As expected, I got too busy with the day job. Consequently, this week I was unable to contribute to the type of entertainment and physics fun our 3 readers got used to in the past, er… week or so. This week there is a department review going on, and this means way too much paperwork and politics, and probably some third p I am missing right now (but it sure ain’t physics). Life as faculty member is not always as glamorous as it appears to be in the popular imagination, there will always be weeks like that.
So, in the meantime, something I encountered while browsing the new journal Physics, which seems to be a pretty decent way of keeping up with current stories in, well, physics. Here is a good piece by Stanford’s Shamit Kachru, of KKLT (and Rutgers basketball) fame, writing about one of the very recent developments in string theory, the attempt to find gravitational duals for cold atomic systems. Enjoy!
I vaguely recall skimming some preprints on the arXiv which suggested that the gravity-dual-of-cold-atoms approach would work much better in 3D than in 2D, since the ratio
for a Fermi gas at unitarity shrinks in 3D but blows up in 2D, or something of the sort. . . my search-fu is too weak tonight to find what I read before, but arXiv:cond-mat/0610256 looks familiar.
That remark about the life of a faculty not being all glamorous is so very, very true. Particularly if they trick you into doing administration. (Shun it! Fear it!)
On the other hand, I often remind myself that if I had a real job I’d probably still be doing all the un-fun parts of my current job, but without the fun parts. So I should count my blessings.
Blake, I think the search is still on for duals relevant to experimentally realized systems, so all such statements are likely to change with time.
Todd, you are right, there is a certain amount of drudge work in any line of work, we are probably luckier than most this way.