Break On Through To the Other Side

I was reminded to share this page in light of some recent conversations elsewhere. I would also encourage interested readers to check out the rest of Prof. Sethna's web site - there's a whole lot of great material on numerous interesting topics in physics and "complex systems," as well as what seems to be a nice, modern introduction to statistical mechanics for a wider audience than for whom most texts are intended. (I've only skimmed over it here and there so far - your mileage may vary.) Disclaimer - I am not affiliated with the lab. In fact, my only affiliation with Cornell is that I once dated a girl who lived in Ithaca, and her father worked at the university. Heh.

I will say that many physicists I've known - at least publicly - aren't convinced that they are after finding 3 laws to explain 99% of the behavior in the known universe. Most have far less ambitious goals (like being able to explain superconductivity for non-BCS systems), although I suppose this is their PR problem - they clearly need more Philip Andersons and Robert Laughlins to champion what most physicists are actually interested in, and not just what the very prolific high energy theorists and astrophysicists are putting on the book shelves. Of course, it's not to say that there can't be some excellent synergy going on - there's plenty of fundamental physics going on at neutron sources worldwide, and many groups are interested in using the tools of AMO physics as increasingly powerful probes of fundamental physics.

We can all recount anecdotes from our personal experiences - I met a bio grad student who clearly thought of their project in terms of cartoon diagrams without a number or semi-quantitative thought in mind, the theoretical physicist who thought that explaining his ideas to the experimentalists (or anyone who wasn't actually a frustrated mathematician) was the role of the phenomenology folks, and the chemists who complain about lack of rigor yet still seem desperate to explain everything in terms a first-year chemistry student would recognize. What we should focus on is trying to understand what is useful in such diverse approaches and work from there.

Biophysical chemists such as myself do not suffer from such faults, as we have all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses. We're also very modest. :) Read more!

A Modest Update

Point the first -

- It was remarked to me that my occasional overindulgence for parenthetical remarks in my writing suggests that I am secretly a Lisp programmer at heart. I snickered. It does look like an interesting language to learn, though…

Point the second -

- I was reminded of a thoroughly snarky point I had made to some friends a while back. String theory (or whatever your preferred scheme for quantizing gravity and unifying the fundamental forces) can explain physics. But the really interesting stuff will require using physics to explain the laundry list of actual phenomenona that we have on our platter. So learn your statistical mechanics, as you can then do everything from analyze (to one degree or another) magnetic samples, ion channel clusters in membranes, and socioeconomic behavior.

So love your stat mech and cherish the partition function!

Point the third -

- A recent blog post over at Just Like Cooking sparked a comment, harkening back to a brief digression elsewhere last year. I was of course led astray for a bit, and dug up some earlier papers on the topic. Not that my to-do list is by any means feeling underweight, but I feel it could be edifying (and potentially interesting) to try and work through the idea in a manner that would be fairly accessible to a (more) general audience. So less "death by Hamiltonian," and more "spiced up with Hamiltonians," if one will permit that metaphor. Read more!