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I finally got my McCain/Palin yard sign. As most of you know I am really into politics, and like to follow and be informed about the current events as much as possible. Unfortunately, not being a US citizen I am unable to actively participate in elections, nor even give campaign contributions to the candidates that I support. So I have rather limited options in making my political views known and make an influence on others. This year I was finally able to acquire a campaign yard sign, and in this small way I hope to express my support and solidarity with that presidential ticket.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I have written about the start of operations on the Large Hadron Collider (AKA The Big Bang Machine, AKA The Black Hole Machine.) It turns out that during the test run some of the components got fried, and the machine was rendered nonoperational. In order to fix it, it is necessary to warm it up from the temperatures close to the absolute zero to the room temperature. When I was an undergraduate I worked in ultra-low-temperature lab. The grad students who were running the experiments would not be too thrilled when they would discover a problem while the experiment is cooled down, because warming everything up and checking and double checking for all the problems required many months of work, and meant that the Ph.D. thesis would be delayed (yet again). So it doesn't come as any surprise to know that this latest problem with LHC will postpone the inevitable until at least the early Spring. Which is not all that great if you are a high energy physicist looking for some data to back up (or not) your favorite pet theory about how the world works. But if you believe that LHC will create a black hole that will eventually swallow up the Earth, then this gives you extra time to say the final good-byes to your loved ones.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the advantages of living in a college town is the opportunity of go to a talk by a distinguished or famous personality. More often than not, these talks and invited speakers are from a very left part of the spectrum, but it is nonetheless interesting to find out what these people have to say. If nothing else, it's good to know what your enemies are thinking. This past week I went to a couple of talks that were part of DePauw Discourse. The two talks that I had attended were by Lee Hamilton and Madeleine Albright. Madam Albright, a former secretary of state under President Clinton, was probably the highlight of the series, and sure enough she did not disappoint. Energetic and witty, it is easy to see why she would be a popular guest on college lecture series around the country. It is also easy to see that taking a class with her would indubitably be a lot of fun. I personally will always be grateful to her for the role she played in bringing down the regime of Slobodan Milošević and the work she did in resolving the issues in former Yugoslavia. However, her talk somehow confirmed my previous impression of her, and that is that she is more of an intellectual-academic type than a technocratic pragmatist. Most of her statements were very broad and I did not gain any more insight into the workings of a top-level diplomat than I would have from just following the news every day.

The pleasant surprise was Lee Hamilton. A '52 DePauw grad, he is probably one of the distinguished alumni that DePauw likes to flaunt around. However, he came across as anything but a bleeding heart liberal. Knowledgeable and pragmatic, it was very hard to argue against some of the points he made. One off-kilter MoveOn-type member of the audience asked him about prosecuting President Bush for the war crimes, and he would absolutely have nothing with that idea. In general, both Albright and Hamilton came across as much more moderate and reasonable than the predominantly liberal audience and some of the interviewers and presenters.

Lee Hamilton was interviewed by Bret Baier, another distinguished DePauw alum. Bret is a White House correspondent for Fox News. Bret works for Brit Hume, probably the most informative and incisive political analyst on TV these days. In his conduct and demeanor Bret came across as extremely professional and level-headed. Now that is the kind of alum that any school can rightly be proud of.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Early this morning Large Hadron Collider became operational at CERN in Switzerland. The run this morning was the test of the basic operation of the collider, with the real science part of the experiment to start in about a month. The collider will be operating at energies much higher than any previously achieved and promises to shed light on some very deep mysteries of Physics. However, the run-up to the experiment has been marred with a lot of controversy. Because the energy levels that the protons at LHC will be achieving have last been achieved at Big Bang, the whole endeavor came to be known as "Big Bang experiment." The whole connotation of that is quite ominous, and many people were quite concerned about what sort of catastrophe we may experience. To top it all, there have also been suggestions that the experiment would create tiny black holes that could quickly swallow up the Earth. None of this, I am happy to report, happened.

One of the interesting things to me is that most of the reports of the opposition to the experiment came from the pseudo-intellectual secularist quacks. Religious groups and individuals for most part either did not care about the hype or were hoping that the experiment may precipitate the end of the World and bring forth salvation for the right believers. In this matter at least, it was the loony atheists who were mostly "against science."

As a high energy Physicist (at least that's who I am most easily lumped with) I am really excited about this experiment. The whole field of particle and field theory Physics has laid fallow for many decades, and all the glittering ultra-(post)modern-theories have not penned out to bring us any closer to the fuller understanding of the fundamental laws of nature. LHC is bound to shake things up a bit. One of the hoped discoveries would be a Higgs boson, a particle that supposedly gives mass to all other particles. I have my doubts about this. I think that the Higgs mechanism is just an inelegant patchwork that helped us make the sense of the Standard Model, but it ultimately only amounts to exchanging one kind of unknowns for another. Hence, I am skeptical that Higgs bosons will be discovered as actual physical particles.

Even more exotic hoped for discoveries are super symmetry and extra dimensions. Both of these concepts came out of the attempts to go beyond the Standard Model, and neither one of them has had any shred of the evidence from the actual experiments. IMHO, the theories based on these two are also extremely ugly and unwieldy. My biggest hope is that the non-discovery of either one of the aforementioned effects and maybe the discovery of something completely unpredicted, would shake up the way that things are done in theoretical physics. It is high time to show, once and for all, that the emperor is not only naked, but stark raving mad.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 07:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Many, many years ago, when I was applying to colleges in the US one thing I knew was that I really wanted to study Physics, and hence I mostly applied to places with really strong Physics departments. At the time I was living in Rhode Island as an exchange student in high school, and was able to visit several of these really good research institutions on the East Coast. The only place that was not on the East Coast that I applied to was Stanford, and at the time there was not much of a chance of me visiting it. So when I got accepted there I was a bit unprepared and did not know much about the place. In fact, the only two things that I knew for sure were that it was in California and that it had SLAC, a world renowned high energy Physics laboratory where many of the discoveries relating to our understanding of the subatomic Physics have been made over the span of several decades.

Once I got to Stanford, however, I realized that SLAC is some distance away from the main campus. I quickly got overwhelmed with school work and other activities that kept me very busy throughout my undergraduate years, so it took me almost four years before I made the first real visit to SLAC. By then some of the youthful naiveté about Physics labs had faded away, and I did not have as much of unalloyed reverence for it. Most of the main big research and discoveries had been done by then, and the laboratory was trying to reinvent itself and to branch out into other areas of experimental Physics. Nonetheless, as a symbol of big science and exciting new discoveries in particle physics SLAC would definitely always be on my mind.

So in the light of all of that it came as a big shock to me and many others when it was recently announced that SLAC will be getting a new name. The reason is that SLAC was always technically owned by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and those guys recently went on a rampage with patenting all the names of the national labs. Since "S" in SLAC stands for Stanford, and Stanford doesn't like having its name used by someone else, this created a bit of a riff between the two parties, so now the change of the name seems inevitable. Which is rather unfortunate – it was the name that the laboratory was known for during its golden years, and had put Stanford on the map of high energy Physics. The change of name may hinder Stanford's ability to get its name across to prospective Physics majors from faraway places.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This past week has been my first full week of teaching at Wabash. So far it has been an overwhelmingly positive experience and I enjoy my new job a lot. Many people don't know this, and I delight in telling them, but Wabash is one of two or three remaining all-male colleges in the United States. Wabash is a place where word tradition has a lot of weight, and not going coeducational has been one of their salient points. For people for whom the whole concept of tradition is an anathema, this attitude can be very alien, but I personally don't have an issue with that. Initially it was a bit weird to walk into a large classroom filled exclusively with young men, but after only a short while you stop thinking about that. Students are just students, and your primary goal as a professor is to educate them to the best of your abilities, and under those circumstances the issues of sex, race and other demographical indicators quickly fade into the background.

Besides being very much into tradition, Wabash is actually a very libertarian place. There seems to be very little micromanagement of faculty and students. This may seem contradictory, but I've come to see that traditional values and individual freedoms are not contradictory. In fact, many social attitudes surveys do have these two sets of values mapped onto different dimensions. I personally thrive in that sort of environment. I think that I am qualified and competent enough to run my classes and my work to the best of my ability, and I appreciate when I am given the freedom and the responsibility to make those professional decisions on my own. A work environment that allows its employees to act along those lines also fosters the sense of trust and ownership over the institutional goals.

The only aspect of my new job that I had some misgivings about was the half an hour daily commute. However, with some strict discipline and careful planning, the time on the road and the drive itself don't seem to be presenting too much of a burden on me. I've gotten a few books on tape, but even on days that I don't listen to them the commute seems to pass by fairly quickly.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)