Daily Update Monday Oct. 13

1.     Daily Update Monday Oct. 13

a.     Woke up, breakfasted on peanut butter banana, then took physics test. It went fine—I answered all the questions and don’t think I missed any, but there were enough questions that my first pass over the questions left me with little time to blunder-check.

b.     Did hw with Eleanor, John.

c.      Went to Lunchbox Seminar. This time speaker was a young professor from Stanford by way of Cambridge and some other prestigious places. He discussed the connection of classical (Einstein, non-quantum) theories describing black holes to descriptions of systems involving strongly coupled interactions, specifically metals that don’t conduct normally. It was pretty intense, but here’s my “quick” breakdown:

                                                 i.     Electrons in conducting metals actually interact strongly with each other, but because all the momentum states available to the electrons in the metals are already filled, (Pauli exclusion principle dictates more than two electrons can’t occupy same state) the electrons can’t scatter into new states, so we can treat them as if they don’t interact significantly with each other and act as “billiard balls” influenced only by potential field.

                                               ii.     A specific class of metals that don’t conduct normally, when electrons are intentionally removed or added so that the electrons can move from state to state and interact with each other, offer such high resistivity to flow that the implication is that the mean path the electron can travel before hitting an obstruction is less than the “wavelength” that the electron has when considered as wave.

                                              iii.     I’m fuzzy on this, but these strong electron-electron attractions and the other quantum-dynamical effects having to do with wavelength > mean free path makes the interacting electrons a strongly coupled system.

                                              iv.     Which brings us to similarities with black holes, “strongly coupled systems”.

                                               v.     These respond to perturbations like normal thermodynamical systems do; by diffusing them across the entire black hole.

                                              vi.     Which leads to strong thermodynamical/entropy-related analogy where the black hole can be thought of as the strongly coupled equivalent of a normal thermodynamical system.

                                            vii.     Darn it, I guess I didn’t really understand it all that well. Bits and pieces. Later, at 4:00, I went to the full colloquium version of the talk (my physics professor was there, and we talked a little tiny bit about the research he was doing.

                                           viii.     At the colloquium, he talked about the characteristics of the weird metals a little more, showing how the conductivity of the metals with respect to temperature could be theoretically related to the black hole’s responses to perturbation with respect to the “temperature” of the black hole, (which is the energy that the “paired” particles it somehow quantum-dynamically emits). He discussed a peak in the conductivity function called the Drude (Drud-uh) peak, and described how quantities relating to the peak could be computed with the black-hole approach. He finished with a discussion of how the similarities in the metals’ conductivities could be the results of fundamental bounds on entropy and “viscosity”. Complicated.

                                              ix.     Just want to point out I’ve now heard from an experimenter and a theorist, and their perspectives on physics were wildly different. I think observing that split will be interesting.

d.     Went back to dorm, did a little hw, then went to CS class. Discussed complexity analysis and three algorithms for finding the subsequence with the maximum cumulative sum within an array of positive and negative integer values; the most efficient O(n) algorithm was very clever.

e.     Went to physics colloquium, described above.

f.      Intended to go to chess club, but randomly found Go club hanging out in the Society of Physics Students lounge. They were very nice. I played a training game, finally learned how Go’s dang-gone scoring system works. I happened to guess correctly what research a biochem major, Rachel, was doing, and she recommended me a paper by a UW prof.

g.     Went back to dorm. Ate dinner (chicken strips at the 8) with Jamie. Then we headed to Ultimate. I played pretty well and actually scored 3 goals, but our team lost :(

h.     I decided, in a crazy LEROY (there’s a strange inside joke associated with the name Leroy Jenkins; if you don’t know what it refers to, I associate Leroy with hustle and reckless abandon) move, to go back to the dorm, change shoes, and go play badminton with the Badminton Club, which I’d been neglecting for the past 2 weeks.

i.       I got my butt kicked by a guy in my CS Honors class and went back to the dorm. Posted my discussion question for the education class, then went down to Rick’s for cheap ice cream. I met up with Xin on the way down. (I don’t think I’ve mentioned Xin (pronounced Sheen) yet; he’s a super nice guy in my physics class, very guileless and always smiling. I played tennis with him and his roommate Hayden a couple days ago.) He said, smiling, that the physics test had ruined his day. But he was beaming like a loon when the Rick’s volunteer scooper rewarded his $1.75 for a single scoop in a waffle cone with the most enormous mound of ice cream I’d ever seen. He had to share it with people in the lounge.

j.       I ate my ice cream and read physics.

k.     Wrote log and went to bed.