Next big news

Well, as you have seen – from time to time, I blog about NASA‘s and CERN‘s big press conferences – when they manage to get their place in the news. Now I decided to change it a bit and say something before it hits the press – pretty soon we’ll have a claim that Higgs boson has been observed. Contrary to the superluminal neutrino claim, this one will come as a relief, since it confirms the Standard Model.

P. S. dmr (Dennis Ritchie) died. Whole world talked about Steve for days after he passed away, but no one talks about the creator of UNIX. I’m not surprised, though.

News from the Opera

Yes, classical music and opera are a nice topic for blogging… but this time I’m talking about the news which have hit the press in past few hours – as Tommaso Dorigo already announced few days ago, the Opera experiment (see here) gave some unexpected results, which will be reported tomorrow – seems like some neutrinos traveled too fast – superluminal speed. Webcast from CERN will be here at 1600 h local time.

It reminds me a bit of the frenzy concerning the NASA conference I also blogged about here – I guess that’s the price of the internet era, science penetrates the news and always sounds sensational when put on the headlines (recently New Scientist had a story about Michael Aschbacher receiving a prize for his completion of the gigantic proof of Classification theorem for finite groups. One news-portal made that news sound like the theorem has been proved yesterday, and not 7 years ago, emphasizing the size of the proof and making it sound like a miracle)

Update: The Opera team has put their paper on arXiv here. Luboš Motl is covering the subject on his blog ever since Dorigo made the first leak, so you can get the latest info there.

Update no. 2: The conference is over and it seems that an extensive search for flaws in the experiment begins. Seems like Leonard Hofstadter is no longer in a relationship with Albert Einstein. We’ll see how long is that relationship crisis going to last.

Hair in the book

There is a common joke in my country:

Q: Why aren’t you studying for your exams?

A: I can’t. I found a hair in my book and now I can’t open the book anymore because of the disgust.

I had a very similar experience few days ago while solving problems from the competition I mentioned earlier. From the very beginning, I tolerated poor English, wrong problem statements, but that day I found out that one of the problems in the list was trivial. It required absolutely no imagination, knowledge or idea whatsoever. Combined with an ad hominem argument I found out about the competition’s organizer, it made me close my notebook and toss the problem set in the wastebasket. I know it is silly, but it seemed to me that one trivial problem spoiled it all to me – now I would seek for triviality in every other problem – challenge would be ruined for good.

Competitions

I miss the old days in high school: mathematical competitions, IMO qualifications, training, problem solving. Due to the fact that my home institution does not compete in any serious university-level mathematical competitions, there was no chance for me to try out that form of competitions.

Few days ago, I found an email in my mailbox – list of 30 mathematical problems – high school and undergraduate level, deadline for solutions – this fall. I almost forgot how pleasurable problem solving is – writing solutions on napkins, calculating while in the shower… Makes you feel alive again (it migt sound pathetic, but that is how I feel right now).

P.S. Today, I mailed my first IMO problem proposal to the committee. If I haven’t reached the immortals’ seat as the contestant (yep, my 2 IMOs were way down on the fail scale) I might catch it as the problem proposer. July 18/19 are the D days…

Games

Preferans, anyone?

Sometimes I miss the old days when I used to play computer games (point and click adventures and football management simulations mostly). Now there are only three games I play, both live and via PC: chess, go and preference (preferans). What made me write a post about games? Well, some people are trying to persuade some other people that poker is a sport on a forum – I couldn’t care less, to be honest – if they would just stop making the relationship between poker and mathematics so mysterious and blurry – and using that same relationship as an argument why poker is a sport. In the same time, I ask the poker advocate whether preferans is a sport – and he says no. I bet he had never played preferans – just like most people. Everyone played poker, everyone knows poker rules, but no one plays preferans. Now that’s a shame – no one plays go, no one plays preferans, and what a paradox – social games no one plays except for me make me more and more asocial!

Who is that man next to Gödel?

If you ask me - Gödel shouldn't have won the Einstein Award in 1951. Einstein should have got a Gödel Award!

Imagine a world where Gödel is a greater celebrity than Einstein – and in which someone would ask you “Who is that man next to Gödel after seeing this photo? Einstein is the first scientific celebrity, first mass media science superstar – I guess the world needed such an icon back then. One could say that physics is closer to people than mathematics and the physicists’ results are more easily understood by the general public. It is only partly so – you have Grisha Perelman as an instant celebrity although very few laymen know what exactly Perelman did for mathematics.

So, it leaves us the duty to tell people about the great Kurt Gödel (who passed away in 1978, on this day,  Jan 14 to be precise) when they see this picture and ask “Who is that man next to Einstein?”

How I rotated my Erdős number

This morning I got a notification mail: a paper of mine was accepted for publishing in a nice, well-referenced journal. It is my first serious paper, and since it was co-authored, I got myself a finite Erdős number. Interesting enough, it is 8 (so I simply rotated it 90° – it was infinite (∞) before this paper). Actually, it might be even less, since number 6 in my chain could have a smaller Erdős number (but who could go through all her papers – even not taking into account that she has published under two surnames).

MR calculator says her Erdős number is 6, and using  Springer’s database I found the relation between her and my coauthor, hence the conclusion I’m 8.

Now I just need a movie to act in, and find a place in the graph of Kevin Bacon numbers!

My branch of Erdős graph

Copenhagen

Copenhagen cast

I’m a filmophile – but every now and then I see a movie that surprises me and makes me wonder why haven’t I seen it before. One of those movies is Copenhagen(2002). Three actors holding the whole plot, telling the story over and over again.

It is based on a play – I wonder if there will ever be a chance for me to see it on stage. It almost made me go to a theater in my home town and ask is there a chance they put it on their repertoire. I know that there wouldn’t be many spectators on the premiere, but let me dream…

Now this one is for you, Steve

Steve

After writing a post for Bill, it is about time Steve gets one. Why am I writing this post? Well, what would you do with a business offer in Mac-oriented development team? In my case, the decision was simple – turn down the offer. I like programming, but I am an algorithmic type of guy, not OO. On the other hand, if I have to choose between getting familiar with a new operating system, a new framework and a new language on one side, and complex networks, topology, or even Russian language on the other side, my choice is the list number two, even though they would pay me for the list number one.

Of course, there is one more aspect: the principles of Free Software – I don’t think I could ever write code for a proprietary piece of software.

A convoluted post about Feynman, Mach, Pauli and Captain Obvious

RP Feynman

Yesterday I had much fun at the university asking people what happens after Captain Obvious leaves the Blue Eye Island. Each time someone had the answer, no matter what it was, I would choose the other answer and persuade him/her that answer was more logical. That experiment reminded me of Feynman sprinkler. Let me quote Feynman:

I once did an experiment in the cyclotron laboratory at Princeton that had some startling results. There was a problem in a hydrodynamics book that was being discussed by all the physics students. The problem is this: You have an S-shaped lawn sprinkler–an S-shaped pipe on a pivot–and the water squirts out at right angles to the axis and makes it spin in a certain direction. Everybody knows which way it goes around; it backs away from the outgoing water. Now the question is this: If you had a lake, or swimming pool–a big supply of water–and you put the sprinkler completely under water, and sucked the water in, instead of squirting it out, which way would it turn? Would it turn the same way as it does when you squirt water out into the air, or would it turn the other way? The answer is perfectly clear at first sight. The trouble was, some guy would think it was perfectly clear one way, and another guy would think it was perfectly clear the other way. So everybody was discussing it. I remember at one particular seminar, or tea, somebody went nip to Prof John Wheeler and said, “Which way do you think it goes around?” Wheeler said, “Yesterday, Feynman convinced me that it went backwards. Today, he’s convinced me equally well that it goes around the other way. I don’t know what he’ll convince me of tomorrow!” I’ll tell you an argument that will make you think it’s one way, and another argument that will make you think it’s the other way, OK? One argument is that when you’re sucking water in, you’re sort of pulling the water with the nozzle, so it will go forward, towards the incoming water. But then another guy comes along and says, “Suppose we hold it still and ask what kind of a torque we need to hold it still. In the case of the water going out, we all know you have to hold it on the outside of the curve, because of the centrifugal force of the water going around the curve. Now, when the water goes around the same curve the other way, it still makes the same centrifugal force toward the outside of the curve. Therefore the two cases are the same, and the sprinkler will go around the same way, whether you’re squirting water out or sucking it in.”

Now, the problem was first treated in Ernst Mach’s book Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung. Ernst Mach was Wolfgang Ernst Pauli’s godfather (note Pauli’s middle name). Today is the anniversary of Pauli’s death – and a quote from Pauli that everyone remembers

It is not even wrong!

resembles the conclusion most people yesterday made after I convinced them that both solutions of blue-islanders problem have sense (of course, I know the holes in the argument, but it is still fun to argue).