May 2024 | Asymptotia
Monthly Archives: May 2024 | Asymptotia
There’s a lot of joyful knife-work in my future. #bolognese #summersalad –cvj| Asymptotia
Well, I can now officially mention that I've been part of the filmmaking team (in a way) working hard to bring you an enjoyable and interesting Fantastic Four movie! I think it has been about two and a half years (?) since this all began. This was a nearly perfect model of how science consulting can work in film. I worked with everyone, wherever I was needed, with the director, writers, producers, director of photography, VFX teams, set design, and so on. They made me feel welcome and part of...| Asymptotia
[More technical post follows.] I've been working on this project with (UCSB postdoc) Maciej Kolanowski on and off for a while now, but only in the last couple of weeks did I have the time to hunker down and help push the writing of the results to the finish. For your Sunday reading pleasure, it is already up on the arXiv here (it came out Thursday but I've been too busy to pause to post about it - partly because I've begun work on writing up the next paper in the backlog). The title is "Exten...| Asymptotia
In January 2024 I wrote a paper showing how to define the Supersymmetric Virasoro Minimal String* (SVMS) as a random matrix model, compute many of its properties, and indeed predict many aspects of its physics. This was the first time the SVMS had been constructed. Despite that, a recent paper found it necessary to specifically single out my paper disparagingly as somehow not being a string theory paper, in service of (of course) their own work trying to formulate it. Odd - and disappointingl...| Asymptotia
Some years ago I speculated that it would nice if a certain mathematical object existed, and even nicer if it were to satisfy an ordinary differential equation of a special sort. I was motivated by a particular physical question, and it seemed very natural to me to imagine such an object... So natural that I was sure that it must already have been studied, the equation for it known. As a result, every so often I'd go down a rabbit hole of a literature dig, but not with much success because it...| Asymptotia
This week’s lectures on instantons in my gauge theory class (a very important kind of theory for understanding many phenomenon in nature – light is an example of a phenomenon that is described by gauge theory) were a lot of fun to do, and mark the culmination of a month-long … Click to continue reading this post →| Asymptotia
Thanks to everyone who made all those kind remarks in various places last month after my mother died. I've not responded individually (I did not have the strength) but I did read them all and they were deeply appreciated. Yesterday would’ve been mum‘s 93rd birthday. A little side-note occurred to me the other day: Since she left us a month ago, she was just short of having seen two perfect square years. (This year and 1936.) Anyway, still on the theme of playing with numbers, my siblings ...| Asymptotia
I've been very quiet here over the last couple of weeks. My mother, Delia Maria Johnson, already in hospital since 5th November or so, took a turn for the worse and began a rapid decline. She died peacefully after some days, and to be honest I’ve really not been myself since then. There's an extra element to the sense of loss when (as it approaches) you are powerless to do anything because of being thousands of miles away. On the plus side, because of the ease of using video calls, and with...| Asymptotia
I’m a baker, as you probably know. I’ve regularly made bread, cakes, pies, and all sorts of things for friends and family. About a year ago, someone in the family was diagnosed with a severe allergy to gluten, and within days we removed all gluten products from the kitchen, began … Click to continue reading this post → The post Magic Ingredients Exist! appeared first on Asymptotia.| Asymptotia
The good news (following from last post) is that it worked out! I was almost short of the amount I needed to cover the pie, and so that left nothing for my usual decoration... but it was a hit at dinner and for left-overs today, so that's good! --cvj Click to continue reading this post → The post Hope’s Benefits appeared first on Asymptotia.| Asymptotia
The delicious chaos that (almost always) eventually tames into a tasty flaky pastry crust… it’s always a worrying mess to start out, but you trust to your experience, and you carry on, with hope. #thanksgiving The post Hope appeared first on Asymptotia.| Asymptotia
I realised just now that I entirely forgot (it seems) to post about an episode of PBS' show Nova called "Decoding the Universe: Cosmos" which aired back in the Spring. I thought they did a good job of talking about some of the advances in our understanding that have happened over the last 50 years (the idea is that it is the 50th anniversary of the show) in areas of astrophysics and cosmology. I was a contributor, filmed at the top of Mount Wilson at the Observatory where Hubble made his famo...| Asymptotia
For those of you who keep up with my social media posts, you’ve probably been expecting that I’d eventually announce that I’m transitioning from Twitter to something else… and it is Bluesky. I’ll stay on Twitter for a bit longer while I settle in (and while I wait for people … Click to continue reading this post → The post Bluesky! appeared first on Asymptotia.| Asymptotia
Never toured the inside of the Houses of Parliament before, seeing all the red and green colour coded areas (lords and commons – look at the benches next time you see debates in either place) and busts and statues of some of the shapers, for better or worse, of much … Click to continue reading this post → The post Westminster Wonders appeared first on Asymptotia.| Asymptotia
During the pandemic shutdown I regularly ran these london streets and bridges -virtually- on a treadmill watching a YouTube video of such a run. This morning (actually 8 days ago since I see now I forgot to hit “publish”) was the first time I did it for real! I wonder … Click to continue reading this post → The post Running London appeared first on Asymptotia.| Asymptotia
Since you asked, I should indeed say a few words about how things have been going since I left my previous position and moved to being faculty at the Santa Barbara Department of Physics. It's Simply Wonderful! (Well, that's really four I suppose, depending upon whether you count the contraction as one or two.) Really though, I've been having a great time. It is such a wonderful department with welcoming colleagues doing fantastic work in so many areas of physics. There's overall a real feelin...| Asymptotia
(A more technical post follows.) By the way, in both sets of talks that I mentioned in the previous post, early on I started talking about orthogonal polynomials , and how they generically satisfy a three-term recurrence relation (or recursion relation): Someone raised their hand and ask why it truncates … Click to continue reading this post →| Asymptotia
Well, that was my title for my seminar last Thursday at the KITP. My plan was to explain more the techniques behind some of the work I've been doing over the last few years, in particular the business of treating multicritical matrix models as building blocks for making more complicated theories of gravity. The seminar ended up being a bit scattered in places as I realised that I had to re-adjust my ambitions to match limitations of time, and so ended up improvising here and there to explain ...| Asymptotia
[A rather technical post follows.] For curious physicists following certain developments over the last two years, I'll put below one or two thoughts about the new paper I posted on the arXiv a few days ago. It is called "Consistency Conditions for Non-Perturbartive Completions of JT Gravity". (Actually, I was writing a different paper, but a glorious idea popped into my head and took over, so this one emerged and jumped out in front of the other. A nice aspect of this story is that I get to w...| Asymptotia
