Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Overblow!

Finally! I can produce overblows! albeit just on the holes 1 and 6. I had to tune up my C harmonica to do so, but its a sweet feeling. Ill try and make some proof of this by the weekend, right now i just have too much work.

Also, I'll speak about Robert B. Laughlin, who came to Mexico city this week, but there's no time!

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Linguistic Phase Transition

It seems it would be best if I made future post on plain old English since we're having people coming from Astronomers. In the Wild. Oh well...

And Now for Something Completely Different...

(Nota: A partir de ahora tambien estare participando en Astronomers. In the Wild., asi que transcribo mis aportaciones a dicho blog)

A man with string theory up his nose.

As our gracious host has already pointed out, I'm actually a physics student, so it's an honor to be able to write for this fine astronomy blog. In any case I'm beginning to understand the AdS/CFT correspondence, which as you may already know, deals with the apparent duality that exist between some string theories and quantum field theories.
What we can aspire to do with this approach is to investigate quantum field theories without relying on perturbation theory, which limit our understanding of nature. For example, Quantum Cromodynamics (QCD) enjoys asymptotic freedom at high energies, this means that since interactions are weak at those energy scales it's sane to use perturvative methods. However in cases where energy scales are small, we simply do not know how to perform calculations. As always numerical methods are useful to some extent, but even they have a hard time dealing with some situations (they involve dealing with some dynamical quarks, as far as I know). Other option is to study the AdS/CFT correspondence and gather bits of information about gauge theories in general. It all boils down to this: either, A) Find a string theory dual to QCD to be able to make calculations or B) Understand properties about gauge theories in general so you can make predictions about QCD. The second option is more viable and has had success in the past. But I'll explain that some other time.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Premio Nobel en Física, edición 2007

El próximo martes sabremos quien ha ganado el premio Nobel de física 2007. El año pasado las especulaciones acerca de quien ganaría el premio fueron bastante acertadas, y el estudio de las anisotropías de la radiación cósmica de fondo les otorgaron el Nobel a John C. Mather y George F. Smoot, reconocimiento inevitable por uno de los descubrimientos mas interesantes en cosmología actual.
Este año la situación no es tan clara. Aun cuando el descubrimiento de la expansíon acelerada del universo mediante el estudio de supernovas me parece un descubrimiento extraordinariamente interesante, quizás existan áreas de investigación de la física aplicada o experimental las cuales han sido pasadas por alto por nosotros la gente mal informada.

En menos de un año entrara en funcionamiento el LHC, el cual quizás nos permita ver física mas allá del modelo estándar y quizás en 5 o 10 años podamos tener un nuevo premio Nobel para la física fundamental (tras sacarnos de nuestra peculiar situación actual).

Para algunas predicciones interesantes sobre los ganadores de este año vease
Astronomer in the Wild