Tres físicos no hispanohablantes

So this is our second full day of work so I guess things seem to be settling down.  We finally  had a meal that we cooked ourselves (some pasta and chicken) and we got a good night of sleep.  (The night before Garrett and I slept very little due to serious jetlag).  We have been enjoying ourselves in the apartment and have found some nice places around us. There were also some `experiences´, such as lighting our gas stove without matches and we still do not have a real clock, phone or internet. This means that we have had time to do other things, play cards, read and explore. Also, I will be sleeping a lot.

As far as work goes, Martin and I are learning the first order formulation of GR, which is different than the previous formalism that we learned. Now there are two types of indices, internal and spacetime. We are trying to learn the Ashtekar variables in the next couple days (these are a three dimensional projection of our four dimensional space-time picture and a new way to write the equations of relativity). We will let you know when anything exciting shows up.

Last night we met up with Chema, our primary collaborator, and Stephon, our advisor, for dinner at a nice little restaurant overlooking the beach and ocean. Each hour makes me feel a little more settled, but it is amazing to me just how many little things feel different: boxed milk in the grocery store, no tips at restaurants. I’ve traveled to Europe before, but always for vacation. Everything feels very different as a research assistant because I am a little more worried about where I have to get to than what I will see along the way.

The IFCA itself is an unassuming little building located behind the physics department.  This section of campus is just a few minutes walk away from our apartment.  Just about everything is a pretty manageable walk in Santander but this is literally just 2 blocks down the hill from us.  We worked at our apartment in the morning and met up with Chema and Stephon in the afternoon to discuss the overall direction of our research.  The meeting was productive and I think we are off to a good start.

As promised, here are a few pictures from our adventures so far.

As we walked toward the bay I was captivated by the scenery. There is something breathtaking about the landscape of northern Spain. The rocky hills are sharply defined and very colorful.

This is the hall leading to the jetway in the Bilbao airport. The entire airport looks very modern and like an airplane.	Our luggage took forever to arrive and we were a little worried, but the airfoil-like architecture was stunning.	Our bus passed right by the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.
Not far from our apartment we found a staircase that has a wonderful view of the bay. We walked down to the pier and through a little bit of downtown. True to its reputation Santander is indeed a port-city.	As we wandered down to the bay yesterday we had a nice view of many interesting parts of the city.

In case any of you were wondering, flying through a thunderstorm IS as frightening as it sounds.

We´ve safely made it to Santander, in spite of a few hiccups during the travel process. Our first flight, originally scheduled to leave Philly for Frankfurt (Germany) at 8PM, left the ground at about 10PM. Also, first lesson of international travel: never book two international flights with only an hour layover between them (oops). Needless to say, we missed our connection to Bilbao, and were left with a 4 hour layover in Germany. Sure, not too bad, save the five or so ¨foreigner¨ mistakes we made, probably incurring a loss of €30.

All that aside, we´re having a great time. Our mid-air thunderstorm was an experience to remember, and quickly led to the most beautiful ¨blood red¨ sunrise Martin has ever seen (Alex and I were condemned to the middle rows). If you ever have a chance to fly into Bilbao´s airport, it is far cooler than any other that I´ve seen; the rocky coastal region surrounding it is absolutely beautiful. Note: tapas are quite delicious, yet difficult to procure when you don´t speak much Spanish. And while international travel may completely warp your internal perception of space and time, the 15 hours of sleep you can get when it´s over are glorious.

We´ll post pictures as soon as our apartment gets internet. If it ever does. We´ll probably try to get a phone too. I hear those are useful.

Passport? Tickets? Check.

This week has been filled with sorting out all kinds of last minute details.  Like figuring out what odd combination of buses we need to catch to get from the airport outside Bilbao to Santander (the city we’ll be staying in), figuring out how to get from there to our apartment building, and of course packing!  We were all relieved when Garrett’s passport arrived last week.  Aside from the minor stresses of getting ready to travel, our anticipation has made this week has felt very static.  Occasionally it will hit me that I’m the only member of our group that speaks any Spanish.  I haven’t been to Spain since sophomore year of high school when I went on a concert tour of the Basque Country with my orchestra so I’m curious to see how different it feels now that I have a few more years of studying Spanish under my belt.  I’m excited about the chance to explore a different provence of Spain, albeit one right next door.

Packing has a way of revealing the most interesting little treasures. I couldn't exactly tell you why, but I found this image oddly compelling. It either says something about my sense of cliché or just embodies the fact that I'm nervous about how rusty my Spanish has become since last spring.

Living room of our apartment.

Chema, the main researcher we will be collaborating with, generously found a place for us to stay and has told us all about Santander.  Santander is the regional capital of the province and autonomous community of Cantabria, just east of the Basque Country.  It is a small port city with a population of about 185,000.  We’ll be working at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA), a research center at the University of Cantabria.  The main areas of research at IFCA are nonlinear physics, astronomy, and instrumentation/software development (many researchers at IFCA contributed to the Planck Satellite).  We’re all really excited to have this opportunity to spend time at a professional research center and hear a little bit about what Chema’s colleagues are working on.

” Travel has a way of stretching the mind.  The stretch comes not from travel’s immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad new sights, smells and sounds, but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way.”

-Ralph Crawshaw

More than anything else I’m looking forward to the change of pace.  What’s exciting to me about theory work is that you can never predict what’s going to trigger an exciting and productive conversation.  Discussion, argument, and varied setting are so central to the process because anything that will push you to think a little differently is a valuable contribution.

Once we get ourselves settled in I look forward to exploring the city.  The food in Cantabria is supposed to be excellent and I’ve heard that there is a nice beach within easy walking distance of IFCA.

You may have read (somewhere on this blog) that my summer research concerns this thing called the “CMB” – the Cosmic Microwave Background (sometimes called the Cosmic Background Radiation, or CBR). Being able to study the CMB is, in some ways, a fulfillment of dreams I had when I was 10. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Big Bang; the supposed beginning of the universe, or as some would claim, “the beginning of time” (whatever that might mean). Well, back when Garrett was a little 10 year old, the Big Bang was still called the “Big Bang Theory.” And back then, I had to wonder why humans thought that everything started with a really, really, really big explosion. How could we make any educated guess that the ENTIRETY of the universe just blew up out of nothingness? Nearly 10 years later, I now know why scientists supported the big bang theory: because it predicts the existence of the CMB.

So, what is the CMB?

That’s it!

(…Was that not helpful? Sorry, I’ll explain.)

In 1964, the physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were testing a sensitive communications antenna at Bell Labs. In an attempt to test the antenna in a radiation-free environment, they calibrated the device to a relatively quiet wavelength in the microwave range. They found that their antenna detected a constant low level background noise in any direction they could point it. After accounting for all foreseeable errors, they concluded that the universe was filled with a constant radiation background.

Penzias and Wilson couldn’t explain their finding, but in fact, it had already been predicted. In 1948 Georg Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman did some theoretical work regarding the Big Bang Theory, a theory then considered to be incredibly speculative. Their work (essentially) calculated the temperature of the universe, and they found that the universe should be permeated by a residual radiation corresponding to a temperature of 2.45 Kelvin. Funny enough, the radiation measured by Penzias and Wilson corresponded to a temperature of 3.5 K.

And that’s all the CMB is – a bunch of photons (packets of energy). Granted, they’re incredibly special photons. It’s the oldest bunch of radiation we can detect! And the great age of the CMB is what makes it so useful; it’s a snapshot of our Universe at an early age. I can’t stress enough how important the CMB is. When Penzias and Wilson detected it, they created a fundamental benchmark for the fields of Cosmology, Particle Physics, Astronomy, etc.. If any theoretical model of the universe has the potential to be correct, it must explain the CMB. Thus, the CMB has become a type of “laboratory” for physicists. By analyzing its properties, we are able to test and eliminate theoretical models. This is exactly why the “wildly speculative” Big Bang theory gained a wealth of support after the CMB’s discovery. The Big Bang Theory predicted our observations and their origin, and rightly received public approval.

The picture above is a modern map of the CMB (taken by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe; a.k.a. the WMAP satellite). The many colored spots on the image correspond to regions of varying temperature, with the traditional (blue/green/yellow/red) hot-to-cold scale (note, our galaxy’s radiation has been subtracted from the image). I’ll explain the details of this image in a future post.

(PBS Voice:) If you’d like to learn more about the Cosmic Microwave Background, a brief (but comprehensive) review can be found on Wayne Hu’s webpage ( http://background.uchicago.edu/~whu/). Or, you can check out one of the many accessible undergraduate texts on Astronomy or Cosmology.

References: Historical facts credited to Matts Roos, from his text “Introduction to Cosmology.”

Can't you see the dark matter? This is about how much we know about what dark matter is.

As you may or may not know, there is a problem in the field of cosmology which is that the mass in the universe that we can observe does not add up to what we would expect based on other observations. To explain how galaxies clump and stars move around in their galaxies, additional mass, called ‘dark matter’ is required.  It is called ‘dark’ because it doesn’t give off light.  The only problem is that because we can only observe it indirectly, no one really knows what this stuff is.  Consequently, we don’t know how to write down the necessary equations that explain it’s gravity.

Well, there is a possible solution to this problem that Martin and I have been looking at for the last couple weeks. There is a newly proposed theory of gravity by Petr Horava, which includes non-relativistic properties, such as faster than light travel for incredibly short distances.  In this theory, time and space, are treated unequally, which leads to an extra term that appears in our solutions.  This term acts like cold dark matter (cold because it’s not self-interacting). Here is the paper that explains the theory if you would like to read it: http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.3563. The whole situation is very exciting and we hope to find out more about it.

Pretty picture of the origin of the universe

We just got back from a conference at Penn State on Classical and Quantum Gravity.  The conference was being held in honor of the 60th birthday of Abhay Ashtekar, one of the founders of loop quantum gravity and the Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University.  Dr. Ashtekar was one of Dr. Alexander’s first mentors at Penn State.

At the conference we heard a wide variety of exciting talks ranging on topics from classical general relativity, to schemes for quantizing gravity, to black hole horizons, to numerical treatments of classical GR, to quantum field theory in curved-spacetimes.

http://igc.psu.edu/events/abhayfest/program.shtml

While we can’t claim to have understood all the talks, it was very exciting to be in the same room with many of the ‘big names’ in the field, such as Sir Roger Penrose, Abhay Ashtekar, Robert Wald, John Collins, and James Hartle.  We ate lunch with Deepak Vaid, Andy Randono, and Ted Jacobson and discussed composite fermions, black holes, and the experience of being a theoretical physicist.  Thursday night we attended a public lecture by Sir Roger Penrose called “Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy: How Big is Infinity.”  He presented a broad look at fundamental questions related to quantum mechanics, string theory, and inflation while maintaining a great deal of lay-person accessibility.

The Alexander Group is traveling to Santander, Spain to collaborate with researchers at the Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria (IFCA). While we are there we will be collaborating with professional astronomers, cosmologists, and nonlinear physicists on two projects. Collaborating with Dr. Jose Diego, Dr. Alexander and Garrett are exploring parity properties of the cosmic microwave background data. Under Dr. Alexander, Martin and Alex will be exploring the properties of fermionic fields in alternative formulations of general relativity. We will used this blog to report on our adventures leading up to and during the trip.