The Wood

by Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)

But two miles more, and then we rest!
Well, there is still an hour of day,
And long the brightness of the West
Will light us on our devious way;
Sit then, awhile, here in this wood--
So total is the solitude,
We safely may delay.

These massive roots afford a seat,
Which seems for weary travellers made.
There rest. The air is soft and sweet
In this sequestered forest glade,
And there are scents of flowers around,
The evening dew draws from the ground;
How soothingly they spread!

Yes; I was tired, but not at heart;
No--that beats full of sweet content,
For now I have my natural part
Of action with adventure blent;
Cast forth on the wide world with thee,
And all my once waste energy
To weighty purpose bent.

Yet--sayst thou, spies around us roam,
Our aims are termed conspiracy?
Haply, no more our English home
An anchorage for us may be?
That there is risk our mutual blood
May redden in some lonely wood
The knife of treachery?

Sayst thou, that where we lodge each night,
In each lone farm, or lonelier hall
Of Norman Peer--ere morning light
Suspicion must as duly fall,
As day returns--such vigilance
Presides and watches over France,
Such rigour governs all?

I fear not, William; dost thou fear?
So that the knife does not divide,
It may be ever hovering near:
I could not tremble at thy side,
And strenuous love--like mine for thee--
Is buckler strong 'gainst treachery,
And turns its stab aside.

I am resolved that thou shalt learn
To trust my strength as I trust thine;
I am resolved our souls shall burn
With equal, steady, mingling shine;
Part of the field is conquered now,
Our lives in the same channel flow,
Along the self-same line;

And while no groaning storm is heard,
Thou seem'st content it should be so,
But soon as comes a warning word
Of danger--straight thine anxious brow
Bends over me a mournful shade,
As doubting if my powers are made
To ford the floods of woe.

Know, then it is my spirit swells,
And drinks, with eager joy, the air
Of freedom--where at last it dwells,
Chartered, a common task to share
With thee, and then it stirs alert,
And pants to learn what menaced hurt
Demands for thee its care.

Remember, I have crossed the deep,
And stood with thee on deck, to gaze
On waves that rose in threatening heap,
While stagnant lay a heavy haze,
Dimly confusing sea with sky,
And baffling, even, the pilot's eye,
Intent to thread the maze--

Of rocks, on Bretagne's dangerous coast,
And find a way to steer our band
To the one point obscure, which lost,
Flung us, as victims, on the strand;--
All, elsewhere, gleamed the Gallic sword,
And not a wherry could be moored
Along the guarded land.

I feared not then--I fear not now;
The interest of each stirring scene
Wakes a new sense, a welcome glow,
In every nerve and bounding vein ;
Alike on turbid Channel sea,
Or in still wood of Normandy,
I feel as born again.

The rain descended that wild morn
When, anchoring in the cove at last,
Our band, all weary and forlorn
Ashore, like wave-worn sailors, cast--
Sought for a sheltering roof in vain,
And scarce could scanty food obtain
To break their morning fast.

Thou didst thy crust with me divide,
Thou didst thy cloak around me fold;
And, sitting silent by thy side,
I ate the bread in peace untold:
Given kindly from thy hand, 'twas sweet
As costly fare or princely treat
On royal plate of gold.

Sharp blew the sleet upon my face,
And, rising wild, the gusty wind
Drove on those thundering waves apace,
Our crew so late had left behind;
But, spite of frozen shower and storm,
So close to thee, my heart beat warm,
And tranquil slept my mind.

So now--nor foot-sore nor opprest
With walking all this August day,
I taste a heaven in this brief rest,
This gipsy-halt beside the way.
England's wild flowers are fair to view,
Like balm is England's summer dew
Like gold her sunset ray.

But the white violets, growing here,
Are sweeter than I yet have seen,
And ne'er did dew so pure and clear
Distil on forest mosses green,
As now, called forth by summer heat,
Perfumes our cool and fresh retreat--
These fragrant limes between.

That sunset! Look beneath the boughs,
Over the copse--beyond the hills;
How soft, yet deep and warm it glows,
And heaven with rich suffusion fills;
With hues where still the opal's tint,
Its gleam of prisoned fire is blent,
Where flame through azure thrills!

Depart we now--for fast will fade
That solemn splendour of decline,
And deep must be the after-shade
As stars alone to-night will shine;
No moon is destined--pale--to gaze
On such a day's vast Phoenix blaze,
A day in fires decayed!

There--hand-in-hand we tread again
The mazes of this varying wood,
And soon, amid a cultured plain,
Girt in with fertile solitude,
We shall our resting-place descry,
Marked by one roof-tree, towering high
Above a farmstead rude.

Refreshed, erelong, with rustic fare,
We'll seek a couch of dreamless ease;
Courage will guard thy heart from fear,
And Love give mine divinest peace:
To-morrow brings more dangerous toil,
And through its conflict and turmoil
We'll pass, as God shall please.

Solid Water

Beard Board

Ken is currently growing out his beard, and the process is absolutely fascinating to me. I have serious beard-envy. I'm not saying I want a big bushy face-forest (although I'd probably try for one eventually, if I could, out of sheer curiosity), but a little face-foliage, to shape and comb and wax into points, to keep you warm in winter, with that great scratchy-soft texture and lots of colors and natural waves... I could make it into a goatee or a soul patch or a handle-bar moustache, pointy sideburns or mutton chops or any of million combinations, and change it all the time, 'cause it just keeps growing. Oh yes, I'm envious.

But I have to admit, it probably looks better on him than it would on me. And I get to live vicariously through his experiments and artistic efforts. And I get to kiss a guy with a beard, which is probably more fun than just kissing, with a beard.

Anyway, like I said, I'm fascinated by this process. And when Ken goes to the Beard Board I read eagerly over his shoulder, and look at all the pictures. It's not a very active forum. People don't post all that frequently. So the other day we explored some of the links to related sites -- and it was a gold mine.

Probably the best discovery was the Handlebar Club check out the FAQs - "What is a snood, and where can I acquire one?" - and be sure to follow the link for moustache mugs (Ken wants one.) But that's just the set-up. The gallery is the payoff.

Unfortunately, Ken is not eligible to join the club right now, since he has a full beard rather than just a handlebar moustache. But that's okay, because he can still join the "Official Gentlemen's Facial Hair Club" or the "OGFHC". This site provides lots of services for the hirsuite community, such as examples of Facial Hair Stereotypes in Popular Media. But perhaps the most relevant section of the site for me, as an unbearded-American, is the "she would look better..." page. I'll let you imagine what that is, or click on the link for yourself. Some of them really do look better.

There's a lot more links at the bottom of the Beard Board page, under the "beard affiliates" drop down menu (like rate my goatee, an inevitable mutation of the "hot or not?" meme), but Ken drew the line after we visited The Chest Hair Site. I was willing to stop there too.

This is Grand

This is Grand is the name of a blog which features stories from Chicago's El, and is also what the recorded voice announces inaudibly over the tunnel noise, when the train is about to stop at Grand.

The blog had a photo contest, and the twelve winners are posted here. I share the Chicagoist's weakness for scenes that include people, and I don't think these photos are really lying... I think there is something sublime about mass transit.

As further evidence, I'm going to link to these gorgeous 1920s posters for Chicago rapid transit. I've actually linked to them before, but even I had trouble finding where.
One of them is my desktop wallpaper. Another one inspired me to visit the lighthouse just north of campus. Well worth the trip.

Seems like my blogging's been a lot less Chicago-centric lately. It's a shame. But what with the weather and all, it's so much easier to stay in and rent Buffy DVDs (although now that Blockbuster has decided to let everybody keep movies for a month before charging them for the disk, it's going to be harder to find them) than to go down town and explore the city.

We did go down before Christmas. We took the Christmas Train to see the window displays at Marshall Field's and the Daley Plaza Tree and Christkindlmarket (the tree was so much bigger than I expected from the pictures. Ornaments the size of beach balls looked the same size as normal ornaments, in comparison to it) and The Magnificent Mile Lights Festival. That was a great night.

But now that the holidays are over, most of the city is hibernating anyway. There aren't many events to draw me out of my own cave. I guess I'll just have to make do with photoblogs until spring comes again. Cubs tickets on sale soon...

What Do You Believe is True, Even Though You Cannot Prove It?

Back in high school I read this book called The Third Culture which was edited by John Brockman. I picked it up because I'd just read C.P. Snow's book The Two Cultures with which I've been obsessed ever since.

Now I don't believe that the people who wrote essays for Brockman's book represent anything like a third culture. They're science types. They're writing about questions which might be considered philosophy, but scientists have always done that. He edited another one, more recently, called The New Humanists which was exactly the same sort of thing. (I have to admit I didn't finish that one, because I lost it before I'd read all the essays. Andy, I think you've forgotten, but I owe you a book...)

Some time ago I heard that he'd started a web page called "Edge." And now, thanks to Peter Woit's reminder, I'm taking a look at it.

It has a feature in which Brockman asks lots of his famous, science type correspondents, the same provocative question. "What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?"

That's the kind of question that takes a lot of nerve to ask. And it takes serious cajones to answer it honestly, for a scientist.

Richard Dawkins admits that he cannot prove that "All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe."

Physicist Freeman Dyson takes the cowardly route, and goes with an unprovable mathematical conjecture. (I'd be tempted by this sort of answer too, only I'd pick some geometric axioms.)

Biologist Jared Diamond, author of the scientific explanation of human history called Guns, Germs, and Steel, takes the opportunity to explain a hypothesis he says he can't yet prove, and so does Lynn Margulis, the biologist who came up with the currently accepted theory of the origin of eukaryotic life, and so does Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained.

Gregory Benford, physicist and science fiction writer, ducks the question, and asks one of his own: why should there be laws of nature? I guess we can take it that he believes, but cannot prove, that these laws are universally true. Clifford Pickover, computer scientist and creator of Clifford A. Pickover's homepage (try his ESP experiment) also tries to dodge, by phrasing his answer with "ifs". "If we believe that consciousness is the result of patterns of neurons in the brain, our thoughts, emotions, and memories could be replicated in moving assemblies of Tinkertoys." Be a man, Cliff. Do you believe Tinkertoy brains could think, or not?

The physicists in general do better at acknowledging how little we can actually prove Leonard Susskind, states the assumption that underlies quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics: "If I were to flip a coin a million times I'd be damn sure I wasn't going to get all heads. I'm not a betting man but I'd be so sure that I'd bet my life or my soul. I'd even go the whole way and bet a year's salary. I'm absolutely certain the laws of large numbers—probability theory—will work and protect me. All of science is based on it. But, I can't prove it and I don't really know why it works." (This reminds me of a story I read in the anthology "Fantasia Mathematica" in which someone gets really upset when a collection of monkeys at typewriters actually do start reproducing the works of Shakespeare -- word perfect, from their first keystroke.)

Lee Smolin is "convinced that quantum mechanics is not a final theory. I believe this because I have never encountered an interpretation of the present formulation of quantum mechanics that makes sense to me."

And Leon Lederman (former director of Fermilab, author of The God Particle and a nice guy, who answered a fan e-mail I sent him a long time ago) says: " To believe without knowing it cannot be proved (yet) is the essence of physics. Guys like Einstein, Dirac, Poincaré, etc. extolled the beauty of concepts, in a bizarre sense, placing truth at a lower level of importance."

There are a hundred and twenty contributors, all told, but the responses are short. Browse through them, and see who has the most guts.

Nothing

So here's what I've been doing for the past week or so, my excuse for neglecting my small-but-faithful audience: nothing.

And I've loved it. Nothing like -- riding in the car fifteen hours each way from Chicago to Denver and back reading out loud to keep Ken awake (The Sword in the Stone, which we finished, reading about the Boxing Day Boar Hunt on the day after Christmas) and watching the New Lemony Snicket movie and reading books seven, eight, nine, ten and eleven of the Series of Unfortunate Events.

The movie just about lives up to the books -- a high standard. All that's missing is the joy the books take in words themselves. In obscure vocabulary and playful definitions, in codes, puns, alliterations, anagrams, and literary allusions. I was extra-pleased by the mention of C.P. Snow's Corridors of Power, and I love all the T.S. Eliot. It's great that you can recognize villains by their fondness for Edgar Guest, while the well-read heroes prefer Herman Melville. I need to look-up some of the references which went over my head -- "Morel" Behavior in a Free Society, Archy and Mahitabel, Comyns, and Carl Van Vechten. I should also read the Gulag Archipelago, one of these days. But I think I got most of the references to Nietzche and Beverly Cleary.

Anyway, even some of that fun makes it into the movie, through Jude Law's pitch perfect narration. So it's worth the ticket price. We also rented "King Arthur" (which doesn't completement The Sword in the Stone as well as you'd think) and "Shaun of the Dead" (which does complement "Dawn of the Dead" -- Ken's favorite movie -- very well indeed.) I give it four stars, and I'm not the zombie-lover.

I picked out a wedding dress with my mom. Wedding plans are being revised, although I'm not making any more announcements yet.

Took Ken to Midnight Mass and to Casa Bonita. He's a good sport.

Christmas shopped up to the last possible moment, and then reaped an amazing haul on Christmas morning -- thanks for the cell-phone service especially, Dad and Mom.

And since we got back, I've spent a lot of time hanging out with Ken while he plays "Fable," which I got him for Christmas, after heavy hinting. I like watching video games. It makes more sense than watching sports -- at least I know the person I'm cheering for. And this game has a great story. I got totally caught up. The most hilarious part was when he took off his helmet and all of the game characters fell in love with him. His "renown" level was very high, as was his "attractiveness" score -- since his hair had grown back after his stint in prison.

There was a lot of recorded West Wing and Gilmore Girls to catch up on (thanks Becca) and more video games, movie rentals, books, and snow ball fights, and walking around on frozen ponds, somewhere in there...

It feels so good to do nothing, for a while.

Even Though My Sister Hates the Poetry Posts...

The Journey of the Magi
by T.S. Eliot


'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Running Out of Classes

I feel ripped off.

I thought by this point in my education, I would know a lot more. I still look at papers, and feel like they're in a foreign language. I still look at the math, and feel like you'd have to be much smarter than me to understand it. (Including math that I've written.)

I do not feel like an expert. And this is bad, 'cause they're letting me help teach classes...

You know how they promise you, your whole life, "You'll understand when you're older"? They say, "Well, we can't explain this to you yet. You don't have enough math. You have to learn all this other stuff first."

But now I've done all that, I've sat through all their classes, almost. They haven't lived up to their side of the bargain. There's still so much I don't understand. And now I begin to suspect that they don't really understand either.

There are still lots of people above me, but they are not so far above me now. I'm getting to the point where it's not so much about people who know more than you, as people who know about different things than you, where we start to specialize.

So now, when I listen to physicists talk, I'm much less likely to believe they really know what they're talking about. I don't, and I've gotten this far, so why should I believe they do? And I feel the same way about people in other fields now, too. A doctorate is so much less impressive now that I think I actually might get one. Any club that would have me as a member, etc...

So running out of classes has made me feel a little cynical. Also smug, though. And old. (But I like feeling old.) Mainly, though, I'm just outraged about all the questions I now see I'm never going to get answers to. After so much work, and such a long time... Man! That sucks!

Everything I Know About Quantum Field Theory

Okay, this is not going to be a great explanation for three reasons. First: because my understanding isn't great. Second: because I'm going to try to write for a reader who hasn't taken quantum mechanics. And third: because the theory itself is young, only about forty years old, and there isn't a complete consensus among professional physicists yet on how to interpret it.

That said, the math predicts experimental results with incredible precision, and this description, unlike the quantum mechanics I've studied up until now, is consistent with our other knowledge of physics, with the theory of electromagnetism and relativity.

Here are the assumptions you have to make to get a working theory: 1. The particles of which everything is made behave, in many ways, like waves. 2. If you insist on thinking about particles instead of waves, you'll find some paradoxical properties, such as the idea that a particle which has a definite momentum does not have a definite location. Note: I didn't say that we can't know its location. I said it doesn't have one. 3. Time is a dimension almost exactly like length, width, and depth. It helps to think of "later" as "over there."

Now I'm going to explain these ideas further, but please understand that these are assumptions, not conclusions. It is not true that modern physics "proves" any of this. But if you make these assumptions, you can develop a theory of how particles interact which exactly matches, in every experiment to date (and there have been a lot of them, in those giant expensive particle accelerators) the way particles do interact. It is very possible that another description would match these results equally well, but we haven't found one yet (though some candidates -- incorporating large parts of Quantum Field Theory -- do exist.)

Okay, so what do I mean by that assumption number one? In what ways are particles like waves?

When waves encounter an obstacle, they spread out around it. (Imagine a box sitting in a pool, and ripples reflecting off of it in wide arcs.) Particles do something similar. If a beam of electrons encounters an obstacle, they too will spread out in different directions. Contrast this with billiard balls. If I send a bunch of billiard balls one at a time, from the same direction and the same speed toward some box, I expect them all to bounce off at the same angle. Electrons do no behave like billiard balls in these experiments. They also diffract around edges (billiard balls don't turn corners) and even show effects that are analogous to rainbows. Then too, like waves on Lake Michigan (I've watched them) and like light and sound waves, beams of electrons can interfere with each other, cancelling out in some places, and adding up in others (where electrons add up you get extra bright spots on your screen. Where water waves do, tall peaks and low troughs. Where sound waves do, loud noise, Etc.)

So why don't we just give up and talk about waves all the time, without ever mentioning particles? The fact is that both a beam of electrons and a beam of light are detected as a series of discrete collisions. Click, click, click, goes you photon detector or Geiger counter, one click at a time, whenever you shine your beam at it. (Photons are what we call the "particles" of light, the individual clicks on our devices.) You find charge and energy only in discrete lumps, whenever you go to measure it. So both electrons and light move like waves, but look like billiard balls, to our instruments.

The way physicists handle this is to say that the wave tells us something about the probability of detecting a particle. The bigger the waves at any given point in space and time, the more likely a detector located there is to go "click." So in the areas where the hypothetical waves add up to bigger waves, in these interference experiments, I detect lots of particles. That's my bright stripe of electrons or photons. In the places where the waves cancel out, I detect no particles.

Okay, now about that second assumption. That's called the "uncertainty principle." There's actually a couple of variations on it. The one I quoted, about a particle not having definite location and a definite momentum at the same time, is the most famous. It's experimentally testable -- just try measuring the positions of a beam of particles whose momentum you know, or the momenta of particles you've got trapped in a specific place. You'll find that under identical circumstances you get different results.

In fact, this is not nearly so confusing if you think about waves. A perfect wave repeats itself forever and ever at a uniform wavelength, so it doesn't really have a location. Everywhere looks just like everywhere else. By contrast if you have a single blip, where the water splashed up into one little peak, I can talk about the location, but not, really, about the wavelength. In traditional quantum mechanics, the wavelength tells you the momentum, so saying you can't know the momentum and the position at the same time, is just saying something obvious about waves.

Now picture a barrel full of water. Drop stones in the exact center of the barrel, and you may be able to create a circular wave pattern that holds its shape. The ripples spread out in circles, hit the circular wall of the barrel, reflect back as shrinking circles, and, if the wavelength is just right so that the reflections overlap the original waves, you get what's called a "standing wave pattern." It only works if the wavelength is just right, though, and the stones hit right in the center. This kind of pattern looks a little bit like the blip (it never spreads out past hte barrel) and a little like long train of incoming waves. I can talk about both its location and its wavelength, although both are a little ambiguous. And this kind of wave can persist, can hold its shape, but only if it's the right size to "fit" in the barrel. (For a simpler example of what I mean here, try drawing a box on your computer's paint program, and then drawing a wave with equally spaced crests inside it, that has a crest at both edges. You'll find that you have to get the spacing of the crests just right.)

It's waves that "fit" -- which look a little like blips and a little like wave-trains, which persist only if they have a certain shape and size -- which we actually see in real life. They're the ones that last long enough for us to see. The shape of these waves determines their energies, and only certain shapes, certain energies, are allowed.

When we try to measure the energies of electrons in real life situations, we don't get any old number. Over and over again, we find only the same discrete values -- the ones corresponding to those states that "fit" in our boundaries for the experiment. I'm talking experiment now, not theory. The same values over and over again. The theory is just our best guess as to why that would be. It all has to do with the fact that whether a wave-shape sticks around depends on its wavelength as well as where it start spreading out from.

All of this is ordinary quantum mechanics. It describes my electron (or whatever) as a probability wave, and tells me that I'm only going to get certain values for the energy.

What quantum field theory does, then, is try to explain why I should only get certain values for the number of electrons. In other words, if these thigns move like waves, why should my detector go click click click? Why do I never see half an electron? Why do I never see anything with half the electron's charge?

What if, says QFT, the wavefunction didn't describe that probability on a scale from zero to 100%. What if it described the strength of some field at that point in space and time. What if (for a specific wavelength) the bigger the field, the more particles I am likely to find at that point in space. In that case, for small energies, it still tells me the chaces of finding a particle here, but for large energies it tells me I might find more than one.

In other words, whether I detect a particle at some location does depends on the strength and shape of the field, but the field is more than just a probability function. For low energies, it doesn't matter; the effect is the same. But for high energies, I would seem to get particles popping out of nowhere. The idea here is that what actually exists is the field, not the particle. The particle is nothing but a click on my detector, the likelyhood of which depends on the field that exists.

But why should I get clicks at all? Wasn't that the question? If it's fields that are real, why do my instruments seem to see particles? Okay, and here's where it gets weird...

What if that field didn't have a specific value, the way a single blip on the water has a single location, or have a regular rate of change, the way a train of waves headed towards the beach has a specific wavelength... What if the charge, or whatever it is that my detector detects, depends on both so that only certain values "fit"? The way only certain shapes fit into my barrel. Those shapes didn't have a specific location or specific wavelength. They were spread out over a whole range of locations, with different wavelengths. In quantum field theory, my field doesn't have a specific value or rate of change, but a whole range of them.

So what I end up with, in effect, is like a probability function for a probability function. I look at one point in space and time, and I make a graph of how likely it is to have a field of a certain size, and that graph, of probability as a function of field strength, looks like some kind of wave. Only certain wave-shapes fit the boundaries that I draw, and those wave shapes correspond to the incidents where I detect a single particle at that location, or two particles, or three, or... Well, you get the idea.

It's a pretty big idea. When I discover an electron, the field doesn't have a single value but a range of possible values, a special wave-shaped range. If you like, you can picture a wave with a blurry edge, like the one below. That's what I'm picturing.



These are the things that are real, supposedly. At least, a theory describing these things predicts exactly what really happens, stuff that moves like waves but registers in our detectors like particles, predicts the results of experiments to an accuracy that is, as my professor likes to say, the same as giving the distance between New York and LA to within the width of a single human hair. (I didn't give him enough credit in my previous posts. He's a good professor, and he was trying. He just doesn't think about things in the same way as I like to.)

So that it...

Oh, but wait. You wanted to know about that "time is a direction" stuff. Well, actually that's not so much quantum field theory as relativity. But, as I mentioned at the beginning, quantum field theory (unlike old fashioned quantum theory) is consistent with relativity. Mainly in that it treats mass as a kind of energy (and even shows that mass can be "created" from energy, if you want to think about the probability of measuring more particles when the energy is bigger in that way) and treats time as a direction. So basically instead of having six directions to go (up down, forward backward, and left right) these waves actually have eight. When they scatter, there's a chance they will scatter "backwards in time." Now this sounds strange and spooky, but 1) mathematically it is mundane. A function of time is no different from a function of x or y or z, and I can graph them in just the same way and 2) the only implication it has for the real world of experiments, is that it means we should sometimes see particles which look just like our normal electrons and so on, but with the opposite charge, and a couple of other reversed properties. All we see in the lab is an "anti-particle" going forwards in time -- the two are equivalent. The only reason you might want to use this backwards-in-time description at all, is in describing what happens when a particle and an antiparticle occupy the same place at the same time. They "annhilate." At later points in time, neither one of them exists. They don't scatter off into any of our detectors. This spooky experimental fact actually seems less spooky of you think instead of a guy in a movie, getting into a time machine and going back. He vanishes, but at an earlier point in time there are two of him... Similarly you might think of someone from the future coming back to our time, which happens to be just before his own birth... In the future, there are two of him... (this is equivalent to the kind of particle creation I described earlier.) And if all of this seems far fetched, please remember that anti-particles are routinely observed in the lab (having been predicted by an early form of QFT) and that they experimentally can be created and annhilated. It's the universe that's far-fetched, and the theory faithfully describes it. If thinking about time travel gives you a headache, join the club. But take comfort in the fact that this mathematical description still says causes have to precede effects, and no paradoxes are possible (this is guarenteed by the fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but don't ask me how, exactly.)


You don't have to believe it. We'll probably come up with something that works even better, eventually. But considering the paradoxical experimental results that it had to explain, this one works amazingly well. Anyway, that's my understanding of quantum field theory, after a one quarter course on the subject. Considering how badly I did on the homework, you should take this with heaping spoonfuls of salt. Not only might the theory be wrong, but I might very easily be misunderstanding huge parts of the theory. But if you promise not to consider me an expert, I do like sharing my interpretations.

Fun With Marketing

Got something to sell? Want to advertise to your neighbors? Or just judge them by their purchases? Find out what kind of stuff they like to buy:

Demographics by zipcode

Isn't it handy that people can be so neatly divided into categories? Check out the full list, and find the stereotype that fits you best:

PRIZM

(both links via Making Light, a long time ago.)

But perhaps you're too busy to mess with door-to-door, or direct mail. Perhaps you'd prefer the convenience of bulk e-mail. In that case, you're going to need some names to put in the "from" lines:

Random Name Generator

(via Electron Blue, where there's an interesting article about it.)

Or perhaps you'll call people up during the dinner hour? Whether you do that or take the spam route, you'll want to give people a way to call you back to place their orders:

What does your phone number spell?

(via Ken, who is already brilliantly marketed. [the Harley Davidson guy at the bottom of the page is the best likeness.])

On the other hand, maybe you'd better go with something a little more cutting edge. Like viral marketing -- the flu's a big fad this season. Everyone's getting it, and it comes in a fetching green. (via someone on AFP.)

Thanksgiving

I'm thankful for:


The beer our landlord left for us as a reward for keeping the house nice.

The great dinner we had at Ken's dad's house last night, especially the delicious cherries and chocolate dessert his step-mom made. And for the opportunity to play with his little sisters. I miss babysitting.

The snow. And the forest preserve by Ken's apartment, which glittered yesterday.

The fact that Jewel Osco is right across the street, and offers thirty minute photo developing.

The Afghan restaurant on Devon, that left a menu on my doorstep this morning, and provides free delivery.

The cell phone my dad still pays for, which allowed me to talk to him, and my mom, and my brother, and my sister, and my grandpa, and my aunt-Mary, and my cousin (in a complicated way) Lynette, before they sat down for Thanksgiving dinner.

The fact that the circus is coming to town! We're going to try to go this weekend.

The blankets my mom bought me when she visited. My room is freezing.

The four day weekend, and the end of the academic quarter.

The public library, high speed internet, the Chicago Tribune, and CLTV.

Christmas lights.

My mom and dad, my sister and brother, all my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, and the new family I'm going to be getting, and the man I'm going to marry.

November Poem

Has it been a week? But I've got three or four posts I'd like to put up, only I have the links bookmarked on a different computer for one of them, and I don't want to write the QFT one until the quarter's over, and I don't quite know what to say in the last, which was going to be about how it feels to be running out of classes to take. (It's a funny feeling.)

So for now I'll just do the easy thing and choose a poem for November. I find I'm in the mood for Browning, and for something sort of sad...

Youth and Art
by Robert Browning

It once might have been, once only:
We lodged in a street together,
You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,
I, a lone she-bird of his feather.

Your trade was with sticks and clay,
You thumbed, thrust, patted and polished,
Then laughed "They will see some day
Smith made, and Gibson demolished."

My business was song, song, song;
I chirped, cheeped, trilled and twittered,
"Kate Brown's on the boards ere long,
And Grisi's existence embittered!"

I earned no more by a warble
Than you by a sketch in plaster;
You wanted a piece of marble,
I needed a music-master.

We studied hard in our styles,
Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos,
For air looked out on the tiles,
For fun watched each other's windows.

You lounged, like a boy of the South,
Cap and blouse--nay, a bit of beard too;
Or you got it, rubbing your mouth
With fingers the clay adhered to.

And I--soon managed to find
Weak points in the flower-fence facing,
Was forced to put up a blind
And be safe in my corset-lacing.

No harm! It was not my fault
If you never turned your eye's tail up
As I shook upon E in alt,
Or ran the chromatic scale up:

For spring bade the sparrows pair,
And the boys and girls gave guesses,
And stalls in our street looked rare
With bulrush and watercresses.

Why did not you pinch a flower
In a pellet of clay and fling it?
Why did not I put a power
Of thanks in a look, or sing it?

I did look, sharp as a lynx,
(And yet the memory rankles,)
When models arrived, some minx
Tripped up-stairs, she and her ankles.

But I think I gave you as good!
"That foreign fellow,--who can know
How she pays, in a playful mood,
For his tuning her that piano?"

Could you say so, and never say
"Suppose we join hands and fortunes,
And I fetch her from over the way,
Her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes?"

No, no: you would not be rash,
Nor I rasher and something over:
You've to settle yet Gibson's hash,
And Grisi yet lives in clover.

But you meet the Prince at the Board,
I'm queen myself at bals-paré,
I've married a rich old lord,
And you're dubbed knight and an R.A.

Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy.

And nobody calls you a dunce,
And people suppose me clever:
This could but have happened once,
And we missed it, lost it for ever.

Wish List

What do I want for Christmas? An end to hunger and injustice and indignity, and while you're out, peace on earth and good will toward all.

Thanks to the Hunger Site, it's occured to me that you can buy me some of that and some nifty playthings at the same time. The Hunger Site works by donating food (a little more than a cup of rice or wheat) to charity, for every day you look at their ads. They've been my homepage for a long time now, so I've seen a lot of their ads, and I want some of this stuff. For each of these items that you buy, you donate another fifty cups or so of food, and help keep the Hunger Site in business as well.

So you get that good feeling, along with the neat stuff, like recycled silk scarves, gloves, shoulder bags, and throw rugs. Or wooden Jacaranda hand-turned bowls, salad sets, and birch bark boxs (I like the oval one).

Those links just go to pictures. I can't figure out how to link directly to the catalog descriptions, so you'll just have to go to the store and search, I guess.

I'd rather have practical stuff than decorative stuff (I'm looking forward to a tiny but empty apartment in not so many months...) The Hunger Site is, unfortunately, a little short of that. As are Oxfam and Ten Thousand Villages even though I like their stuff as well, and they too offer the "good deed with every purchase" deal. (They also don't seem to have online catalogs, so you have to find a physical store.) But I figure someone must be selling dishes and blankets, so I searched a little and found that the Fair Trade Federation has a whole list of fair trade importers with online catalogs. (The one that I linked from the word "dishes" up there, "A Greater Gift," has a particularly large selection.)

This way you can get people unique, handmade, practical gifts, and also help people in third world countries support themselves. This is a longer term solution than mere donations. These countries need something they can sell to the west for a fair price, and handicrafts -- time and labor intesive -- could become a major export. Because if there's anything third world countries have, it's a labor force with time on its hands.

Buy this stuff, make a market for it. Most of these people would like nothing better than to earn their own living by working hard, taking pride in their craftsmanship. Start your Christmas shopping now, and make the world a better place.