Squirrel!!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrghhhhhhh!!!!!

. . .  Computers will crash,
Mistakes are unavoidable,
There lies great wisdom :
. . .   in regularly backing up data 
Verily, it is true!

Learning to paint …

Well, twiddling with GIMP is pretty much fun. Here’re some of my attempts at cleaning up scans, and colouring them, while I’m nowhere near something like this, the practice can only be good for me.

All this thanks to great artwork by Aditi.

Some Movies

In no particular order:

• The Pursuit of Happyness
• Do the Right Thing
• Everything is Illuminated
• Babel
• Searching For Bobby Fischer
• Dor
• The Illusionist
• The Station Agent
  
• From Hell
• C’era una volta il West
• High Noon
• Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo
• Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom
• Little Miss Sunshine
• Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi
• Dark City
• Twelve Monkeys
• Baraka
• Coffee And Cigarettes
• The Princess Bride
• Time Bandits
• Millers Crossing
• Fargo
• Once Upon a Time in America
• Goodfellas
• Snatch
• Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
• Matchstick Men
• Dr Strangelove or How I learnt to Stop Worrying and Start Loving the Bomb
• Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain
• Les Triplettes de Belleville
• La Vita e bella
• Delicatessen
• Back to the Future
• Pi
  
• The Big Lebowski
• Sweet November
• Khamosh Pani
• American History X
• Million Dollar Baby
• Dances with Wolves
• October Sky
• Sling Blade
• The Terminal
• Breakfast Club
• The Last Samurai
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda
• Scent of a Woman
• Bigger Than the Sky
• The Cider House Rules
• Gadjo Dilo
• Im Juli
• As Good as It Gets
• Seven Years in Tibet
• Schindler’s List
• Gandhi
• Battleship Potemkin
• Diarios de motocicleta
• Lawrence of Arabia
• Touching the Void
• The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain
• The Great Dictator
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Ed Wood
• Pushpak
• Pulp Fiction
• Cidade de Deus
• Rounders
• Requiem for a Dream
• Snake in Eagles Shadow
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Some books

• Representation Theory : A First Course (Fulton & Harris)
• Symmetry & the Monster (Mark Ronan) [Not yet read]
• Gödel, Escher, Bach : An eternal golden braid (Douglas Hofstadter) : A popular level book on Gödel’s theorem and AI and related stuff. The first half is good, but the book drags on too much with unfounded speculation towards the end.
• Surreal Numbers (Donald E Knuth) : Aweird funny little book on set theoretic foundation of number theory.
• One Jump Ahead (Jonathan Schaeffer) : About Chinook, the checkers playing program
• Sophie’s World (Jostein Gaarder) : A sort of informal fun introduction to Western philosophy
• Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Eco)
• The Power of One (Courtenay Bryce)

SUSY – II

Well, I’m done with the official presentation today, so that leaves me a bit more free for some time. Considering that I’ll be offline for a week or so … once I go home, I think I should probably try to spike my blogging density for some time.

 

Now, last time we’d just set up the SUSY algebra for (0+1)-D systems, basically Quantum mechanics, that is actually enough for the proof of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem(The links at the end of the wikipedia are worth checking out and range from popular level to maths that is beyond me at present). So, for now, let us take a slight detour, and look at differential forms. This may be redundant but, let’s just review differential forms (horribly quickly, in a way that might appear, (because it is) pretty sloppy to a mathematician, but it’ll do for our purposes here)

 

So, given a manifold, M, let’s look at it’s tangent space. Basically, we can have vectors & tensors in the tangent space. Now consider all the antisymmetric tensors in the tangent space. Now, (loosely speaking) the p dimensional antisymmetric tensors is what we call p-forms. The p-forms form an abelian group under ordinary addition. Now let us define an operator, d as:

(dA)_ijk… = D_[i A_jkl...]

Where, basically we get a p+1-form from a p-form, by differentiating it (thus adding an extra index) and then antisymmetrising, so that the result is also a form (antisymetric tensor). This structure is what is called a cochain complex. Now, we can also define a d* operator which takes a p-form to a (p-1)-form, by contracting with an additional index.

 

Ok, that’s enough of an interlude into this, and it’s getting to technical for a lazy guy like me to care to typeset in the horribleness, that is HTML (for mathematical typesetting that is …). So, you might say, all this is very interesting, but why should I be interested in forms? Well, there’s tonnes of uses of this language in Physics … For one, you can join the cool kids, and say:

F = dA, dF = 0, d*F = J

instead, of the boring old Maxwell’s equations … but well … it’s just pretty neat stuff, by itself … but we’ll see soon how all this can be useful, in Physics.  We’ll consider a Supersymmetric system which has as its Hilbert space, the space of all forms. As I said on the top, I’ll be offline for a week at home, so I will continue posting, only after that, if you’re impatient then you can have a look at the report I wrote up about my summer work.

Ciao,

 

 

SUSY

It’s been nearly three weeks since I promised to write about my activities here. My apologies, in case I actually have any readers. I got swamped in last minute deadline-beating and managed to sneak in my eport just at the last second as the clock was striking 4. I’m writing this post thanks to some encouragement from Tom. So, here goes:

Day 1 : Symmetries have played a very important role as guiding principles in Theoretical Physics. A given symmetry enables us to make some statement about the behaviour of a system (namely the associated conserved charge), thus one would naturally be interested in any possible new symmetry that physical models could have. However, there is a theorem due to Coleman and Mandula, that forbids the possibility of any symmetries that transform as tensors under Lorentz transformations other than P_μ and M_μν. There is a very simple plausibility argument by Witten as to why this should be so. It basically says that, the conservation of P_μ and M_μν, leaves only the scattering angle unknown. Any new conservation law would leave us with only a discrete set of possible angles, but since the scattering amplitude is an analytic function of angle it must be zero for all angles. Thus it would seem that the Coleman-Mandula theorem, rules out all possible symmetries other than the Poincare group(translations and Lorentz transformations). This seems to spoil all our fun, by saying that no new symmetries lie in wait to be found by daring & adventurous experimentalists.

 

Thanfully, there’s a catch! We have only ruled out symmetries, whose generators transform as tensors under the Lorentz group. What about spinors?? That is another representation of the Lorentz group. We can have spinorial conserved charges. This is because, spinorial conserved quantities do not give us any observables, which impose constraints on scattering matrices. (For the more technically minded, the Coleman-Mandula theorem applies to Lie algebras, whereas supersymmetry charges obey a different structure, they have anticommutators instead of the Lie-bracket). What they do is to relate boson-boson and fermion-fermion scattering. Now, the anticommutator of two supersymmetry generators is going to have two spinor indices. This quantity is like a vector, if it consists of a left & a right handed spinor, but this thing being a conserved vector, has to be nothing other than P_μ. All other anticommutators have to be zero, because such a quantity does not correspond to anything that we observe. More importanty P₀, the Hamiltonian, can be written as the anticommutator of a Q & its hermitian conjugate Q*. This is the simple case with just one supersymmetry, what is called, N=1 supersymmetry. Therefore, we have:

H = {Q, Q*}

Now, this simple way of writing H, as an anticommutator has several interesting properties. Next day, I think I’ll write a bit about differential forms, and slowly build up to a proof of a special case of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem(for the de Rham cohomology).

 

In case anybody is reading this, I’d really like to know that somebody actually reads the stuff I’m writing. And considering that my audience, would probably be a singleton, I could try to make the stuff I put here more/less technical as you might like it. It would really feel nice to know that the stuff I’m writing here, is (hopefully)useful/enjoyable to someone.

Sinking & Swimming in SUSY

For quite some time I’ve been thinking of blogging along as I try to learn Supersymmetry and related stuff, but it’s taken quite a few pushes from several friends to overcome the initial inertia barrier. Today is as auspicious a day as any, so let me start. After some thought, I’ve decided that I’ll let my posts slant more to the side of popular science with lesser equationy stuff, mainly for the following reasons:

1. Anyway have to work out most of the equations as part of my project, so posting at a more expository level here, will complement that by forcing me to think up of why certain things work the way they do, how to better look at things, & most importantly, ensure that I actually understand what I’m doing.

2. I’m lazy, and it’s pain to typeset equations in HTML, (made more horrible by wordpress not supporting MATHML)

So, here’s hoping I’ll start soon tomorrow!

The Gamma Song

Well, the idle mind is the devil’s workshop, but I’d say that a busy one, is a storehouse of crazy, arbit, stupid, meaningless & unwanted creativity. This time during the endsems, Shankar & I came up with “The Gamma Song“. It’s another parody of the famous(?) Llama Song^[1] Check it out if you like Physics/Maths/Stupidity or just have a lot of free time.

The Lyrics:

here's a gamma,there's a gamma
and another little gamma,
real gamma
virtua' gamma,
gamma gamma
look!

gamma gamma,
Riemann
gamma
tangent
Wick
rotate-a
gamma
gamma gamma,
squareroot
gamma
gamma gamma
look!

I was once a Tensor,
I lived in a space,
but I never saw the way
the indices were raised
I was just an A-mu,
but that fixed a gauge,
And now listen little child,
to this verbiage

did you ever see a gamma,
miss a gamma
hit a gamma,
gamma's gamma
curve of gamma
gamma gamma
look!

Affine gamma,
Dirac gamma,
Chiral gamma,
Basu,
gamma,
gamma with psi bar
a drama,
gamma gamma
look!

is it all in bold now?
is this all so weird?
is it made of tangent bundle?
h-cross
sigma
beard
Now our song is losing spin,
we've run out of ... look!
time for me to retire now,
and become a crook!

QFT … or why you should be glad I’m not a poet

Quantum Field Theory, it's come a long way,
Since Oscar & Walter started out one day,
Rewriting Schrödinger's equation in a relativistic way,
But their effort was partly in vain,
For the electron did not see fit to deign,
Being a spinor with spin h-cross by two,
Physicists they were left without a clue.

Then along came Paul, stared into the fire,
Pulled out an equation with anticommuting stuff,
Alack! Alas! The equation seemed wrong,
Negative energy eigenvalues it did acquire,
There was a solution, though it was rough,
Fill the vacuum with an electron sea,
Now if there is a hole where an electron should be,
Why! That is a positron can't you see?
Those were the days of old QFT

Skip forward in time, two dozen more years,
And Richard and Julian, and Shinichiro San,
They smoothened the wrikles and layed rest to fears,
And things it seem'd were falling in place,
Till other new problems blew up in our face,

Are neutrinos massless? Are quarks confined?
Is Gravity quantised? Howe'er shall we find?
M-theory, and unification, why it's all still a puzzle,
And science marches on from hurdle to hurdle!
From this eternal story we can surely surmise,
That theories are made, and problems are solved,
These theories then fade, as new problems arise.