It’s based on the computer algebra package LiE, written by M. A. A. van Leeuwen, A. M. Cohen and B. Lisser in the early 90’s. They chose to implement a proprietary scripting language as a wrapper for all the fancy mathematical algorithms. While this language is useful for interactive computations and short scripts, python is more expressive and powerful — definitely what you want when exploring your favorite exceptional group.
A Fun Example
Here’s an example of using lie to do a calculation that’s near and dear to every high energy theorist’s heart. We’ll show how the 10 + 5bar + 1 representation of SU(5) contains a single standard model generation. First we’ll fire up python and import the lie module. Continue reading…
The snarXiv is a random high-energy theory paper generator incorporating all the latest trends, entropic reasoning, and exciting moduli spaces. The arXiv is similar, but occasionally less random.
Actually, the snarXiv only generates tantalizing titles and abstracts at the moment, while the arXiv delivers matching papers as well. Details of the implementation are below. I’m the author, and I don’t remember exactly why I decided to do this. I did already have the framework lying around from a previous project, and I swear I spent more time doing research last weekend than implementing snarXiv.org.
Suggested Uses for the snarXiv
If you’re a graduate student, gloomily read through the abstracts, thinking to yourself that you don’t understand papers on the real arXiv any better.
If you’re a post-doc, reload until you find something to work on.
If you’re a professor, get really excited when a paper claims to solve the hierarchy problem, the little hierarchy problem, the mu problem, and the confinement problem. Then experience profound disappointment.
If you’re a famous physicist, keep reloading until you see your name on something, then claim credit for it. Continue reading…
“Print number 6517 and 6518 are smeared and does not define clarity.”
Another excellent find among my grandmother’s old documents was a set of hilariously informative instructions for nose-printing your dog.
When my father was young, his family owned an enormous Great Dane named Lady who turns out to have had a pedigree. Canadian National Live Stock Records show her mother’s name as “Duchess of Willowdale” and her father’s as “Dandy of Metheringham.” To register Lady herself with the Canadian Kennel Club, my grandfather had to send in a nose-print. I have no idea what the primary method for taking nose prints was, but it apparently failed, according to this letter from the Dept. of Agriculture: Continue reading…
Perhaps the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. But probably my oxen will haul a dozen loads of gravel just as quickly.
Going through my grandmother’s old things last night, my father and aunt came across her typing textbook from secretarial school in England, 1934 to 1936. One of the exercises, about halfway through, includes a somewhat hilarious list of sentences using every letter of the alphabet. Continue reading…
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The theme started out in 1976 as electronic music, was set for brass orchestra in 1983, and was later reinterpreted and recorded for NPR by jazz musician Wycliffe Gordon in 1995. Meanwhile, lots of musicians have written and performed variations, some of which get played on air. The most “well-known” version (according to NPR) was performed and arranged by the Washington Saxophone Quartet.
Quire Cleveland recording a trixie. (That’s me on the left of the chorus.)
In the theme’s history, brass settings are the norm. However, my Dad recently got invited to compose some trixies in an early music style. He came up with some fun stuff and recorded it with Quire Cleveland, and some fellow faculty at CWRU. You can hear them all at the Quire Cleveland website — or just listen to All Things Considered!
The episode about theorists is unsurprisingly entitled Problems, and features a number of good moments, from signs at the LHC that read “Risk of Liquid Air,” to enormous chalkboards covered with Feynman diagrams, to the hilarious expressions of all-too-familiar grad student angst (“sometimes I almost want to give up everything”).
’Problems’ travels to Paris for a look at some of the theoretical work behind the ‘Eurostar’ paper. Gavin and his PhD student Mathieu explore the mathematics behind the behaviour of fundamental particles, and we have an update on the ‘incident’ which is holding up work at the LHC.
One of my favorite quotes is an observation that I didn’t fully understand until well into graduate school:
I think one of the hardest parts of research is not so much trying to solve a problem, as figuring out which problem you’re going to solve.
It’s absolutely true. The most exciting problems are simultaneously easy enough to be solvable, and hard enough to teach you something deep while you’re solving them. So far, for me, these have been hard to come by. My impression, based on the work that’s been done by my professors, is that a sense for the right problems is something you develop slowly over time, no matter how clever you are.
And as ridiculous and depressed as the poor Ph.D. student sounds in places, I completely understand what he’s feeling. The realization that theoretical physics is hard (and I mean real physics, not classwork), is something that comes in waves, and really only starts to hit in graduate school. It’s a little scary — you’ve got to grow up fast, or go do something else.
