Asymptotia

[A more technical post follows] My most recent paper, out on the arXiv today , is very exciting to me because it seems to be a genuinely new way of computing some important quantities and it is devilishly simple. So simple that I worried for months that it is all super-obvious to everyone. But another voice within me said to myself: Well if it is so obvious, why has nobody published it? Another (…

I started a tradition a little while back where every year we have a special departmental colloquium entitled “The Nobel Prize in Physics: Who/What/Why”. This year my job in finding speakers was made easier by having 2/3 of this years newly-minted Nobel Prize winners in physics in the Department! (Michel Devoret and John Martinis.) So our room was a bit more well-attended than normal…(hundreds an…

Well, I can now officially mention that I’ve been part of the filmmaking team (in a way) working hard to bring you an enjoyable and interesting Fantastic Four movie! I think it has been about two and a half years (?) since this all began. This was a nearly perfect model of how science consulting can work in film. I worked with everyone, wherever I was needed, with the director, writers, producers…

[More technical post follows.] I’ve been working on this project with (UCSB postdoc) Maciej Kolanowski on and off for a while now, but only in the last couple of weeks did I have the time to hunker down and help push the writing of the results to the finish. For your Sunday reading pleasure, it is already up on the arXiv here (it came out Thursday but I’ve been too busy to pause to post about it …

[A more technical post follows.] In January 2024 I wrote a paper showing how to define the Supersymmetric Virasoro Minimal String* (SVMS) as a random matrix model, compute many of its properties, and indeed predict many aspects of its physics. This was the first time the SVMS had been constructed. Despite that, a recent paper found it necessary to specifically single out my paper disparagingly as…

Some years ago I speculated that it would nice if a certain mathematical object existed, and even nicer if it were to satisfy an ordinary differential equation of a special sort. I was motivated by a particular physical question, and it seemed very natural to me to imagine such an object… So natural that I was sure that it must already have been studied, the equation for it known. As a result, ev…

This week’s lectures on instantons in my gauge theory class (a very important kind of theory for understanding many phenomenon in nature – light is an example of a phenomenon that is described by gauge theory) were a lot of fun to do, and mark the culmination of a month-long theme on topological objects and non-perturbative effects. I always enjoy teaching this stuff, including the history! –cvj

I realised just now that I entirely forgot (it seems) to post about an episode of PBS’ show Nova called “Decoding the Universe: Cosmos” which aired back in the Spring. I thought they did a good job of talking about some of the advances in our understanding that have happened over the last 50 years (the idea is that it is the 50th anniversary of the show) in areas of astrophysics and cosmology. I …

During the pandemic shutdown I regularly ran these london streets and bridges -virtually- on a treadmill watching a YouTube video of such a run. This morning (actually 8 days ago since I see now I forgot to hit “publish”) was the first time I did it for real! I wonder … Click to continue reading this post → The post Running London appeared first on Asymptotia .

This morning I had a really fantastic meeting with some filmmakers about scientific aspects of the visuals (and other content) for a film to appear on your screens one day, and also discussed finding time to chat with one of the leads in order to help them get familiar with aspects of the world (and perhaps mindset) of a theoretical physicist. (It was part of a long series of very productive me…

Since you asked, I should indeed say a few words about how things have been going since I left my previous position and moved to being faculty at the Santa Barbara Department of Physics. It's Simply Wonderful! (Well, that's really four I suppose, depending upon whether you count the contraction as one or two.) Really though, I've been having a great time. It is such a wonderful department with we…

(A more technical post follows.) By the way, in both sets of talks that I mentioned in the previous post, early on I started talking about orthogonal polynomials , and how they generically satisfy a three-term recurrence relation (or recursion relation): Someone raised their hand and ask why it truncates … Click to continue reading this post → The post Recurrence Relations appeared first on Asymp…

Well, that was my title for my seminar last Thursday at the KITP . My plan was to explain more the techniques behind some of the work I've been doing over the last few years, in particular the business of treating multicritical matrix models as building blocks for making more complicated theories of gravity. The seminar ended up being a bit scattered in places as I realised that I had to re-adjus…

It has been extremely busy in the ten months or so since I last wrote something here. It’s perhaps the longest break I’ve taken from blogging for 20 years (gosh!) but I think it was a healthy thing to do. Many readers have been following some of my ocassional scribblings … Click to continue reading this post → The post Living in the Matrix – Recent Advances in Understanding Quantum Spacetime appe…

There’s not much in this post, but I wanted to mark a significant date. It is the first day of the rest of 2023, but in addition, it is the beginning of a new chapter for me. Yesterday was my last day as an employee of the University of Southern … Click to continue reading this post → The post And so it begins… appeared first on Asymptotia .

A lot of us have been waiting for a long time to hear this news! The NANOGrav collaboration has announced strong evidence of a background of low frequency gravitational waves emitted from supermassive black hole mergers. Their detection methods are pulsar timing arrays (still one of those fantastically simple, cool … Click to continue reading this post → The post Rattle and Hum appeared first on …

About two years ago I wrote a post entitled “A Return”, upon moving to Princeton for a year (I was a Presidential Visiting Scholar at the Physics department). I reflected upon the fact that it was a return to a significant place from my past, where I’d been transformed in so many ways. Princeton was the first place I visited (not counting airports) in the USA, the location of my first postdoctora…

After doing a night bottle feed of our youngest in the wee hours of the morning some nights earlier this week, in order to help me get back to sleep I decided to turn on BBC Sounds to find a programme to listen to... and lo and behold, look what had just aired live! The programme that I'd recorded at Broadcasting House a few weeks ago in London. So it is out now. It is an episode of Jim Al-Khalil…

I’m sitting, for the second night in a row, in a rather pleasant restaurant in Oxford, somewhere on the walk between the physics department and my hotel. They pour a pretty good Malbec, and tonight I’ve had the wood-fired Guinea Fowl. I can hear snippets of conversation in the distance, telling me that many people who come here are regulars, and that correlates well with the fact that I liked the…

As I mentioned in the previous post, I had business at BBC Broadcasting House this week. I was recording an interview that I’ll fill you in on later on, closer to release of the finished programme. Recall that in the post I mentioned how amusing it would be for me … Click to continue reading this post → The post BBC Fun! appeared first on Asymptotia .