Quantum Foundation Lecture part 1

Today I have attended the first part of the lecture series I mentioned in one of my previous posts. Prof Roy covered lots of things in his very first lecture which might have made the junior undergraduate students feel slightly demotivated. This is obvious because the students who have not yet learned basic quantum mechanics properly, how will they appreciate the inadequacies as well as inconsistencies in quantum mechanics which have led to extension of quantum mechanics. At the end of the lecture the Head of the Physics department had to request Prof Roy to teach at slightly lower level from tomorrow looking at the fact that there are many junior students who are attending the lectures.

Anyway being a senior graduate student, I even could not follow the latter half of the lecture. He started with the theoretical inadequacies in quantum mechanics in spite of tremendous success experimentally and tried to motivate why we need a richer theory. He then mentioned Schrodinger's Cat experiment, Double Slit experiment, Wheeler's delayed choice double slit experiment, EPR Paradox, the concept of local reality and Bell's inequality. Then he showed how quantum mechanics does not obey this inequality. Although the qualitative part was very clear, the rigorous mathematical steps to derive the inequality was too much within an hour and in the very first lecture I believe. I hope he will repeat some of the things which he did today in tomorrow's lecture and will make the ideas, motivations very clear instead of spending much time on the mathematical derivations. Since most of the people are not familiar to this field at all, so they should get the motivations first to do it rather than start with the mathematics. Hope to see as many people as there were today. It could have been better to arrange some coffee and cookies to attract more people. Hope SAPD will do that in future lecture series....:)

Congratulations Prof Venkatraman Ramakrishnan...:)

This is the first time I guess, a scientist of Indian origin has got the prestigious Nobel Prize in Chemistry http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2009/ . It's a great privilege to offer Prof Venkatraman Ramakrishnan heartiest congratulations. Although officially he is an American citizen, people back in India are overwhelmed with joy and excitement. Prof Ramakrishnan who did his B.Sc from Baroda University, India and PhD from Ohio University, United States has made the billion Indians proud as well as inspired. Wish you all the luck and a long life. Keep inspiring us again and again!!

Video Lecture Part 2 and 3

Today we had the video screening of Prof Shiraz Minwalla's String Theory Lecture Part 3 in the Physics Department. Naturally the number of people coming for the lectures has decreased a lot compared to the lecture part 1. In part 2 he talked about Weyl transformations $$ {g}_{\alpha \beta} \rightarrow e^{\phi} g_{\alpha \beta} $$ as well as reparameterization invariance and how we can use them to remove one degree of freedom from the world-sheet metric and write it as $ g_{\alpha \beta} = \eta_{\alpha \beta} $ where $ \eta $ is the Minkowski metric. Then he showed how to write the action in light-cone world sheet coordinates. Then he used the constraints as well as reparameterization invariance in the light-cone world sheet coordinates to remove two degrees of freedom which results in D-2 modes of oscillations.

Today's lecture (part 3) was a bit more technical : how to quantize the action. He started with the action
$ -\frac{1}{4 \pi \alpha} \int \surd{-g} g^{\alpha \beta} \partial_{\alpha} X^{\mu} \partial_{\beta} X_{\mu} $
and went ahead to quantize it. He did not follow the conventional approach which most of the string theory books follow: find the classical canonical momenta and quantize it by giving operator meaning to the various involved quantities. He used symplectic structure approach in which he wrote the action in terms of two-forms. That part was really confusing since he was writing and erasing so many things on the black board. He mentioned that this symplectic structure approach will be very useful while doing compactifications. He is basically strictly following the string theory book by Luest and Theisen, may be looking at that book will help to understand the things he did today in a better way.

A Dream Come True....:)

Finally I purchased all the three volumes of Steven Weinberg's Quantum Theory of Fields. I could do that a little later also since these books are available in the library and I have the e-copies also. But I was so much pissed off while reading those e-books that I could not stop myself from spending 3500 rupees to purchase those volumes. The worst thing about these QFT texts is that in almost every single page the author will be referring to some equation or some section in the other two volumes. I had a very hard time reading three e-books at a time. Sometimes I wonder why the author did not write a single book instead of three volumes. Its true that the book will become too heavy in that case but for me at least it will be less painful to read one book at a time than three different books. Now I have all the technical books written by Weinberg and I thought it would be great to take a group photo of them..:P

Latest Assamese full length movie "MON JAI"

This time I went to Assam on the occasion of Durga Puja I came to know about a new Assamese movie titled "MON JAI". It is a real surprise for the people of Assam to see the release of full length Assamese movie. After a series of bomb blasts in the movie theaters across Assam few years back, the whole Assamese film industry headed for sure and certain collapse. More than half of the movie theaters had to shut down their business. And for their own survival the people involved in the film industry moved to drama as well as making of short musical VCD s etc. It was really unfortunate to see such a fate of this industry which started in 1935 with the first Assamese movie Joymati. However with the release of Mon Jai starring Zubeen Garg, Nishita Goswami, I am still hopeful of revival of the film industry. Although I did not have time to watch the whole movie, the first part I watched was really nice. The movie is a bit slow one but has been able to present beautifully the true picture of an Assamese well-educated, unemployed, frustrated youth played by Zubeen. Unemployment in Assam has always been a cause of many other problems and vice versa. Anyway I liked the role of Zubeen very much, he has improved a lot in his acting skills. The title track sung by him is really heart-touching, the youtube link of which is below:

Viva La Assamese Film Industry. I am hopeful of many more such releases in the coming years.

Lecture Series on 8, 9,12 and 13th October 2009

The Student Association of Physics Department IIT Bombay is organizing a series of lectures by Prof S.M. Roy (Retired Professor, TIFR, http://www.theory.tifr.res.in/~shasanka/ ). The details of the lectures are as follows:

* Lecture 1 - October 8th, Thursday at 5 PM at KRESIT Auditorium:
- Quantum Foundations
- Einstein Locality / Local Reality
- Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox
- Bell Inequalities

* Lecture 2 - October 9th, Friday at 6:30 PM at KRESIT Auditorium
- Many particle Bell Inequalities
- Schrodinger Cat States
- Quantum Entanglement & Tests of Quantum Entanglement

* Lecture 3 - October 12th, Monday at 5 PM at P C Saxena Auditorium
- Applications of quantum entanglement:
- Quantum Communication (cryptography, dense coding, teleportation)

* Lecture 4 - October 13th, Tuesday at 5 PM at P C Saxena Auditorium
- Quantum Computation:
- Grover's search algorithm
- Super-Zeno algorithm to preserve quantum states

The interested people can register for these lectures here http://www.phy.iitb.ac.in/lectures/smroy/ . Since very few people work on this area specially in India, I do hope this lecture series would generate lots of interest among people towards this field and will push for doing research related to one of the most fundamental aspects of modern physics.

So many bibliographical complaints...:(

Just after I submitted my first paper to arXiv, I am getting complaints from people regarding citations, references etc. As a new entrants to this arxiv, SPIRES world I am naturally surprised to see people care so much about whether a new paper somehow related to their earlier work cites their papers correctly or not. I am currently making a list of all these complaints and hopefully will fix it when I replace my paper in arXiv...:)