Collaborate? Sure

As I am sure I’ve mentioned before, I do a lot of my physics collaboratively and a lot of this is remote collaborations. It’s critical to my being able to do research — otherwise I would feel very isolated here in Northfield. For those who don’t know, Carleton College has a very small number of people on the faculty, and only undergraduate students, which means that it is the antithesis of the big productive research factories where most faculty members got their Ph.D.

My colleagues not in the sciences find it fascinating that we have collaborative work at all. It’s easy to explain why experimentalists, particularly ‘big-science’ experimentalists, need collaborations. Certainly all of the very few single-author papers you still see in the literature are theoretical (I can’t remember the last time I saw a single-author experimental paper, unless it was a review of some sort). But why do theorists work in teams? And relevant to being at a small college (and hence making this an Anacapist post): How does one create and sustain collaborations (particularly remote ones), and what does one mean about the nature of my work?

So I’ve been musing about collaborations, and this is the first post that results

There’s an interesting tension in general between solo, focused, theoretical work (and boy can this be intense and focused, see Dave Bacon’s commentary on the comparison between theoretical scientists and Tiger Woods for example) and the wide-ranging, free-wheeling, and extended discussions that characterize a good Gordon conference or a KITP workshop (see the latest KITP newsletter for a discussion about how the KITP mode of doing science is beneficial).  Clearly some people prefer one mode and some the other.

In my case, as I find my time more sliced up by teaching, administrivia, life (especially post-parenthood), it has become harder impossible to sustain the kind of day-and-night-long sustained bits of effort that I used to periodically pull off in graduate school and as a post-doc. Not that this was always some remarkable push through new intellectual territory and not that all these pushes were useful — there were, and there remain, as many trips down intellectual blind alleys as needed to find the clear path. But still, I could do it: Survive on coffee and whatever snacks I had at hand until I was ready to get up from my desk, even if it was 12 hours after I sat down. But now responsibilities make sure that even if I do have that kind of time available, I don’t have it in one sustained chunk.

As I find myself bouncing from project to project, I wonder if I have changed irrevocably and can never do solo work again. My research is starting to look like my life, in short: Many things vying for my attention, and one has to parallel-process (or compartmentalize or whatever). To give you an idea, currently in rotation: (1) With Bala and Drew, on persistent patterns, (2) With Arik on quantum state diffusion and anomalous chaos, (3) With Nathan, continuing work on scaling in the quantum-classical transition for a decoherent chaotic system that I started with Arnaldo.

I also have two rising seniors working with me this summer, Bob and Chris, who are looking at sub-projects that relate to the project with Arik. I have on the back-burner my work with Anatole on ratchets, and hell, probably multiple postponed conversations with friends I need to pick up and keep moving.

The good part is, collaborative work can be innovative and definitely more than the sum of its parts (this is perhaps a good time to refer you back to a recent note on how humans problem-solve). The bad part is, I am not sure it is always good to have to keep re-orienting myself every time I dive back into a problem.

I could argue that given that I have only short chunks of time, it doesn’t matter what I work on in that time — I am always ‘restarting’ something when I return to it, and it might as well be something new. It certainly allows me to never feel completely stuck on a problem. When I get very frustrated with one of the projects, I dive into one of the others. But there is clearly some sort of cut-off point for having too many projects going, and I think I’ve hit that limit.

Sometime soon, musings on (1) What exactly is it that I *do* in one of these collaborative projects? And (2) How do different personalities affect the way a project works? And so on ….

Our life is not a movie or maybe

This is mostly to serve as a pointer to an essay by Philip Ball about an article in Nature about human mobility patterns. Ball quotes John Stuart Mill:

“Events which in their own nature appear most capricious and uncertain and which in any individual case no attainable degree of knowledge would enable us to foresee, occur, when considerable numbers are taken into account, with a degree of regularity approaching to mathematical.”

And takes it from there. It’s one of the consistent themes running through my intellectual life, and this blog, of course: That statistical thinking helps make sense of complicated confusing contingent phenomena. I’ve been fascinated by that idea since I was a kid. I remember heated discussions with my father after reading Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ trilogy about the possibility of ‘predicting’ human social futures (or psychohistory, a la Hari Seldon) — which he put down to my even-then-obvious bias towards ‘scientism‘. I get a great deal of satisfaction, even now, from seeing patterns at the macroscopic level arising from averaging over microscopic idiosyncrasies.

When we use the term ’statistical’, we do not mean that everything is random or that it all relaxes to a Bell curve. The probability distributions that emerge when complicated nonlinear interactions and dynamics are at play in non-equilibrium phenomena can be heavily influenced by a few events and can lead to extremely counter-intuitive phenomena. Consider Levy flights, for example — these show up not only in particle dynamics in Harry Swinney’s lab, on Wall Street, but also form the basis of extremely effective atomic cooling techniques.

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” — Muriel Rukeyser. With all due respect to the spirit of that statement, the universe is made of stories, by atoms, about atoms. And atoms behave statistically.

The Anacapa Society website goes live

I’ve mentioned before my role in the Anacapa Society (for the promotion of theoretical physics at PUIs — primarily undergraduate institutions). Our website went live a couple of days ago, hosted by the good forward-thinking folks at Amherst College. Below is a note from Don Spector about it.

If you are a potential Anacapist and haven’t signed up for our society yet, please do. It’s free, and has already proved to be a really good resource network. More information at the website, of course.

—
Anacapa members,

Much has been going on recently, and we have two important new developments to share with you.

First, and most important: We have a brand new web site, located at http://anacapasociety.org. The very first thing to do — maybe even before you finish reading this email! — is to go to the new web site and register.

The web site will be the new home base for announcements, discussions, and all other Anacapa activities.

Three important reasons to sign up are:

(1) Only members can access the forums, and there will be additional content only available to members

(2) The membership list will eventually become part of the searchable database to find collaborators, outside reviewers, etc.

(3) As everything gets consolidated into the new web site, the googlegroups mailing list will be phased out, and the Anacapa website registry will replace it as the tool for staying in touch.

And big, big thanks to Courtney Lannert for spearheading the new web site; to David Craig and Will Loinaz for their important assistance in helping get this completed; and to Howard Hanna and others from the Amherst IT department who helped design and implement the new site.

Second, and quite exciting: The Anacapa Society’s first grant proposal, submitted last September, has been funded by the NSF. Want more information on this? Go the web site (http://anacapasociety.org) and follow the links for news!

But now, if you haven’t done so already, go register at http://anacapasociety.org. Also, a tip: we suggest that you use your actual first and last names as your username (e.g., “Anna Kappa”), because that is how you will be identified in any forum posts or article comments you make. (The forums and comments will only be viewable by logged-in members.)

We look forward to more developments in the coming months.

–Don Spector, for the Anacapa Society Board

***************************************************************
Donald Spector, Moorad Professor of Science
Chair, Department of Physics
Coordinator, Engineering Program
Hobart & William Smith Colleges

What say we ask PRL or AJP for a music review section for real?

Selections from the forthcoming Quantum Aesthetics: The Best of the American Journal of Physics’ Music Review Section. (h/t Gaetan Damberg-Ott)

And don’t forget the letters in response (look for the ones by Adam Jensen and Mike Hicks).

How do I spend my time?

School’s out. That is, classes are done, grades are due shortly, commencement is this Saturday, and we’re chilling out on vacation. Right? Hah.

There is a discernible difference in how term time goes compared to how the summer or breaks go, but work continues. Mostly for my own edification (one reason I started this blog was to keep track of where I was spending my energies so I could manage things better), here’s my estimate of where time went this particular term:

When I was teaching 3 courses (and the senior integrative exercise or ‘comps‘): 33 — 36 hours a week on teaching (contact, prep, and grading) — but only on average. Grading makes that fluctuate tremendously. This dropped hugely when I went down to 1 course for the second half of the term (we teach 6 courses a year, 2 during every 10-week term at Carleton; my schedule split Spring Term into an insane half and a relaxed half by virtue of our 5-week courses).

College-and-department-related administration and engagement (this includes advising, college-wide committees, departmental responsibilities including searches for visiting faculty, etc, signing off on various expense reports and logs that I have to verify, lunch meetings devoted to pedagogy or presentations by colleagues on their scholarship, for example, semi-formal socializing with visitors, with students, staff, and colleagues): 4 -8 hours a week.

CISMI-related administration issues: 2 - 10 hours a week. This fluctuates hugely, again, depending on whether a proposal or reporting deadline is headed down the pipeline or not, for example.

Research:

The very least I do every week, no matter how badly I am drowning: scan the daily abstracts from arxiv.org (restricting myself to quant-ph and nlin, though I do subscribe to cond-mat as well, but that last is a true high-level scan more at the level of paper titles than abstracts, honestly). I also get the Table of Contents emailed to me from PRL (weekly), PRA, and PRE (monthly), Physica A and D, and a bunch of IOP journals (J. Phys. A., J. Phys. B, Nonlinearity) as well as Nature and Science. I would say I look at the text of 10 papers a week beyond the abstracts, and download and print a smaller subset. So let’s say that’s another 3-5 hours or so weekly just staying abreast/staying afloat of what’s current. Oh, and reading some physics blogs (I do it through Jacques Distler’s Planet Musings, mostly). Another hour or two meeting with research students. An average of an hour a week on being a Referee (big fluctuations on that, of course).

You can do the addition as well as I do. ‘Research’ the way I understood it as a graduate student and post-doc: Discussions with collaborators, or an analytical calculation, or coding something for the computer, or running simulations, or analyzing the runs, or writing (I once heard Sir Michael Berry of ‘Berry’s phase’ fame give a talk at UT-Austin, dressed in one of his trademark tie-dye shirts, looking for all the world like a Deadhead, and someone asked him if he’d written up the result he was talking about, and he said, ‘Well, I’ve written it down, but I haven’t written it up’. I liked that quick way of summarizing the difference between knowing something well enough for yourself versus the attempt to frame it more formally for an audience), or rebutting a referee, or whatever, came above and beyond the standard 40 hours a week during those insane first five weeks of Spring Term. And honestly, during a typical 2-course term as well.

It’s a good thing I love my job so much.

(And yeah, some time spent on this blog as well. That there are periods of dead silence here may not be that surprising, then, eh?)

Randomness and quotations — I like this meme

I picked this meme up from Chad.

The four quotes below showed up at the bottom of the list when I used the random quote generator that Chad references.

They seem to apply aptly to my life at the moment, as I am sure I would find if I generated another set of random quotes some other day in the future. Another little piece of anecdotal evidence in my theory about statistical mechanics and stories. Randomness, as always, delivers.

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives. William Dement

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk? Laurence J. Peter

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact. Jean-Paul Sartre

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.Franklin D. Roosevelt , radio address, Oct. 26, 1939

The memory of persistence

Now that my school year is winding down somewhat, I have been turning back to research issues. One project that has been moving slowly for me is on so-called “persistent patterns”.

These arise in situations where you’ve got chaotic dynamics interacting with some sort of noise or diffusive behavior, with applications ranging from chemical reactors to ocean modeling. Think about putting cream in coffee: As you stir, you get tendrils growing out of the original blob, and combined with the diffusion, this results in a homogeneous mixture very soon. You would think that if the stirring dynamics was chaotic, the mixing would go even more efficiently and quickly — and this is often true.

However,  work over the last decade or so, both theoretical and experimental (see the superb work by Jerry Gollub’s group, for example), shows that it is not always true: In certain incompressible time-periodic fluid flows long-lived patterns emerge. Once these patterns emerge, the mixing process is completely determined by the rates imposed by the slowest decaying structures. Basically, these patterns show up that hang around effectively forever.

Getting a little technical, these persistent regions of high concentration of the passive scalar have been shown to be associated with the stable and unstable manifolds of the underlying chaotic dynamics. But we are far from figuring out the conditions for their emergence and other details about their properties.

I’ve been trying to understand this on and off for years, and there’s a current preprint with my friends Bala Sundaram and Drew Poje where I think we’ve nailed down some critical issues. Almost. Sigh.

Why would someone interested in quantum mechanics and the quantum-classical transition and decoherence care about fluid mixing? It turns out that the behavior of these fluids in real space is identical to that of the phase-space behavior of classical probability densities in Hamiltonian systems with added noise. So understanding the behavior of these fluid dynamics systems is a way of building intuition about the classical limit of the quantum systems I have been thinking about for years. Which is how I got into this problem. And it’s an excellent mathematical physics problem in its own right — with experimental tests of claims available through ‘table-top’ experiments. Wonderful.

Now if we could only finish the last couple of things we need to …

How many hours does it take?

I had a recent conversation with Christopher, who is from the part of campus that figures out where the money is for academics to use, and helps us get it. We were talking about a bunch of things, and in the middle of all this came up the notion of trying to figure out the number of hours it takes to ‘produce’ results in my line of work, whether student hours, or my own hours.  That is, if we insist on being all corporate, what’s your guess for the billable hours for a research ‘product’?

I threw out a ballpark guess of about 1000 hours to ‘results’ and probably another couple of hundred to manuscript. (See, that works out to about 4 months of focused non-stop work on one project for the results and a few more weeks on the manuscript. There have been stages in my life where that kind of work yielded absolutely nothing, and others where I got a bunch of papers out suddenly, so I am seriously smoothing the fluctuations, but that does seem in the right ballpark).

So let’s say 1000 hours of my work. How about student work, say on a project supervised by me, but where I am not doing any of the ‘calculations’? What’s the multiplier? 2, 3, 4 ? Hard to tell. Summer research is about 400 hours worth of pay to students. I ask all of them to spend time with me before the summer and say that I expect them to return after the summer because that increases the chances that we’ll actually finish the project. Painful experience tells me that this is still too little — I would barely get 500 or so student work hours out of that arrangement, so I have to put the rest of the time in myself, or else distribute the project over multiple students and multiple years.

Looking back on my recent papers, including those with students, I would say I have the order of magnitude about right.

So. What’s the point?

Well, sigh. I guess this blog post is basically a reminder to self to be patient. Results take time. Papers take time. Publishing takes time. Referees are guaranteed to raise objections you thought you’d cleverly anticipated and responded to in the very first paragraph of your paper. Two steps forward and one step back is standard operating procedure. Getting stuck just as you thought you were done is typical. And not to reiterate the obvious, but the way to keep going is not because of the results but because you enjoy the process itself (well, most of it :-)).

Procedural, analytical, relational, innovative

Spring pause today, and I’m enjoying reading and writing while skilfully procrastinating dealing with grading today. An article that caught my eye, and that I almost put in the comments section to my previous post on lessons learned/things to remember for my write-up on my attempt to re-vamp intro mechanics, triggered this particular post.

This is from the New York Times, and it’s about learning new habits. It’s a short article, so I won’t bother summarizing here, but a couple of interesting points:

“Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively. At puberty, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.

The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us inherently use our innovative and collaborative modes of thought.”

Hah. No kidding. I think the students in intro physics/intro mechanics have a hard time getting from procedural to analytical in the first place. That is, they expect physics to be about a certain set of equations, and also expect that I will tell them which equations to use. When confronted by the fact that a typical physics assignment requires analytical AND procedural abilities, they get slightly shaken. But these are Carleton students, so they get over that. However, when confronted by the need for relational work (’group’ problem-solving) and innovation (’ask a question, and answer it’ — part of my instructions for the last lab they did) they are palpably out of their comfort zone.

The articles goes on to say that in new experiences, there are “three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress. Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs.”

The trick, therefore, is to stretch these minds without stressing them. Sigh.

Where did the weirdness go?

Nature just featured an excellent article on “one of the great conundrums of modern physics: the quantum–classical transition” by Philip Ball, at the semi-popular level, talking about the mystery of where and how weird quantum mechanical effects go — that is, why we know they exist, but don’t see them in daily life.

Most of my work is concerned with some aspects of this, and when I try to explain this to my research students, I talk about it as follows: If atoms are quantal, and we are made of atoms, why don’t we behave quantum mechanically? And if it’s a matter of size or complexity (nonlinearity of the system concerned) or temperature and influence of the environment on the system (as is believed) then how and when does the change from quantum mechanics to classical mechanics happen as a function of these properties? Is the change smooth or abrupt — that is, do we go from very quantal to somewhat quantal (and what does that look like?) to classical, or does it go from quantum-classical immediately? Is the transition monotonic — that is, do we only go from quantum to less quantum as we change parameters in one direction, or do you have regions of more quantum-ness and less quantum-ness? How does the quantum dynamics reflect behavior in the classical dynamics? Etc. (Some more discussion of these issues is on my research web-page.)

These are entirely fascinating questions as fundamental physics, but quantum effects are not only cool, they are impressively powerful, and very useful sometimes, so the practical question is: where can we find them?

As a theorist, I wonder about right measure of quantum-ness: How quantum is a given state? How do you measure the difference between a classical distribution and a quantum distribution? I’d like to be able to discuss all this in some sort of abstract way so I can understand the topology, the geography, really, of the quantum-classical boundary. And of course, if I do find an effect, how do I translate this into something an experimentalist might measure?

As the school year heads into the home stretch, I’m getting excited again about getting some uninterrupted (well, relatively uninterrupted, let’s be honest) time to make some progress on these questions again. It’s been a long and complicated year, and I’m looking forward to the comfort and joy (and pain, yes, and pain) of grappling with some of these intriguing questions with more focus soon.