seriously, completely understood

Sean presses forward with "Seriously, the Laws Underlying the Physics
of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood"

I would put an emphasis on the word physics here. I think there's an
interesting question about the definition of physics. People who
think of themselves as physicists would of course like to define it so
that it is as powerful as possible. Reading Lubos a while back, (finally it got to be too much, and I found reading him, and the few attempts to engage with comments just too upsetting) one
could see this activity at play in the realm of string theory. String
theory was to be the best, most powerful theory out there. It didn't
matter that it wasn't well defined or maybe covered a variety of topics. Future work would go into its definition and elaboration. What was important was that it was known
ahead of time that it was all powerful.

Clearly the standard model and general relativity are powerful frameworks that are extremely fruitful for building models to describe and predict the world. And there do seem to be some facts about how we can take anything we find and break it apart and find the same underlying stuff. And if we put that stuff into an accelerator or in various
configurations, we can predict what it does.

But if the real point here is to emphasize the power and generality of the standard model and general relativity, then why talk about the "physics" of everyday life? This is the fundamentalism that Nancy Cartwright fights against. An effort to put disparate activities and types of argumentation together into one whole and say that it somehow covers everything.

Of course, I'm also sympathetic to this view of physics (or perhaps one can generalize to science, as well) as a unified extremely powerful discipline, and it was the faith that pulled me through graduate school. One thing for me that was discouraging (to continue a thread from Wimsatt's description of finding out how important "jerk" was) was when learning about quantum field theory and renormalization. QFT was presented as a generalization of the non-relativistic quantum mechanics we'd learned. But then it was shown that one actually got wrong answers and had to patch things up with this method called renormalization. If this was the fundamental theory, and it still required this much tinkering to get results for particle physics experiments, it seemed plausible that it might require different tinkering to apply it to correctly to limiting cases such as a helium atom. In some sense I hope I'm wrong about this, but it certainly was never presented in a coherent way. Foundations of QFT don't really seem to be too popular though, or seen as really open topics.

update... now the final (?) installment: one last stab.
I added a comment about how the reduction of helium to the standard model isn't usually done in a chemistry class, and it actually seems pretty hard. We're still trying to get protons out of QCD, with lattice QCD. I just wonder how much theories change as they pass from one discipline to another.

All figured out

Here is Sean at Cosmic Variance patting ourselves on the back for having all the physics underlying our every day life figured out. I know what he means, and in some sense its a good point. I've tried to make this point to people before. That the laws of physics that we know, explain everything. Everything. Its a good point to not nitpick about the mass of the Higgs or the existence of sypersymmetry, or an accurate framework for quantum gravity.

At the same time, here is the reductionist mentality writ large. I'd like to see more debate and clarification on this point. Is there a way to make this point that is not so arrogant and overblown? Its certainly an accomplishment, and there's certainly a precise statement to be made, but how to make it without claiming too much, or minimizing the work and value and richness involved in "the playing out" of these laws?

organization

I've never been very good at organizing my life systematically. Somehow things seem to work, but I am also always left with a feeling that there are so many loose ends. Part of me wants to keep pushing to find a system, and part of me says- "look, what you are doing seems to work, so don't worry about it." I've heard the French described in this way, and I've seen it myself. There is a big mess of redundancy, it looks like a disaster, but somehow when you really need something, it tends to actually be there and work, somehow.

For example, should I make a To Do list? Where do I put it? Do I write it on a piece of paper and carry this everywhere? Or put it up on my wall? If I carry it, then I may always be worried about what I have to do, and never relax. If I leave it at home, I may not have it when I most need it. Do I write it in a file or using a program on my laptop? Then, when my laptop fails, all may be lost. Do I use some networked site like google or some other service to manage my data? Firstly I need to learn their system. Secondly I am then dependent on a large company that may not have my interests at heart. And these companies are getting too powerful, anyway. Do I really want to be a part of that system? Of course I use their services sometimes, but do I really want to make this the sole point of contact and system for my data?

So what about a more varied system? Where the same information is written on paper, in my email box, on my laptop calendar program, and perhaps sometimes in a google calendar or some other network type application. Having a system like this takes some work, and I think needs to grow organically in some sense. It needs to be robust. (Yes, still processing some of Wimsatt's concepts.) I think somehow I never developed such a system, and any attempt to produce one too quickly runs into some of the problems I've mentioned. When life is too busy, any flaws in my system are made worse. I try to write things down, and the proliferation of paper is worse than the organizational benefit from doing it.

Maybe it really is time to buy one of these organizer things.

what we are afraid of

So I've been reading W. Wimsatt's "Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality". It has a lot of material on reductionism, which is quite wonderful, since its always been a topic that fascinates me and scares me. He provides tools to get around the various overly crude reductionisms- the "nothing but"isms. One challenge is that its rather focused on philosophy of biology, and I don't know this literature so well. But I'm still appreciating it quite a bit. In particular, Dawkins' reduction of all natural selection to the level of the gene ("the selfish gene") is something that scared me when I read it, and would like to find more articulated criticisms within the group selection literature.

It occurred to me that extreme reductions may be behind a variety of fears we have. We are afraid of being too machine-like. We are afraid of being too computer-like. We are afraid of being too tool-like. We are afraid of being too money focused. We somehow know that to view all as "mechanism", or all as "computation" or "communication" or "economics" is a kind of simplification that will make many things we value rather hard to articulate. (A friend was recently telling me about his "all is optimization" theory of life, which of course is the very same type of beast.) So the fear is perhaps our reminder to ourselves not to take the (maybe useful) ideology too seriously- a nagging suspicion that everything we value is being defined out of existence.

This occurred to me as I was thinking about my own life and how to form patterns that are positive (a self-help/therapeutic approach to life). I was realizing that I have a deep antipathy to planning things too much. "It makes me into a machine." I say. Or perhaps, "it makes me into a computer."

To say much more, I'd either have to be more explicit about myself, or try to be more precise about these philosophical arguments and societal forces. But I'll stay in this gray zone where hopefully I've still said something useful. (I know its a bad habit of staying in this gray zone, and I ought to start moving out.)

language

To have a nicely working system, people should know the names of things. And computers and programs make this even more difficult since they are so inflexible when it comes to names.
So put oneself in a multi-lingual environment with disparate computer codes, and naming of things becomes a difficult job.
I'm trying to get my own mess sorted out. I have directories with names that classify.
I have files with different extensions implying the programs that can read them.
And I have different projects I am working on. I keep redefining the projects, so I keep renaming them, and there is overlap between the different projects. And I seem to have multiple copies of the same files in different locations.
Basically, there are settings for devices, there is a corresponding parameter in a model, and then there are measured and calculated quantities for these different settings.
Sometimes settings are named based on the day they were used to link them together with other parameters for those days. Sometimes they are named with something like the word 'nominal' to try to push these into standard settings.
Now, I might think I am obsessive about this sort of thing except for the fact that I really have not yet created a working system. So its really just unfinished work that I'm having trouble moving forward on.

A final point about this kind of work. There are two aspects to this kind of work. First there is this clarification work. Work to try to make language that works well for the different people involved. Then there is actually getting stuff done. For the latter purpose, there will inevitable be arbitrary choices made. The area is complicated enough that its not always clear what the right thing to do is. The point is that you should know what you did. So if someone asks you, you can tell, and they can repeat (or you can!) if necessary. So you need to know what you did. And depending on the kinds of people you are working with, you may also need to have answers ready to defend the arbitrary choices you made- or at least a strategy so that you could easily try something else if you can't defend a choice.

There is a conflict between doing something definite and coming up with an appropriate language to describe what you are doing. Doing something definite will often make you make choices about language before you are ready to do so. Walking the line between these two things is the key to move forward but also bring others along with you so that it can help the total understanding and group good as well.

tolerance

I'm trying to do some detailed work. I have to create a bunch of files with settings of currents and magnet strengths, and then load these values into a model of the machine and calculate quantities based on tracking particles through the machine.
I'm realizing that I have an approach where I assume that everything I do I might make some mistakes. If I focus really hard, I can make fewer mistakes, but this is exhausting, and its hard to think creatively while doing this. So I try to set up my systems so that they are tolerant to making mistakes. This means that there are checks later on, and reviews where I can catch the mistakes I make.
I think that other people don't work this way with this kind of work. They are more careful, they don't make many mistakes, and once things are checked, they leave things as is for fear of messing it up.

This to me is another aspect of "the mess". Its an area, where in order to turn something not into a mess, I have to work much harder than I normally would. If it were not a mess, and I had no problems with the systems in place, then I could just work in my concentrated mode, not make mistakes (or very rarely), and get a lot more done. Since I allow myself to make mistakes, then I have to change the system itself in order to accommodate this, or else face the consequences of making mistakes and looking bad as a result.

relearning to read

The institute for the future of the book blog discusses a slow viewing of a Herzog film
and states

The problem of availability is something that seems increasingly to have been solved. To view or to read well is another kind of problem. In the past, when there was an economy based on scarcity, this might not have been as much of an issue: whatever was available was watched or read. Now we need to think about how we want to watch: we need to become better readers.

I've been chewing on this for awhile. This morning it struck me that perhaps this is a much harder task than we may think. And perhaps the technical challenges associated with bringing about the new mode of availability are trivial compared to the human and social challenges of reclaiming the same depth we had and perhaps developing it in new directions. I, for one, have certainly become worse at in depth reading in recent years. Perhaps there will be long term benefits. But I'm most often struck by a sense of loss.

To me, there are two separate questions. The first is about the nature of hyper text, and what such a literature might mean. My gut feeling is to reject it, and somehow it feels like this is related to the integrity of personal identity, and the linearity of time... (problem much simpler reasons are available)... were there ever choose your own adventure stories that reached the level of high literature?

The second question is about how to read single texts. Do we take notes? Do we spend hours at a time, or minutes? Do we always read linearly, or sometimes skip ahead? I don't know why these questions should even be asked, except that with internet reading I've taken to all these habits, and perhaps they should be clarified if not rejected on an individual basis. I think for the most part, these are bad habits, akin to seeking out cliff notes for a book and not actually reading it. The danger of mistaking the map for the territory?

One final point is that there's a small flaw in the claim that the availability problem has been solved. What this means is that digitally, texts are more and more easily available. However, at this point, I really don't feel like e-readers are good enough. Maybe I just haven't given them a chance. But in any case, the truth is that if one prefers to read a printed text in a convenient book form, then the digital existence on one's devices is not the same. And independent book stores provide a filtering process that forms a community and provides these books for immediate purchase. I see the new system as an alternative, but calling it the "availability" problem hides the changes that have already taken place and will continue to take place with respect to what books mean, how they get to us, and the connection to the author.

I guess I just really like libraries and bookstores, and wonder what will happen to these institutions and how the social role will develop. Probably much has been written on this, but I think its easy to think that somehow the technical part of digitally distributing text has somehow done away with a large amount of preexisting objects, culture and ways of thinking about things.

messes

How do we deal with being stuck in a messy situation?

The nature of a mess is that you put energy into fixing it and it is still a mess. Perhaps one can slowly turn a mess into not a mess, but during the process it will be a mess. The key is to not look for completion, and to make sure one has other resources and interests. Some kinds of life projects give regular rewards, and have regular moments of clarity and transformation. A mess on the other hand, is a constant drain. Again, the work may still be valuable, and in the end, something good may come of it, but for large amounts of time, no such rewards are there, and not being draining may be the best possible scenario.

When one is involved in such a project, it is rather frustrating because one is often asked if one is passionate about it, and if one loves it. But really, all one can say is that one is trying to improve a mess. One can barely even talk intelligibly about it because the nature of the mess is that it cannot be clearly defined, and in fact incoherent approaches to characterization of the issues may abound. Thus, not talking about it may be the clearest and most honest approach available, but this leaves oneself in a state of mystery where one is exhausted, but cannot say why. Historical and psychological analyses of those involved may also help, but without the grounding in other healthier areas (such that its essentially just an approach of humor/compassion), one may again be led to increasing the problem, rather than improving it.

Living through a mess is difficult because one's faster/more direct analytical facilities are led astray. The one thing that one may do is to constantly remind oneself that one is involved in a mess, think to somewhat more healthy situations, and not push too hard. Put energy into it, notice that it is still a mess, and then recover from that effort, having hopefully pushed things along incrementally such that they will be a bit better then next time you return.

slow processes

I think that watching computer technology develop sometimes is disheartening for us humans.
We watch things go faster and faster, and see any process which once took an hour and a person to help with it, now take a single function call in a high level interpreted programming language, and a few seconds of processor time.

Seeing this, and looking at ourselves, and our own development, its hard not to feel impatient with ourselves. Some things take years, and lots of work, and the progress is still only partial. Things like developing friendships, coming to terms with our past, and finding an appropriate way of life, profession, etc. How do we keep our dignity and allow ourselves our slowness when many things seem to be faster and faster? I think there is some flaw in thinking that devalues something for its slowness. When we have a beautiful tree in the yard providing shade for years, do we put this tree down because it took so long to grow? No, in some sense the time it took to grow adds to its value.

So what is the difference between a tree and a Fourier transform algorithm? I don't think many people would wish that their basic programming tools could run a little slower. We like responsiveness.

How do we defend slowness? Perhaps the point is again back to the question of dominant natural and technological language. This computer age asks us to put all things in terms of algorithms and processes. But our own lives are mysteries in some ways. When we translate this into computer language, we have inevitably left things of value out. In the same way that when we translate into economics language, we also leave things out. Its certainly worth the effort to try to understand why some things are slow, and all of the different things that are involved in the process from an algorithmic perspective, but one should also just accept that the translation is only partial, and slow things of great value exist.

separation of duties

There have been various times in my life when I've felt "smart". Sometimes this goes along with some context in which others think I understand what is going on. When I realize that in some context I am considered "smart", my usual response is one of something of the sort: "wow, but I am so confused! I know so little!" Now, one might put this down as modesty, and say, no, in fact I know quite a bit and such and such. But to me this dynamic seems to expose something of the structure of knowledge in society (as I have encountered it). There are people who feel they are not so smart and that others have most things figured out, and there are those who realize they don't know very much, but somehow represent structured knowledge to the others. To me this feels like a hoax that doesn't serve either person very well.

Now, this is a caricature, and I wouldn't want to say that it says much about the actual validity of knowledge. I only point out that this is a dynamic that may complicate things when evaluating how much ground a particular area of study actually covers. Consider perhaps a set of different areas of study, each overlapping with the other in some way, and as a whole covering a large amount of ground. Suppose further that the people studying each area take the subject matter in the surrounding areas to be more solid than those actually studying them do themselves (though they may be less forthright about this aspect than they should be). How do we evaluate the total ground covered by the overlap of these different disciplines? I suppose, we need to try to gain a bit of expertise in each of the areas and ignore some of the sociology and build up our own picture of the total ground covered.

distributed consciousness

Ok, I was getting worried before about the internet and distributed consciousness.
Nice to read from Crispin about collective consciousness. Here and here.
Yes, I like to think that if there are thoughts, that those thoughts belong to someone.
In any case, I am here. I interact with many others through this funny medium, but my consciousness is associated with me body, here and now.

commucations theory

I recently read this article by William Deresiewicz on the history of friendship, and how social networking is changing the definition. I guess its about ideas from one area of technology, development coming into another. In this case, communications theory is being applied to human interaction. So we have nodes that are sending messages to other nodes through channels. Those channels have various properties, such as (?) latency and bandwidth. Thus, we can communicate with each other over the phone, through email, through Facebook, Twitter, Skype and other messaging services. Now, from our perspective, we are living our lives, and these are modes of communicating with others. From the system designer's perspective, we are nodes trying to communicate with each other. Face to face contact through light and sound that travel through the air becomes another channel. It is prized for its "high bandwidth".

Like each such system, the difficult part from a human perspective is that one is put on the defensive. One may be required to put ones values into this new language in order to defend them. I was complaining about Facebook recently and how many of your actions become publicly available. The response of the person I was speaking to was "don't you know about privacy settings?" There was a dismissive attitude to this. It was my job to understand the way in which Facebook had designed the system, and to address my concerns within that system. Rather than keeping things as they are, Facebook allowed more information to be shared publicly than was previously being done, and then put the burden on the user to figure out its system to reinstate those values. Its a similar situation with environmental concerns and economics. Within the domain of economics, those who don't think that species should be wiped out, or forests destroyed, or rivers polluted must phrase these goods within the language of economics.

Let me add one more point. In his article Deresiewicz discusses a Facebook friend who tells everyone that they are at Central park, and Deresiewicz asks why this person felt the need to share this. The thing about these new technologies is that they make this sharing just incredibly easy. The amount of effort to share such a thought is minimal. So, if in the end, one decides that such sharing is actually detrimental to one's relationships, then one must see these technologies as rather dangerous. Or, at least, something that requires a new kind of thought and understanding. A new kind of ledge one may fall off if one isn't careful. The new tools encourage us to externalize our internal worlds. This has much potential, and can improve self expression. But one can also give away important things, and not get much back in return. So, I note the dangers. And hopefully use this as a reminder to those developing this technology to use humility and don't expect everyone to fit into your system.

Computer science is the new physics?

I've been meeting a lot of people doing research in various topics in either computer science, machine learning, or various areas of somewhat related applied math topics. I was discussing pure vs. applied research with someone, and they were telling me that it was a very good time to be doing relatively abstract research in computer science. It was perceived that any kind of results, no matter how abstract can have practical benefit in a relatively short amount of time.

This reminds me of how I imagine it to have been for physics following the creation of the atomic bomb. The physicists were seen as miracle workers. Give these guys some money, and they will do magic with it. It seems to me like we are coming to the end of this. Physics has lost some its sway on the popular imagination. Observing the public perception of the LHC, for example, its hard not to see the last gasps of this former power. I don't think the physicists have no culpability in the impression that the LHC may create black holes to swallow up the world. Although not actively pushed, I think that it is also not actively discouraged. The problem with this, and I think the whole unification of everything via string theory falls along the same lines, is that no real result can live up to this hype. No matter what happens, it will be a let down to the public.

On the computer science front, I suppose there may be fruitful years of research ahead. What personally scares me about this is that the research is about our own imaginations, and not about the world. (But then, maybe this is just my bias, from not being very involved in it.) I do hope that this research doesn't get too far ahead of itself, and leave the world, and people behind. I suppose that physics has its control aspect as well.

A friend/colleague of mine forwarded me this link to these lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman about computer programming based around Lisp. One can only hope that some of this kind of spirit survives in the discipline of computer science. It is a joy of discovery and appreciation of simplicity and clarity that has a kindness and humanity behind it.

For me, I prefer to stick with the science. I prefer to try to understand what's already here, rather than create infrastructure to dramatically change things. And on the creation front, I prefer more modest modes of expression.

Looking back, I'm glad we have found quantum mechanics, and it is said that CERN produced the internet. I'm sorry that it has to be at the cost of a certain group of people presenting themselves as magicians.

A final comment I'd add, is that even though I phrased this in terms of "popular imagination", I think there is more to the story than this. I think that it is accurate to say that there isn't much chance that elementary particle physics will produce practical/technological benefits at this point. Certainly its possible, and one never knows the results of research. But it certainly doesn't appear that the Higgs Boson has any practical benefit, nor do the superparticles for that matter. And I don't think many particle physicists think this either. I think they just believe very strongly in reductionism, and this is the main argument as to why particle physics research should continue. I have to admit, I'm sympathetic to this line of reasoning. But I also think something has gone wrong with this approach- it has gone too far- and it will be very interesting to see what the effects of LHC research are, whatever the results!

philosophy of science

Hmm, so my interest in Nancy Cartwright isn't so idiosyncratic after all perhaps.

wreckage?

I look around accelerator physics and see that there are so many tried and aborted projects.
I think of this process of working on an open source project, and I see its been tried before with the UAL framework. Every idea one has has already been tried and failed.

Perhaps I should try to put a more positive spin on this, and list the open source beam physics projects. We have Zgoubi, and the previously mentioned UAL. Then there is XAL, which is an offshoot of UAL developed for the SNS. Each of these is rather project related, I believe.
UAL is an attempt at generality, but from a physics perspective seems to be more about absorbing existing codes, than developing new algorithms. It is used in the RHIC online model.

Also, I think beam physics should look to other fields such as HEP, with GEANT, and on the synchrotron optics side with codes such as shadow.

cyber

I came across this piece of writing called iGooglesque by E. Sartwell, who is actually a cousin of mine (second cousin, once removed?). It was satisfying to see some analysis of what a large amount of time interacting with a web browser might mean, and what it says about personal choice and identity.

It left me with a desire to better understand these things, and led to a flurry of web searches and wikipedia reading on cyborgs. Particularly disturbing was the idea of distributed consciousness. I read something about this, and it opens up a new concept that then pushes me away from the path I've been following. To me, the concept of grounding oneself, of being very much in touch with one's surroundings, and of consolidating experience, and slowing down; all these things are very important and I would like to do them more often and be better at this. But reading about the idea of a distributed consciousness left me wondering if there wasn't a short cut to all of this. This left me with the same uneasiness I used to feel when contemplating the concept of determinism, after reading Richard Dawkins, for example.

beam optics codes

So I'm continuing on with my conversion of the Excel optics code into Open Office Calc. I've been calling the code Open Optics. I've almost finished the part where a lattice is copied together with the appropriate formulas for calculating some uncoupled parameters by adding them up around the ring. Hard to keep up momentum on this project, because I think that no one will really use it.
But its really not that hard of a job to do, so I can keep moving forward slowly.

For a second project, I have two different possibilities. One is working on the idea of developing a TPSA library to work with Accelerator Toolbox (AT), so that the one turn map can be computed and used to optimize various quantities.

Secondly, there is the need for more collaboration on Accelerator Toolbox. Many different people use it at different labs and they are repeating the work. I can try to put the code in a central repository so that people can work together on it. This is probably the first thing to do before working on the TPSA project. Once more people are working together, it may be easier to use existing code and get more ideas about the right way to combine AT with TPSA. Of course, then, something like a normal form algorithm should be written- or at least something to find tune shift with amplitude.

For the moment, I need to learn better how to use Sourceforge and SVN. I did this with the Tracy code, but my collaborator knew more about it than me. I should set it up myself, and figure out how to do it from behind the firewall, etc.

Finally, there is MAD-X and PTC. This is the existing rich TPSA, normal form code. But its not used that much for light sources, and the tracking routines are somewhat obscure- buried in the PTC Fortran 90. Getting this physics (well, sort of- symplectic integration) out in the open, would be part of the point of collaborating on AT. The tracking routines are very easy to find and read there.

mumbling

And one day we woke up, and everyone we ever knew was there.
The familiar smiles, the wry comments, each distinctive approach.
But there was a strange slowness and vagueness to each individual. Focus as you will, you couldn't quite grasp them. Small pieces came through, but not the whole. There was a kaleidoscope of moments, a flooding of halting attempts to communicate.
"This is who I am!", Alan said. "Ok, we believe you." But he had spoken too loudly. His mumbling had been mistaken for clarity. His words parsed, the structure analyzed, but his face was foggy, and the impressions he received were not coming through.

direction

One can choose direction in many aspects of life.
I guess on this blog I have mostly dealt with my work and attitude towards online stuff.
Can analysis help? We may try to think about who we are communicating with, how we are doing it, and what we hope to gain from this. In a blog, you mainly put stuff out there and don't get a lot back. It can be valuable for the purpose of collecting thoughts and recording moments, but as far as interaction, its rather minimal. I suppose this is not set in stone. Some blogs may cultivate communities in which the relationship is quite different. Perhaps blog is just not a very good word, or its meaning is not specific enough.
Anyway, if one is to be serious about online communication and work this into one's life as a positive thing, and not always an experimental, rather unconscious hope that it will be therapeutic in some form, maybe a little more clarity and direction is required.
This is just to note here that I would like to do this. Either fade this aspect of my life out, or clarify it. The one to anonymous connection doesn't feel like a long term healthy solution. It is too murky, and though perhaps part of development, should be clarified.

works too well

There are some things that work just too well.
Like google search, whatever you put in, you get something back, as if you meant it.

I was going to try to run a program I am writing, and realized that I hadn't written everything that I need to yet. I was thinking, could the code somehow be smart enough to guess what I wanted to do, and then just run? Why do I have to take the time to put all these explicit instructions in there? Of course the reason is that it is based on rules that I understand, so I have a certain measure of control in the situation. If the code could decide itself what it thought that I wanted to do, then its no longer a situation based on rules that I can understand to whatever degree I want.

I'm not saying I think Google should crash on badly phrased searches, but having hidden rules with a goal of never failing and always trying to guess what you want takes the control away from the people using the code and puts it into those writing it.

Again

Just because something has been done many times before, doesn't mean it shouldn't be done again. Yes, the awareness is helpful to some extent. But you will always bring something new.

I'm thinking of my project of writing an accelerator optics code in Calc. What can I do differently? Can I document it better than MAD? Can I make it easier to use?
This area has such a heavy history. Too many codes already. Yes, I'm writing another one. But maybe I can bring something good to the process, and even the result?

harmonizing

Realizing that there have been a number of situations in my life, where try as I may, I just can't put it all together, and can't find a nice picture. Ah well. No reason not to try to harmonize in other contexts, perhaps on a smaller scale.

computers as tools

I came across this article (seems to be badly formatted- should be run through some wiki software?- I cut and pasted it into emacs to get the line breaks...) by Chris Dent at University of Indiana.

He says that there are two different views we have of computers. One is as "interactive artifacts", and the other is as tools. He suggests that the view as being interactive is flawed and the source of computers resulting in much less increase in efficiency than you might expect. He says that basically it is a flawed metaphor. We think of the computer as like a person, able to interact with us. However, for the forseeable future, computer programs are still rule based within a given domain, not able to form their own categories and make connections between domains. Thus, we have overly high expectations for how easy the interaction will be (the computer can understand what I want!), and also too low expectations for how that experience actually goes (I guess I just don't know how to talk like a computer :( )

He says that the two main ways in which computers are tools are in terms of automating tasks that are now or were previously done by people, and by acting as tools to augment ourselves.
I must say that I get a little uncomfortable thinking of augmentation. But I really like this idea of thinking of computers as tools. It throws away the fiction that we are somehow creating beings, or entities, or some kind of abstract existence out there. Instead we are using tools. These tools may store, represent, and manipulate information. And much more. But turning it back into tools, gives us the responsibility. What tools do we want? How effective are they? What do we want them for?

living with networks

Whenever I hear that something is "on the internet", or to "buy it on the net", or search "the net", a little feeling of hopelessness creeps in. I guess the reason is that this view of the internet as an undifferentiated ocean out there, serves a role as a panacea. Or maybe the problem is the identification of the internet as a place, which to me seems to inevitably devalue our physical world. Now there have been video games and virtual reality games of varying degrees of simulation and imagination since when, the '80s?
This is the view of the internet as "cyberspace".

The problem is that to the extent that it makes sense that we exist in this space, we certainly have to change, and this change sometimes feels forceful, like its not recognized the level of discomfort resulting from these changes, and not dealt with in a delicate way.
Of course we can revisit the philosophical questions of life, and what it is, and of consciousness and what it is. And like all technologies, they can actually give new perspective on old philosophical questions. In the sense that one doesn't have to work as hard in "what if" statements.

I recently read Vannevar Bush's rather prescient article from 1945 Atlantic (available here, -- I found this thanks to John Jowett again). He describes the ways in which various technologies pushed forward will link us together, and make examining "the record" more powerful. It is somehow satisfying to see "the internet", or something like it, described at a much earlier date. It gives a new head space in which to think about it, not seeing its current incarnation as inevitable.

few thoughts

A little more on the previous topic.
First, Jodi Dean discusses the UC strike, in a rather abstract way.
Here, she says that the crisis in universities is that universities are a part of the capitalist system, designed to create whatever type of labor capital needs. But supposedly "capital doesn't need us anymore". Is this really true? Does she mean that computerized systems can do everything that people can, and perhaps better? I think this goes too far, and is a mistake in some way, but I may also misunderstand what she's saying. Not that I really want "capital" to want me so badly, or even that I quite know what "capital" is. (Oh, looking at this more, I see that she is actually critiquing that view of the university... I should read this more carefully...)

I've been trying to create systems for myself, and then follow through on them. Every time I start following a linear procedure, something in me tells me that this is dehumanizing, and I ought not to be doing this. I know there's something wrong with this. The most healthy of people have working systems they are a part of, and being a part of that system will certainly involve following linear procedures.

On this topic, I should quote from Karl Popper (stolen from here)

As I wrote many years ago at the very beginning of the debate about computers, a computer is just a glorified pencil. Einstein once said "my pencil is cleverer than I". What he meant could perhaps be put thus: armed with a pencil, we can be more than twice as clever as we are without. Armed with a computer (a typical World 3 object), we can perhaps be more than a hundred times as clever as we are without; and with improving computers there need not be an upper limit to this.

Karl Popper, The Self and Its Brain, p. 208

The French seem to really like bureaucracy. But it also seems to me to be a functional bureaucracy- one that really involves people. Something about this is reminding me of how Americans sometimes see nature, in terms of something totally separate, totally wild. This idea of not separating ourselves from our systems quite so much is also hitting me in terms of how I've seen Europe. I've seen it as a place of history. Its tempting, as in the case of nature, to see contrast civilization with the wild. Likewise, we can contrast living, modern places, with places steeped in history. But Europe, with longer experience of dealing both with nature and a longer history, maybe has developed a different, more interactive approach here.

People and computers

Sometimes it feels like we are designing/(haphazardly pushing forward) a world in which we have no part. Its moving faster and faster, and one wonders whether a different creature- perhaps some digital descendant of ours is better fit to survive here.
We can think of previous revolutions such as mechanical and chemical. In the end we still found a role for ourselves. We found ways in which to buffer ourselves and take advantage of the power of these new technologies. We created cars and airplanes to travel fast and still be in relative comfort. And we don't have to use these fast technologies.
Here's an interview with Ray Kurzweil. Actually he kind of pisses me off. Notice at around 2:30, he is asked the question of what we can do to prepare for the change. He doesn't answer the question, instead, he seems to revel in the predictions of how fast things are changing.
For him, the human brain is something to copy, source material for something else. That's ok, but why do we want to do this? Why just build and build and build. Ok, there's a certain inevitability to some of it. But what's more interesting to me, is people and how they interact with these changes. There's a cheapening effect. Where's the depth? Sure, he might say that the power is there for even more depth. But shouldn't we start with the depth that we have and try to increase that? Where is literature and art and experience of nature in this kind of vision? Its just faster and faster and faster? I guess this is just another kind of conversation to have.
But for me, the thing to remember is that there's no reason why things have to be worse. We don't need to just try to get faster stuff for its own sake.

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