So I went down to Los Angeles to give a talk at the University of South California (go trojans!). This was a fun adventure and I will tell you all about it. In some sense, this is a story of certain fun aspects of academic life. You go see some friends, give a talk about some topic and a lot of good comes out of it. Sometimes, you even get to have a pack of fierce dogs attend your lectures …
This goes as follows: seminars are one of the most important tools to communicate ideas. Science does not happen in isolated islands. It is a collective effort. We read each others papers, we try to extend them in various directions and we apply the ‘good ole bag o’ tricks’ to new problems.
Also we ask people over to give talks because it improves the speed at which we acquire new information. If I read papers, I might get really stuck in a passage because there is some intuition that eludes me. However, if I have the author right in front of me, I can ask questions until I understand.
Doing it by e-mail is not the same. If they are visiting you, or you are visiting them, you can get immediate feedback and go forward a lot faster. This is good for the progress of scientific inquire.
Moreover, you get to talk about other stuff (like politics and blogging, education, you name it) and make new friends, meet old friends and do all those social things that make us human, like going to a bar and having a few drinks.
So this time around I went to LA to the USC. I visited the high energy theory group there and gave my talk. The fun part is that I went there by train, rather than driving. Fellow co-blogger Clifford Johnson
(one of my hosts) was very happy because he has been speaking wonderful stuff about the LA public transportation system. I have been very busy lately doing my usual work, and I didn’t have time to prepare a talk before going to USC, so I took the train from Santa Barbara to LA to have some time to write my talk.
The three hour train ride gave me an essentially uninterrupted block of time to prepare (I had already downloaded the relevant papers). Moreover I got to take a nice picture
of the landscape as I was traveling from the train that I am including here.
I made it to LA on time (the train was early), followed the instructions to take the red line to 7th street/market, and from there I took the F-Dash, landing in USC one hour before I was expected to! Chaos ensued and was quickly resolved by a couple of phone calls and then everything was fine. Phew!
I had a lovely afternoon with the local folks, drinking coffee (remember how important it is) and just talking fun things, some physics, some not. We went for the usual `dinner with the speaker’ at a lovely little place near USC, after which I went to my room and did all the traditional ‘finishing touches’ on the talk.
Morning came, had a huge breakfast where I was staying. I didn’t take a picture because I am ashamed of how much I can eat if given the opportunity, or better yet -because I am so considerate- so that you, the reader, doesn’t get plate envy. I dressed myself properly for my talk (a habit I have), answered a whole bunch of e-mail etc etc and finally made my way back to USC at about 10 am.
The talk was at lunch time, and there was a hungry hound pack as an audience. They had some incisive biting remarks during my talk and howled in pain at my jokes. The wolf leader was
Nick Warner, and the dogs were his way of keeping speakers honest (on the threat of some really nasty thing happening if the audience is not satisfied).
By the way, just so that people don’t get the wrong impression, the dogs are really sweet and they love to chase squirrels.
I’m still alive and well, so I think I survived the experience with dignity.
I talked about three dimensional conformal field theories and had some wise things to say at the end on how to write papers in the subject. I’m not telling.
After eating lunch and having some after-talk physics discussion, I spent part of the afternoon getting a tour of the USC campus.
The University boasts some very beautiful art-deco buildings. We saw courtyards and libraries and the new building that George Lucas is building. We speculated if one was required to use a storm trooper outfit to get inside the building or not and other such fun ponderings that
I will not reproduce here.
I visited some other physicists at USC and made my way back to the
Blade Runner police station also known as Los Angeles Union Station (Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies). This was a curious piece of trivia that I learned
from the fellows at USC. I went to Olivera street and saw the local sights, had some dinner and now I’m on the train writing this post.
David, glad to read that you made it back safely. It was fantastic time, having you visit. Excellent talk too. Thanks! I hope you come to visit again soon…
The lovely nearby place we went to eat is called Bacaro. I did a post about it here.
Best,
-cvj
My dad showed me your blog, and I wanted to say that that is a wonderful picture of my dogs. I also really appreciated the comment about their love of chasing squirrels.
My dogs’ names are Abbey and Lucy, by the way. : )
~Antonia Warner
(Nicholas Warner’s daughter)
Hi Antonia:
Thanks for stopping by. We had to make the dogs pose for the picture so that they would look better. They are wonderful dogs.
Hmm.. those border collies look a little heavy… more frisbee and less beer! That or start telling them that the students are sheep to herd 😉
It was great to see you, David! Even though I only understood the first ten minutes of your talk. 🙂
At USC we are very proud of our architecture and of our dogs. Did they show you the statue of the dog on Trousdale Parkway? If not, here is a picture:
This was almost as fun as that seminar on closed timelike curves in 2011–or no, wait, that hasn’t happened yet. Forget I said anything.
[…] We had an excellent seminar and two-day visit from David Berenstein (UCSB). He told us things about holography and 2+1 dimensional conformal field theories during the Wednesday seminar. He was just as he usually is – enthusiastic, and an excellent speaker – so although it was a crazy week of things going on, it was a pleasure to see and host him. I was pleased that he used public transport to get to campus from Santa Barbara, and that he enjoyed doing so. It was entirely his idea to take the train down, I should say, and I was happy to help him connect the details all the way to campus. I’m trying to encourage people to do that sort of thing much more, as you know from reading here, and it is good when it happens from time to time. David, Tameem (a graduate student of mine) and I had an excellent dinner at Bacaro, the new place near campus I’ve mentioned before. David did a post about his visit on his new blog here. […]
Hi David, how are you doing? I learned about your blog from Sam, whom I met this week in Mexico. I am glad to read that you are using public transportation: last year, when I went to Santa Barbara from UCLA, nobody was able to give me an advise regarding public transportation and I had to rent a car… Anyway, I enjoyed the stressful game of having to guess which is the right exit in Los Angeles’ highways…
Warmest regards,
Jose (from the spanish USC!)
Hi Jose:
I’m fine. Glad that you made it here.
2+1 dimensional conformal field theories? That reminds me: I had an idea for an April Fools joke to pull on the unsuspecting physics community. (It occurred to me last year, but I didn’t have time to work on it, and all the e-prints coming out these days on gauge/gravity duality have made it more plausible anyway.)
Some models of the human neocortex contain a phase transition which falls in the universality class of directed percolation (see, e.g., Buice and Cowan 2007). This means that they’re fairly closely related to Reggeon field theory, which naturally makes a not-fully-educated person like me go, “Hey, spinning open strings. . . .” The work of Kachru et al. on gravity duals of Lifshitz-like transition points (scale-but-not-Lorentz invariant), combined with Minic and Pleimling’s application of AdS/CFT to “aging” phenomena in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics make it plausible — and here is where one handwaves vigorously enough to take flight — that a gravity dual to the Wilson-Buice-Cowan neural dynamics model exists.
All of this is, naturally, a build-up to a truly horrible “brane/brain” pun.
Hmmm, reading my previous comment again suggests to me that I really shouldn’t be posting comments on blogs at 3:32 AM.
Still, if anybody wants to slip a superficially plausible paper onto the arXiv next spring, you know where to find me. . . . 😉
[…] and what is not. This is what makes these problems fun. This problem was suggested to me by Nick Warner a couple of weeks ago. I thought it would be good to release it with some […]