Blog Coma

Ok, there is too much stuff going on right now (don't worry, a lot of good stuff) to blog reasonably, so I am going to put this stuff on hold. Dunno when I'll get to start again.

Just putting this out there just in case the one of you still checking it reads this.

Have fun!

A New Way to Make Babies

Baby universes that's it.

Today I put out a paper on the arxiv :

A New Mechanism for Bubble Nucleation: Classical Transitions
Authors: Richard Easther, John T. Giblin Jr, Lam Hui, Eugene A. Lim

Given a scalar field with metastable minima, bubbles nucleate quantum mechanically. When bubbles collide, energy stored in the bubble walls is converted into kinetic energy of the field. This kinetic energy can facilitate the classical nucleation of new bubbles in minima that lie below those of the "parent" bubbles. This process is efficient and classical, and changes the dynamics and statistics of bubble formation in models with multiple vacua, relative to that derived from quantum tunneling.

Imagine some generic Theory of Everything (you can take this to be the string theory landscape if you want too) and this Theory possess multiple vacua -- minima in the potential where things like the electron mass can stay constant for a long time, and we live in one of those minima which has a very low vacuum energy. However, a long time ago, if we traced back our history, we will find that our little patch of the universe used to live in many different vacua, most of them which would possess a (anti-)chronologically higher vacuum density. The reason this is so is explained by quantum mechanics -- we know that even though we are classically stable in a vacuum, quantum mechanically our entire universe can tunnel through to another vacuum. This process is called a phase transition. This idea that we are living in a "bubble universe", nucleated from a sea of false vacuum, have been around for a long time : Sidney Coleman and Frank De-Luccia, in a landmark paper, calculated the probability of this tunneling to occur, and showed that a bubble universe which formed out of this tunneling looks like an open universe which we can possibly live in.

For the longest time, quantum tunneling is known to be the only process where we generically form bubble universes. There are many interesting implications. For example, such tunneling events allow us to "scan" the Theory of Everything dynamically -- one can imagine a multi-verse structure full of bubble universes where we live in one of them.

One of the question that was recently being addressed is : What happened when such bubble universes collide? Guth, Garriga and Vilenkin got the ball rolling by showing that collisions can leave imprints on the sky which we might observe. Chang, Kleban and Levi, and also Aguirre, Johnson and Shomer calculated that, assuming the bubble walls collapsed during a collision, what would be signatures of the debris we expect from such a catastrophic event.

In our paper, we showed that instead of the bubble walls being destroyed in a collision, what generically occur instead is that the collision generically form a new bubble of a lower vacuum energy instead! In other words, instead of quantum mechanical tunneling formed bubbles, colliding bubbles formed new bubbles completely classically. We showed that the energy of the bubble walls remains coherent throughout the collision, and it pushes the region of spacetime at the collision point over the potential barrier to a lower vacuum. Once that is done, the differential pressure between the new, classically formed, bubble and the higher vacuum sea which surrounds it, will cause the former to grow.

This is highly counter-intuitive -- there is no clear reason that the wall energy has to stay coherent. These are, after all, non-linear and non-perturbative dynamics. However, we believe we know the reason why this is true analytically...but for that, you'll have to wait for the followup paper :).

Meanwhile, enjoy the bubble collision movies here!

Airports you ever flown in or out of ?

So over at Flyertalk, there is a thread discussing the airports where people have ever flown in and out of (transits count). It took me a while to compile my own list :

US :
JFK LGA EWR ORD SFO
GSO PHL BDL SFO LAX
ASE DEN HNL SYR IAD
AUS ATL MDW ABQ BOS
IND SMF ARB PIT CLE
SNA RDU RNO SBA DTW
IAD

+ YYZ

32

International :

Asia :
KUL SZB SIN PEN BKI
KCH MYY JHB BKK PEK
DXB AUH HKG TPE KIX
NRT LBU BTU

18

Europe :
LHR STN LGW MUC HHN
TRS VCE KEF SXF AMS

10

total 60

Best airport : SIN (Singapore Changi). It's like a highclass mall, but just better.
Worse airport : LGA (La Guardia). It's big and ugly.
Most ridiculously arranged airport : IAD (Dulles)
Smallest airport : LBU (Labuan). Landed in a piper single engine turboprop.
Strangest location : BTU (Old Bintulu airport). It's right in the town center...you land and walk out into downtown. Inevitably, they closed it and moved to a modern airport out of the city.
Weirdest Restroom Amenities : MUC (Munich). You can buy condoms....and sex toys in vending machines at the Men's restrooms. (I want to know what the Women's restroom offers.)

Travel Mania and Stats Whoring

I am sitting in Aspen airport (ASE), waiting to head to Newark Interational (EWR), where I will spend about 16 hours before I head off to Trieste (TRS), via Munich (MUC). This would be the last leg of 7 city hop that started on May 19 with a trip from La Guardia (LGA) to Waterloo (via Toronto YYZ), back to LGA (via IAD) on May 23 before my flight to Aspen on May 24. I will cover about 12500 miles in total. Comparing to the 20000 odd miles I fly each time I return home to Penang just makes me feel even more further away from home.

While I am whoring my miles stats, might as well also throw in a nice milestone : I got my 500th citation yesterday, with an average of 26 citation per paper (30 for published ones). My h index is 11.

Anyway, gotta catch a plane. Bye.

Blog Neglect : excuses, excuses (and a paper!)

Excuses (bad ones)
(1) Trip to U Maryland in March
(2) Trip to Beijing in April
(3) Sheer laziness

Excuses (good ones)
(4) Writing a grant proposal
(5) Working on too many different projects

Excuses (really really bad one)
(6) Blogging on Other People's Blog (you still should click through, since that is actually a useful and informative post instead of the usual useless chattering here)

This is the question : To Marry or not to Marry

One of my favorite biographies was Adrian Desmond and James Moore's Darwin, which I eagerly read, huddled in the corner of a tiny YMCA bedrom while I was in England more than ten years back. In one of the most illuminating part of the biography, Desmond and Moore recounted Darwin's struggles with deciding whether he wanted to get married or not. At that time, he had returned from his Beagle trip, and his research had garnered him both acclaim and a comfortably wealthy life in London.

Before, and during his 6 years on board the Beagle, he has suffered through an on and off tumultuous relationship with his college girlfriend Fanny Owen (one day somebody will discover this wonderful and rather bittersweet romance he had and make a movie about it). And he wasn't quite ready to commit to a new relationship, having found comfort in his work and success. So, when faced with a burgeoning love in Emma Wedgwood, he turned on his scientific brain and made a list on the pros and cons of getting married.

This is the question

Mary

Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — —better than a dog anyhow. — Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one's health. — Forced to visit & receive relations but terrible loss of time. —

W My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won't do. — Imagine living all one's day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro' St.

Not Mary

No children, (no second life), no one to care for one in old age.— What is the use of working 'in' without sympathy from near & dear friends—who are near & dear friends to the old, except relatives

Freedom to go where one liked — choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one's bread. — (But then it is very bad for ones health to work too much)

Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool —

His conclusion :

Marry — Marry — Marry Q.E.D.

A year or two later (the date of the document is conjectural), Charles and Emma got married. They had a long and loving marriage and 10 children.

(This post was inspired by a friend of mine who is getting married : you know who you are ;)).

The Marcin Wasilewski Trio

I've been listening to a lot of jazz on NPR since I moved here. They play a variety of jazz, but almost without fail, they are usually either (1) the usual classic acts such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis etc (when the DJ is some old dude) (2) latin/bossa -- almost 50% which comprised of Jobim stuff (3) modern stuff, if you are lucky you'll get a DJ who plays other than stuff from Marsalis-Hancock-Corea, very American-centric.

That's too bad. Because there is a lot of great jazz musicians from Europe that almost never get any airplay around here. One of my favourite jazz group is the Swedish band Esbjorn Svensson Trio (EST) -- I actually heard them being played while visiting a record store and thought "man that's awesome". Sadly, Esbjorn Svensson died recently in a scuba accident last year at the young age of 44, at the height of his considerable powers.

Another band that I discovered almost by accident (trolling Youtube videos), is the Polish band Marcin Wasilewski Trio. A band so obscure that it has no wiki page (Marcin Wasilewski is also the name of a Polish soccer player, and that's what you get if you search wiki). But oh man, are they good. Led by 30 year old Marcin Wasilewski on piano, the trio with Slawomir Kurkiewicz (bass) and Michal Miskiewicz (drums) is a relatively young band. Their playing however, is incredibly mature. Here is the Trio, intepreting Ennio Moricone's love theme from Cinema Paradiso :



And here is First Touch from their latest album January :



There are a few more rips on Youtube of songs from January. Here is a cover of Prince's Diamonds and Pearls :



I have a couple of their albums (they were known as the Simple Trio before -- I am guessing that their manager thinks that's not exactly a great name), and it pretty clear that in each album their playing becomes more and more controlled and mature.

Now, if we can just get some US jazz stations to play some European jazz.