For the most part of last week I was attending a conference on Gauge/Gravity duality in Stellenbosch, South Africa. That was the reason I was in Africa in the first place. The link to the conference site is here, and pretty soon they will have the slides and audio of the talks online.
We were in the brand new Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced study . It is new because now it has become independent. They also have a very nice building and the kitchen staff is phenomenal: they produce really good food. This is the one picture I took of the building from the inside overlooking the terrace.
One of the nicest things about this conference was the schedule. There was plenty of free time to talk with one another and discuss various things in the afternoon. I like those situations because one can get some work done and exchange ideas very fruitfully.
I also met the people from various research groups that work in string theory and related areas in South Africa. After reading many of their papers in the past, it was nice to be able to place a face with a name I know. It was also nice to know that the government of South Africa is investing in research and that the conditions for doing research are good. In general I found that the people in South Africa are extremely friendly and approachable and that the country was very different from my (biased) expectations.
I had a lot of fun in the conference and I was planning to blog about it live. Nature intervened and I became ill for a couple of days so my brain was not fully engaged.
So I will talk about that episode instead. The main reason I want to do so is to give advice for when something like this happens to the readers (on the off-chance that they might read this and actually remember it in the future).
I had some food-borne illness and I have not been able to figure out exactly what it was. I got it the day before the conference started. I was pretty miserable with various symptoms of food poisoning: diarrhea, fever, chills, headaches, nausea, etc. In such an event it is important not to dehydrate (take it from someone who has lived in the tropics for a large fraction of his life). Once you are in this situation you should also avoid foods that will further upset your stomach. For example spicy food and dairy food are usually not good options. You should also get hydration salts as recommended by the World Health Organization. Tea is better than coffee (coffee irritates the stomach). Avoid wine, especially red (red wine tannins can irritate the stomach much further). Seeing as I was in wine country, this was not something I was particularly happy about, but it is a lot better than to suffer for many days. I still managed to cheat a little about this without completely catastrophic consequences.
You should keep these precautions for a couple of days after you recover.
In my experience it is good to ask for help from the conference staff. They will be able to direct you to a pharmacy. You should explain your issues to the pharmacist and he will give you what the locals take in these situations. Bugs can behave very different in different countries and sometimes you need very strong medicine to take care of the problems. If you deteriorate, consult a doctor sooner rather than later. I was mostly recovered on the third day so this was not necessary.
I have also been in situations where I am trying to communicate with a pharmacist that does not know English and in countries where they don’t have an Alphabet I recognize. It is good to mime and to have a dictionary at hand. If you can get someone to accompany you and translate that will usually work better.
In my case the organization of the conference was extremely helpful and I am very grateful to them as a whole for helping me through this episode.
I would also like to thank all of the organization again for the wonderful experience that I had (I shall abuse my importance and use the we for everyone else at the conference). I wish all of them good luck for the future and I recommend to all the readers of this Blog that if they get a chance to go to South Africa, wether on research or for leisure, to take it. It just might change the way you think about a lot of issues.
I’ve been in Southern Africa several times, I really miss it. Should try to schedule a vacation at some point. The flight is less inconvenient from Europe than from North America though. Thanks for the reporting
Euclidean geometry cannot navigate the globe (Fifth Postulate). All gravitation quantizations are disasters – then dark matter and dark energy with no laboratory reality. A weak founding postulate is presumptive.
Physics is historically inept with chirality. The universe has matter not antimatter, the Weak Interaction, spin, gyrotropy… and biological homochirality. When postulated symmetry fails chirality is a good bet why.
Is the vacuum isotropic toward mass distribution? Noether’s theorem then conservation of angular momentum, Einstein’s elevator demand it! So what? A massed sector chiral pseudoscalar vacuum background is consistent with all prior observations. Left and right feet cannot be detected with socks. It powered inflation, selected matter over antimatter, and locked the Weak Interaction left-handed. Diluted to contemporary values it launched biological homochirality.
Opposite parity (chirality in all directions), chemically identical atomic mass distributions are the test. Nature grows them as anything crystallizing in enantiomorphic space groups P3(1)21 and P3(2)21 – quartz, cinnabar, berlinite, tellurium. Are you navigating a sphere with 180 degree triangles? Perform a parity Eötvös experiment contrasting single crystal left- and right-handed quartz test masses. Eliminate the obvious weak postulate… or embrace it, re Yang and Lee.
Good to see we are done with condemning whole continents and back to good old gibberish. Let’s keep it that way.
Theory predicts what it is told to predict. Vacuum isotropic to EM does not constrain the massed sector. Chiral background is obvious to anybody who has smelled (R)-carvone (spearmint, 5 ml $21.70 from Aldrich) and (S)-carvone (caraway, 5 ml, $18). Their analyses (NMR, IR, UV/vis, MS, GC, HPLC, bp, MW, density… chemical reactions) are indistinguishable except to chiral probes (ORD, CD; noses).
If centimeter diameter solid single crystal spheres of P3(1)21 and P3(2)21 quartz gave a reproducible Eötvös balance 5×10^(-13) difference/average net output, 10X sensitivity, what part of physics or thermodynamics would be violated? No observation in any venue at any scale would be contradicted. Teleparallelism not metric gravitation would be validated. Conservation of angular momentum would have an allowed violation – external discontinuous symmetry parity is not Noetherian.
You lose vacuum isotropy for chiral mass distributions, the Equivalence Principle would be empirically falsified, and peturbational string theory is killed for uniting the effects of a massive body and an accelerating reference frame with BRST invariance. That’ll get you an autumn trip to Sweden, you betcha.
The cost is performing an SOP experiment in existing apparatus that has never measured anything other than net zero in 100 years since 19th century Vásárosnaményi Báró Eötvös Loránd (and Dicke being clever in 1964). The control output is solid.
Yang and Lee doubted the inescapably elegant mirror symmetries of particle theory. They were heretic pariahs through Christmas 1956 when they visited NBS for a look. In January 1957 everybody said the exclusively left-handed Weak interaction was obvious. Where were they three weeks earlier?
Stellenbosch. Very pretty college town. You may claim to have been there for academic reasons and to have enjoyed the architecture and cuisine, but you can’t fool me – you really went went there for the wine tours! I bet the gravity you studied was more original than quantum (well, I hope so, that’s why I went…).
Often the tours go past Victor Verster prison in Paarl where Nelson Mandela was finally released (so you can even claim the trip was for historical/cultural reasons).
You mention that “I had some food-borne illness” – if you’re going to work in Africa much then you just have to get used to it! You will build up some resistance over time, but unless you have the luxury of living and eating in a 5 star hotel the whole time (and who would want to – you might as well not have gone there) it will remain an occasional unpleasant fact of life. So, assuming you have had all the recommended vaccinations and take certain other precautions VERY seriously should they be appropriate, you might as well just enjoy yourself (Go on : have that rare steak (SA beef v. good), with shrimp and salad – just make sure you haven’t got an important meeting the next day!)
Also I echo Bee: Cape Town is a very nice place to visit, and if you go along to Cape Point you can see wild native penguins – I was not expecting that I can tell you!