory and deal with people who either didn't get as far as you or want to pull you higher, just isn't fun for me. But maybe defining yourself isn't so bad? Maybe there are new realms of uncertainty you enter?
I just keep thinking of John Cusack in High Fidelity when he finally decides to commit to a relationship:

I can see now I never really committed to Laura. I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and... I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that's suicide. By tiny, tiny increments.

ready to give up

Just one of those days where it seems like I just can't keep going on in the same way.
Whatever that means.

coming together

Our minds can live in many places at the same time.
I feel spread across the country, spread across disciplines, philosophies, loyalties, lifestyles.
I blame it on the internet sometimes- my scattered approach, but really my use of the internet as a tool developed naturally. At each step it seemed to solve a prearticulated problem. On the other hand, what often comes to mind is those stories about wish fulfillment. The ways in which getting what we ask for is what destroys us.
Maybe its just been too long since I've been in touch with a certain voice inside me. The voice that does cross boundaries and includes the various parts of me.
Maybe because I am working, holding things in suspension, creating small environments for things to grow, I can't access this voice. And I'm overwhelmed by too many pieces at the same time. I worry that there is no end. That its just one expanding blow after another with not enough glue to put it together.
I enjoyed painting for the first time in awhile. This is what painting is for me. It is putting things together. I used to think that I could put anything down on the paper or canvas and find a way to make it harmonious. Maybe giving up on this is why I've been unable to paint for so long. But maybe its time to believe in it again. But belief in the more humble sense of a longing and dreaming rather than a "must get it done now".

unstable

I have this funny feeling of sitting at the top of a bowling ball. Certainly it must have something to do with the amount of effort (useless perhaps?) I've been putting into thinking about how to approach the dynamic aperture problem. Find the separatrices and beyond that is unstable.

But its also a feeling from reading Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong blog for awhile, and considering the turn on of the LHC and the turn-off of so much US particle physics. I've never know quite enough about particle physics to be really excited about finding the Higgs boson. I never really got past renormalization and feel like there's something not so good about it, or that the lesson it is teaching needs to go all the way back to the beginning.

And with the Bush administration having already done its damage, google mostly taken over people's brains, I just really don't know where things will go next. What I usually do in times like this is just wait. I try to be quiet, to not make any decisions, and to let things play themselves out. Then I get swept in whatever direction. I don't like this feeling of complete uncertainty. Its familiar, but its reached a deeper level now. I know myself enough to know that I probably still have agendas, but at the moment they all seem dangerous and wrong. There is nothing to do but wait.

move slowly

Action items:
* brother changed name
* wedding to attend (not my own)
* books being neglected
* more time for self not involving tossing keystrokes into big mouth of lattice optimization and evaluation and politics of avoiding blame

ahhhh

This is a very satisfying link.

narrative amidst chaos

What do we say when there is nothing clear to say?
When according to your standards, you want to shout: "mush!"
The tree was covered in dark spindly bark. It was surrounded by small bushes with crisp green waxy leaves. This region of the forest had long been considered problematic. It was in fact just a restful region surrounded by stone walls rather by accident. Nothing really that special, just a confluence of hard to categorize, misty and perhaps obscure lives, corners and the usual uncertainty.

learning things from the ground up (or being buried in the mud?)

I feel like I've been learning certain things lately in the slowest, worst way possible.
I have to get results out of this code that I didn't write, but I have been trying to turn into something more friendly, familiar and reliable. I collaborate with one other person who has slightly different aspects of the code he is interested in developing. We try to keep in synch, but changing things break other things and I often find myself with a broken code and the tortuous question of whether to push on and fix the problems or go back to a slightly worse previous version that I know works (or at least the parts I have checked).

During this process, I am forced to learn about things that I don't feel like learning at that particular time. In the end I do learn certain things, and after I know them, I also have a sense of how they can break, how one can confuse them for something else.

I'm somewhat reminded of a comment by one of my physics professors during college relating to thermodynamics. One of the math professors suggested that there is a beautiful way to understand thermodynamics. If one just understands a certain structure, then thermodynamics fits into it very nicely. (sorry for vagueness, I never actually learned thermodynamics very well)
But the physics professor responded that he thought it was better for students to first muck around in details before getting the clearer grander picture.

So what am I afraid of? I do learn in this process. I think the problem is that I am encountering real design flaws, or perhaps imperfect implementation. As a result, I will likely never actually rise to that level of clarity, and then have only gained an extremely obscure skill: familiarity with a code very few people use. Perhaps I won't know the ultimate value of this until later. I have a feeling that much of the technical details I am learning could be learned much faster and easier in some other way. But perhaps there are lessons involving people, egos, creations, and collaboration that will be very valuable (if I can ever escape from this situation!!)

building out of real materials

I used to think that the world was built out of nice equally sized objects.
Now the pieces turn out to be sharp, crunchy, not very flexible. And even I am such an object.
We all clunk together, forming something larger.
I guess this is just a reminder to myself not to try to make things into what they are not, and to not pretend that I myself am infinitely malleable.

Too many connections

I have more and more ways to communicate but do it less and less. A fluid dynamics image comes to mind. A reservoir with multiple pipes coming out. At some point the outflow is faster than the inflow.
I am confounded by the long tail I so thought I desired. I go through my music and find things like: The Little Goat by the Gothic Archies.
Where and when did I pick this up? And again the same image: I don't listen to music because of the variety and randomness of it all. No center, no emotional story I can control. Getting run over by the digital age. The computer metaphor claiming to overcome all. Making our selves and our lives meaningless as other science/engineering images have: the machine, the molecule.
Too much. My eyes have been diverted. My senses have been distracted.

local/global

There's a certain line of thought in accelerator/beam physics connected to the question of the local/global dichotomy. I'll just put some preliminary thoughts, which is basically what I always do here anyway.
Let me start by linking to the book by Forest. In this book he continually makes the point that one should replace local Hamiltonian dynamics by global map-based methods in the modeling and analysis of storage ring physics. Of course one still needs to use some kind of local theory (a symplectic integrator) to get the global results to begin with, but the emphasis is on this separation of duties. He rails against the old school that mucks around theoretically in the local s-dependant Hamiltonian, basically saying that they never get very far because the real machines are so complicated as to make the approach useless.
Why has this new approach not completely caught on? Is it entirely due to idiosyncrasies and historical development of the field? Is it the old timers holding on to their beta functions and simple coupled theories and not allowing a more general approach that renders their knowledge obsolete?
This may be part of it, but I think there is also something fundamentally flawed about the approach from a scientific community perspective. Certainly there are local quantities and global quantities and global analysis of results coming from local quantities is quite important. The problem is that the physics model is never complete. There are always more local effects to include and if one takes a particular piece of physics and pushes this local/global picture too far, one ends up with software, methods and sociology that shows too much of a disparity between large and small.
The connection I would draw is to large corporations -- say Starbucks or Borders. On the one hand, these companies can accomplish certain large things quite efficiently. But on the other, they are going to change slowly in response to local requirements because they are defined in terms of their final goals. The analogy here is to the computer code that implements the model. (Part of my motivation for thinking and writing about this is my own frustration, partly just from lack of programming skills, in modifying a code based on these principles to do what I want. The structure is fine, but the scale is off for certain types of changes-- too much effort to do something small-- though some would argue that these things are useless, it is exactly here where the disagreement could be fleshed out.)
The problem with the local/global split is that it encourages this building of large structures without allowing many people to understand the workings at intermediate levels. It turns people into either workers or consumers, and leaves the power to mould the system in the hands of just a few.
I don't want to minimize the value of the particular local/global split that Forest advocates for storage ring physics. I think it is quite valuable and the clarity it provides is important. However from a pedagogical and sociological perspective, this leaving out of all forms of intermediate levels of understanding or analysis ultimately may prevent alternative more powerful synthesis and understanding to emerge, in addition to contributing to a polarized environment (though certainly no one person is to blame for this).

people art technology

Yesterday I went with an old friend into the city.
First we caught the last hour before closing of an awesome exhibit at the MOMA:
Design and the Plastic Mind.
It was full of ideas about how to think about the technological changes confronting us, from a variety of ways to visualize metaphysical spaces and complex data sets to ways that we may be changing. There was a story-board progression about how smell could go the way of sound, with nose amplifiers and processors to better magnify pheremones in order to more easily pick out a compatible mate.
Next we took the train down to the financial district and went to the Winter Garden in the World Financial center, which is adjacent to the Twin Towers site. There, the Shua group had an installation piece and performance called Giant Space Detail. I'm not sure I've fully processed it and gotten the concept, but it has a lot to do with paying attention to a place and the lives of the people in it. The performance involved interaction with people using the building, and most of the performers themselves had been enlisted from workers in the building. There was also an interesting interaction with the Twin Towers "Ground Zero". At the large windows where people can look out over the site, the group installed television monitors showing video taken from around the area of day to day working situations together with headphones and accompanying audio. To me, it had a powerful grounding effect that is very counter to the using of 9-11 as a propaganda tool. It really focuses you on the more mundane reality of the place, rather than a "shock and awe" approach.

dignity with computers

What does it mean that computers get fast, and that we can more clearly state some of our approaches to life in terms of algorithms? What happens to people in this process?
Does the fact that computers can beat us at chess mean that we shouldn't play chess? And is it really computers beating us (really somebody has programmed that computer).
Just a lot of disconnected thoughts, trying to say something about how to maintain integrity in the midst of our toys/tools seeming to surpass us.
One sees in the story of Stephen Wolfram for example, a person who thought that his computer tools are so powerful that nobody needs to do math or science anymore.
I don't want to say that computers can't do the things we do. I just want to say that we should stay clear about who we are and what we care about. If we create a computer that we believe experiences things as we do or does things that we respect, well then, let us respect that computer and what went into creating it. But we should not lose ourselves in the process. As long as we understand and experience self-worth and respect, then life is worth living and we don't need to worry so much about whether some other person or machine or computer has accomplished more, or is more than us.

falling trees

There's a gigantic tree in my back yard that fell down a month or so back. It has just been a part of the general background chaos that doesn't effect me until I realized that it really wasn't too far from my own apartment. And there are more of them that could fall.

I'm feeling very ungenerous these days. Like just keeping up some kind of schedule is all I can manage. And this schedule doesn't even serve me so well. Ungenerous to myself as well.

I ran out of propane and got the tank filled up again. But I have yet to reopen the pipes and light the pilot lights of my heater and stove. Partially completed tasks everywhere. Open bags and spare coins sit around useless.

I look out my window as usual and delicate pink and white flowers are blooming on one of these dangerous trees. Behind it there is fog, and birds in this wilderness landscape that is still so foreign to me.

documents

There's a nice article at the Institue of the Future of the Book blog about TeX and whether or not its a technological backwater.
I've been thinking about this kind of thing lately, feeling like I really need to get better at documenting my work. My typical approach is to learn lots of different things, none of them particularly well. So I know LaTeX passably well, a little bit of Word, a little bit of PowerPoint, and in order to keep a foot in the open source world, I've been trying out NeoOffice. For presentations, I also tried out the LaTeX Beamer class and created a PDF for a short talk a few weeks back.
I guess the general theme here is emphasizing (or at least not deemphasizing) the human element in the human-computer interaction/relationship.

clearing

Page 137, Kafka on the Shore:

I walk on for a while and reach a round sort of clearing. Surrounded by tall trees, it looks like the bottom of a gigantic well. Sunlight shoots down through the branches like a spotlight illuminating the ground at my feet. The place feels special, somehow. I sit down in the sunlight and let the faint warmth wash over me, taking out a chocolate bar from my pocket and enjoying the sweet taste. Realizing all over again how important sunlight is to human beings, I appreciate each second of that precious light. The intense loneliness and helplessness I felt under those millions of stars has vanished. Bat as time passes, the sun's angle shifts and the light disappears. I stand up and retrace the path back to the cabin.

This passage for me is a wonderful description of what it is like to have a moment of clarity and respite amidst a difficult time.

shifting sands

My work still feels like building something without a solid foundation.
Lately I've had this image of how ones gets things done in the world: kind of like churning butter, just start doing something and if you do it long enough, something crystalizes out of it. Creating something out of nothing.

One thing I will say is that I am damned tired of computer metaphors for everything. I am ready to start applying other kinds of metaphors to computers! Return of the desktop, file cabinet, river bank, stark trees, swamps, cathedrals and bazaars.

Happy unhappiness day!

strange shores

Many different collaborations, continue to move forward at a snail's pace, trying to not make them incompatible. Work has been difficult. A battle. But I don't want to be a fighter. I really don't.
It is pouring rain in Long Island. Last night I drove home after bowling, slightly drunk, hitting big pools of water, one road closed, I suppose from flooding. My neighbor, also bowling, who left first, wasn't here. I wondered what I would do if he still wasn't back in the morning. Call friends, call hospitals. But he returned at 4AM.

I read theory. My friend turned me on to Jodi Dean's blog, I cite.
Good stuff, but I spend too much time on the computer. Life is still too thin.

Yes, its still raining. And water leaks from the roof onto my futon.

group cohesion

Thinking about religions such as Transcendental Meditation and Scientology, I'm led back to issues of relativism. Are groups really allowed to do what they want? Should we be criticizing and imposing our values?
These questions are partly stimulated by recent press about the protests against the scientologists, and about their disconnection policy. The scientologists argue in favor of group cohesion, saying that they have the right to isolate those who don't fit in.
Reminds me of Jane Jacobs' arguments in The Life and Death of Great Cities about how some social environments have an all or nothing sharing policy. A dynamic group results from public space, in which people can interact while keeping their privacy.

Yes, this is a question I keep coming back to: how can we have the feeling of belonging without too much insularity and closedness?

(Yes, regarding scientology as a religion is a slippery slope. The slippery slope of relativism? Or maybe its just pointing out that I need to come to terms with Transcendental Meditation more directly.)

pictures of dynamics

productive?

Reaching a point of productivity. But there is always a worry that this is incompatible with the rest of life.

On another note:
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has passed away. I will perhaps write more later.
I had just resumed my reading of Mikael Rothstein's book about comparing the TM and Hari Krishna attitudes and approaches towards science.

ssc aftermath

I'm still interested in this question of how the fact that the SSC (see here or here) wasn't built influenced the future of accelerator physics. Check out this list of technical notes and imagine the amount of work contained, much of it quite painful. Would these people ever have been motivated to do this had they known that the thing wouldn't have been built? The tools and insights forged in the process were quite valuable, but the whole issue of credit and respect seems to have become particularly skewed as the motivations shifted. Just my somewhat outsiders perspective.

with or without beauty

I look out the window at black tree lines against bluish pink still dark sky.
There are oppressive structures that ask for simplicity and say that beauty is too complex/extraneous. But then they yield their own complexities: piles and crumples and extraneous things. The good art and science of aesthetics has been so quiet, standing back so shyly.

forming a discipline

There is something horribly redundant about the way work gets done in my group.
People push forward, and then months later its as if nothing was learned. The same concepts are being reimplimented and explored in new computing/people contexts. At some point it might be useful to outline the geography of the infrastructure that causes this to happen. The problem is that results are needed. So people somehow cannot afford to be outwardly interested in infrastructure.

The problem for me is that on the one hand I am good at building infrastructure, but on the other, this is not openly respected.

So my research projects move forward at a snail's pace. But what else can I do? If I push too hard in any direction, I fear that the delicate fabric will break. I see this has happened to some people. They have pushed very hard and in the end form a sub-discipline of whom there is only one expert. Then they spend years scratching their heads (or perhaps shouting and tearing themselves apart in frustration) wondering why all these idiots don't learn these perfectly obvious things that they know.

Without a robust connection to the world of ideas (which typically requires the environments that a university can offer), a subject will remain fractured and inefficient.

balance

There's a certain type of balance I'd like to achieve.
Its sort of a balance between always acting from a center and giving up that center in order to go into details. Sort of a balance between unity and multiplicity. At the moment, it plays itself out in terms of work vs. social life, but within work itself it there is a similar struggle.

Ahh, so I was reading Kafka's story about being a dog. He really does a lot of stuff with animals. That would be interesting to learn more about.

hello darkness my old friend

winter brings back memories. darkness. being alone.
i have a cold and this forces me away from physics back into my own obscure landscape.
time stretches out. i cannot imagine something different.
perhaps the one thing to take from this is that i am being too careful. imagining a snake around every corner is not helpful.

my computer life has blended the boundary between real and virtual. i ask whether i care about what my table is made of, or why it matters that my drawers are open and contain the least useful of my clothes. but i imagine that this is not something new to this time in history. there have always been people with a shadowy grasp on reality. perhaps it is the dream world or the spirit world that is blamed for this dissolution.

i wonder what would be a literature of winter. a type of writing that traces out such underground spaces. is it black and white, or is this just my relative inexperience with winter?
colors could be added. a dark purple, a crisp blue, perhaps even a pale yellow in a corner.

science vs. engineering

Ok, I will weigh in on this old topic.
Consider a matrix, an array of numbers. These can represent a wide variety of different things.
So, let's say a scientist and an engineer both think of their system as a matrix.

The engineer has control theory at hand. One thinks of a system in terms of input and output and asks about controllability and observability. How can I get this thing to do what I want? And... if I prick and sting this thing in all possible ways, will I have understood its internal state?

These are the questions the engineer asks. The system is to be made useful and its internal state is to be categorized in terms of well defined criterion. The questions are pretty set ahead of time.

The scientist doesn't seek total understanding in the same way. The scientist looks for funny properties. If I add up the eigenvalues of this matrix will I get a positive number? There is more of a creative element. A narrative element?

client/server vs. p2p

I realized that in some ways, what I'm been struggling with lately is a matter of architecture.
In a client/server approach, the resources are collected together in centralized places and server programs are your interface to those resources. In a peer to peer approach, there are many sources of information. In fact each node is on the same level. I feel like in each of the projects I was working on, I was being pushed to either be a client or a server, and I didn't particularly want to be either.

I know that hierarchy has its place, but on the whole, I'm much more comfortable with a p2p approach to many aspects of work and life.

back to physics

Ok, I need to do some integrals. I'm trying to find the number of electrons scattering per unit time into a given longitudinal velocity.
I need to do the integral:

where is typically a Gaussian.
I can do the integral first which seems like the right thing to do. But then to check it, I can integrate over from the momentum acceptance to infinity and get the Touschek lifetime. But I can't see how it gives the right answer. Anyway, its fun to get back to this stuff.

bridge

I've been trying to understand a certain piece of technical history that is important for accelerator physics. It involves people at each stage and their own skill sets. I'll leave it somewhat vague for now, because I don't understand it well enough. On one end we have various math ideas which from a certain perspective join numerical and analytical approaches, but from another, its just some math. These go under the names differential algebra, non-standard analysis and truncated power series algebra. At the other end of the bridge we have collaborative work on designing a particle accelerator.

The thing is that in some ways this is really just a personal bridge. I am comfortable reading math. And I am comfortable working in a team with an open environment. But in between has been a huge mess.

I was just trying to find references to Foucault's The Order of Things. I found this essay.
What the author says is that Foucault's grand schemes aren't particularly new, and his referencing is pretty poor, but when discussing particulars, he adds new depth.

Continuing my free association: I was just listening to this radio show starring Richard Stallman!

i am a computer

I used to be really worried about reductionism. You know, the whole pyramid of science thing, with atoms (or quarks and stuff) at the bottom. I didn't like being just a big pile of dumb old molecules bumping into each other.

At the time, I tried to analyze what was bothersome about this. I think the answer I came up with was that it was the dumbness of the molecules. Ok, they're pretty cool, but just not cool enough to equal me. So one way out of the resulting depression is to try to convince oneself that atoms really are that cool.

In the end, I think this line of thinking has at its heart: "I am a machine. Oh no!!"

Lately I've been thinking: "I am a computer. Oh no!!"

It gets especially dangerous when I drive around with GPS, and spend lots of time interacting with screens like the one in front of me now.

It then hit me that being a machine didn't bother me as much any more.
But, so why should being a computer bother me? I guess its because its the dominant language, and suggests certain limitations.

I'm tempted to say that this is about the mind body problem, or subjective versus objective, but I think its more about making things in our own image and then forgetting that we were their source and sort of becoming their slaves. Weird cycle.

extra something

So there are all these pieces, and on there own they rattle together.
Again, I have the image of having climbed out of a ravine.
In the middle of it all, one thinks that out of templates, convergent/divergent integrals, context free grammar, parameter 1 through n, file formats with and without futures and even secret and not so secret motivations, one can build something. Yes, but as long as one remembers that those are just raw materials.

putting it together?

ingredients:
*)"Practical C++ programming"
*)"Mastering Matlab 7"
*)"The Fokker Planck Equation"
*)article by Bruck on Touschek lifetime
*)an undocumented C++ library for particle tracking and global parameter extraction
*)a partially designed synchrotron light source
*)a bunch of smart people who don't work together particularly well

eternal

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A nice movie.
My simulation codes start to take hours, then days. I write scripts. These little creatures doing our work. My work.
The acorns have been falling onto my roof.

LaTeX

Ah, the joys of math. So now I can ramble away with equations! (Thanks to)
So, we can represent the symplectic part of the dynamics of an accelerator by a one turn map:

where is the operator saying to take the Poisson bracket with its argument. is the effective Hamiltonian and is a function of and . In the linear case, is just a matrix and if the Hamiltonian is with , then

where

is the symplectic inner product matrix and its multidimensional
extensions. Actually its kind of ugly. Ah well, I may or may not write more equations.

Speaking of Faith

Krista Tippett, pp. 3-4:

Of this I'm certain: the religious energy of our world now is not in essence a rejection of all disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades-- law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions of morality and meaning. Our most heated debates--on marriage, or stem-cell research, or abortion--defy the boundaries of legal rulings and political rights into which we've attempted to fit them. They drive back to the mysteries of human life and human sexuality. They are prisms for deep questions about identity, relationship, and love in our time. The also arouse fierce human impulses both to question difference and to defend it. We can construct factual accounts and systems from DNA, gross national product, legal code-- but they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in a life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to one another. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address, and religious traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. I've seen a tapestry unfurled, both ancient and in progress like the whole of creation, a bearer of truths that arguments cannot contain. I must tell of these things, and how they meet my own deepest longings for truth, beauty, and hope.

settling in

My laptop is a "PC". You know, with Microsoft Windows. I have been so reluctant to install anything permanent because I don't trust it. Now I install Eclipse, consider becoming a Java developer, locate tools to untar, real basics. Figure out how to access lab unix servers. Slowly things become unbroken. And the metaphorical connection to Long Island, this desolate place, that perhaps after enough years starts to come to life.

fade in/out

Who would have thought that feeling lousy could be such a luxury?

Back to the theme again: life and physics fight it out. There's only so much room.

Here's what I do: I read through the Handbook of Accelerator Physics and Engineering. Again and again. I'm looking for something. I'm trying to make the world be different than it is. I want to find unity. But instead of unity, I find the only togetherness there ever was, the togetherness of being familiar with something. No, you say: there's Maxwell's equations. And there's SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1). Ok, I admit it. I've tried to read Foucault's The Order of Things. Not healthy, but I like to think he was a good guy anyway. And I've come back to Zarathustra, and can still find a small amount of my own voice afterwards.

These voices who ask me to help them build the pyramids... What does one say to them, except, "I'm sorry, but I only have one lifetime"? I wrote to my brother and told him I am an indentured servant. I don't even know what the word indentured means, except that it brings back the song that some music teacher sang with us in 6th grade:

16 tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt

huge systems

For the book group I'm a part of, this month we're reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. The part I'm reading now is describing the modern industrial food system based around corn. He tries to get the big picture, to see how our eating habits tie in with industrial and economic logic of production. Corn production is based on petroleum use (petrochemicals, oil based transportations systems etc.), and feed lot cows in turn eat a corn based diet. On page 83, he says

I don't have a sufficiently vivid imagination to look at my steer and see a barrel of oil, but petroleum is one of the most important ingredients in the production of modern meat, and the Persian Gulf is surely a link in the food chain that passes through this (or any) feedlot.

The part that interests me in this is the "sufficiently vivid imagination". Certainly Pollan has a vivid imagination as we see from all the creative, clarifying metaphors he uses. But the point is that the system is just too big.

I mention this because I feel the same way about my own work in particle accelerators. I jump in at different levels and understand different things, and find people and ideas and work flows and processes at each level. But it just seems too big. In order for it to work, the amount of expertise is literally incomprehensible. But on the other hand, any one person has only a piece of the picture. How this all worked was really a big question I've had for a long time. If no one person understands it all, then how does it actually work? Pollan uses evolutionary metaphors frequently, and I think that this gets at a good piece of the answer to this question. Both the people involved, and the system itself coevolve to form a relatively coherent whole. Corn evolves to use oil and maximize growth, and people adapt to eating processed food.

These big systems have a big effect on us. They shape our lives, and because they contain so many parts, the basic underlying logic escapes us which means we lose control of our life. I find Pollan's book very inspiring in that he is taking something so big that it is almost invisible, and laying it out in front of us in a clear, enjoyable way.

just give me

just give me one good reason
and I promise I won't ask you any more
just give me one extra season
so I can figure out the other four

Blue Umbrella, by John Prine.

distance

I typed in "Six Feet Under" to youtube and watched the season five promotional video. The characters were driving. They reach intersections in barren landscapes where they have to make choices.

I think of my own cross roads and wonder if I've actually made any choices. Somehow everything feels close, just a few steps away. I think that I've always tried to get places while at the same time leaving open the option to get back to where I was.

And then I think of the concept of a metric space. The internet can invert close and far. It all just seems too abstract. Well, that's enough random thoughts for a Friday night. Dangerous business...

keeping in touch

sometimes its hard to keep in touch with everyone. Why do we call certain friends and not others? Why does it take so long to write back to someone and say: "doing fine, thanks for asking." or "life's a bit rough, how are you?"

I guess people bring out different things in us. I imagine calling one person and know that I would end up talking about how depressed I am and how I want more friends, etc. If I call someone else, I'd end up talking about all the interesting work I'm doing. Some people would give me the impression that I'm leading a lonely difficult life, while others leave me with the impression that I'm doing exciting interesting things, meeting interesting people, and really doing exactly what I should be doing at this stage in my life.

Maybe it just means that its a complicated time. Its not one thing or the other, but a big mix of many things. I also think I'm one of these people who's a bit vague, not so well defined at the center of things, at least in the short term. I know everyone has this aspect to them, but its a matter of what's central. For people like me, who change easily, we have to be a bit careful of who we talk to. People can have a big effect on us. Sometimes its only in withdrawal, that I find my own direction again. But withdrawal can become a direction on its own, rather than a tool, if you're not careful. Not that its actually that bad of a direction, if you can take it. There's a whole realm of life surrounding being a solitary person, seeking yourself, or something beyond you inside you.

people

I just saw this film from the Stony Brook Film Festival called Who Loves the Sun.
One funny aspect was that I knew one of the main characters (went to high school with him). I've seen him act in a few other things, and I was realizing that its not so different from seeing any other actor multiple times. You start to feel like you know them- they become a part of your life.

The film was spotty, as most independent films are. Some parts really didn't work- with forced dialogue and pauses that made one feel that the actors didn't know what the scene was about.
The music sometimes had an experimental feel to it. But that's part of what can be so great- the lack of control can open up such interesting, unexpected pieces.

The story mainly surrounded Will, Maggie and Daniel. Will and Maggie were married, but after Maggie had sex with Daniel, Will leaves for five years. They are all stuck together at a beautiful lake house, and they fumble around trying to resolve old issues. Some of the shots were really nice, such as a long slow panning from the sky to the ground through trees and leaves.

learning something new

I'm trying to learn about collective effects in high energy electron beams. This involves the interaction of the beam with itself, mediated by its surroundings. One decomposes the distribution into modes, and tries to find the growth rates of these modes- positive growth implies an instability.

I've studied the Fokker-Planck equation and various physical origins for damping and diffusion, but this has a different flavor from the collective effects involving wake-fields and impedances.

So I have all these papers and a somewhat specified goal that I don't know enough to understand. I skim the papers and other books and try to get a feel for the language and direction. Then I feel useless for awhile- like I haven't learned anything, and like I don't know any physics, and like there are all these very tall walls to scale that I never will. And meanwhile, all the other things that I'm supposed to be doing fade out and also seem impossible.
It just colors everything. Its like how the book I'm reading can set the flavour for the rest of my life.

Next day: hmm, not so bad, I guess this stuff seems a little bit easier than I thought. But jeez... what a messy process.

defrost

There must be a better way to defrost my freezer than to wait for huge chunks of ice to come crashing down...

conference

I met people from Germany, England, New Mexico, etc. People are looking for the next big thing. Some complain about lack of inspiration, others complain about lack of rigour.
I guess for the first time I felt the pull of something like a center of gravity for this community.
I was reminded of the scene from the Star Wars film where they visit Jar Jar's people, and suddenly it opens up in front of them, this huge, hidden, underwater world.

too much

Problems with my hotel room: no phone, bad lighting, water pouring into bathroom in mornings when people above me take a shower, iffy door that left me locked in for 15 or so minutes til I could finally open it. I changed rooms. My would be travelling companions all backed out, so I drove to Santa Fe, Los Alamos and down through the Jemez mountains by myself. Then I got a speeding ticket at the end.
In hindsight will this conference be one of those wonderful times in my life?
Yes, there are good things, but they've faded out, lost focus. (I guess its called a bad mood..)
I was thinking today that I would want to talk to everyone I know about all the experiences I've had with them: "so what was going on with you then?"
Or maybe I just wish people would ask me that question.

new painting technique

just keep painting over it all with white. then, instead of deep, dark separations that need to be bridged, need to be harmonized, just gauzy swirls. but there are dark irreconcilable differences in the world!! yes, but that doesn't mean that I have to keep creating them!

dangerous fruit

My ten minute walk around the block is starting to get more interesting.
The mulberry trees have black berries growing directly from their branches.
Watching the ground, I find sour cherries that have fallen from way above.
I try to get my new neighbor to eat one of the mulberries. But he tells me the story of a Croatian herbalist who was jailed for causing lead poisoning in his client. All right, gas doesn't have much lead in it anymore, but along with the oil and exhaust, this fruit can't be too good for me.
Ok. Add "lead poisoning" to Lymes disease and Giardia amongst the list of things that may shorten my life by my careless habits. I guess we all get to pick our poisons.

long island

Last Sunday I took one of my wandering drives. My original motive of buying a guitar capo was soon forgotten when I decided to search for one of the nearby beaches I'd heard of. This plan was again forgotten when I saw a sign for the "Emma S. Clark Memorial Library". I parked, ready to explore this library when a path in the woods beckoned. Following this path, I passed by private tennis courts, and was soon looking across at a river with a series of stone bridges. I took a loop, using two of these bridges, passing by a proud father and his unruly kids, a group of serious teenaged girls who apologized for their barking dogs. I stared out at the water, a fragrant smell making me think of a California summer, and wondered how this whole scene could have been hidden amongst the strip malls, rude aggressive drivers, and dead-ends in warehouse/empty lot mazes. My whole sense of structure and hiearchy seemed turned around, inside out, like the spheres of Banach-Tarski, or perhaps a Mobius strip.

That night I had a dream that the water of the oceans spilled over and covered me up. Under water, were slowly moving clown-like people carrying out their secret business. I guess at some point in one's life, we become submerged. And we just hope that we have the tools to survive, to not drown, or become irrevocably lost.