Quantum uncertainty and wave-particle duality

I have always felt that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle was a manifestation of wave-particle duality, rather than a simple consequence of the quantum randomness.  The principle is literally a theorem in Fourier Analysis rather than a theorem in probability theory.  Recent experimental results reported by Tim Wogan in Physics World seem to provide evidence for this interpretation.  The relationship between uncertainty and wave-particle duality is not as simple as I would have thought, but nonetheless seems to be a better way to interpret it than to merely attribute it to the inherently random nature of quantum phenomena.

More evidence of the pollution of the scientific literature

DTLR has often lamented the pollution of the scientific literature by papers with flawed methodology or reporting, including bad study designs (e.g., lack of randomization in preclinical comparative studies) or bad analyses.  The inclusion of such published but flawed research has an amplifying effect when it is included in meta-analyses and systematic reviews.

Now comes a pair of news articles, one in Science by Holly Else, and the latest from Nature by Richard van Noorden, reporting that the inclusion of fake papers has even further polluted the literature and undermined such systematic reviews and meta-analyses.  This is an indictment of the existing mechanisms to fund, peer-review, and publish scientific research. 

The DTLR blog was founded partly to provide discussion of the eroded quality of the scientific literature, but it seems in the decade since its existence, the problem has only gotten worse.  And the public cannot be asked to "trust" science until scientists themselves can trust what their colleagues are doing.

What is the point of trying to do scientific research, when even the most rigorous and careful scientists will see their work published alongside flawed or even completely faked "research"?  Why are society's resources being funneled into an enterprise that is increasingly becoming a charade instead of a genuine contribution to human knowledge?

This is a very discouraging way to bring 2024 to an end!

My reading in physics biographies

My last post mentioned that I read a biography of C.-S. Wu earlier this year.  This has been part of a larger effort to start reading the biographies of notable physicists, which I began in the summer of 2023, after watching Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer film.  So far, here are the substantial biographies I've made it through, in chronological order:

• Robert Oppenheimer:  A Life Inside the Center, by Ray Monk (Doubleday, 2012).

• Galileo: Decisive Innovator, by Michael Sharratt (Blackwell, 1994).
  
• Einstein:  His Life and Universe, by Water Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
• Jean D'Alembert:  Science and the Enlightenment, by Thomas L. Hankins (Oxford University Press, 1970).
• The Man Who Changed Everything:  The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by Basil Mahon (Wiley, 2004).
• Madame Wu Chien-Shiung:  The First Lady of Physics Research, by Chiang Tsai-Chien (World Scientific, 2014).

In addition, I read the following short biographies, again in chronological order:

• Isaac Newton, by James Gleick (Pantheon, 2003).
  
• Michael Faraday:  A Very Short Introduction, by Frank James (Oxford University Press, 2010).

• Niels Bohr:  A Very Short Introduction, by J. L. Heilbron (Oxford University Press, 2020).

The Bohr book was the only one so far that I've been disappointed with.

In earlier years, I've read other biographies of physicists; the ones I can remember include:

• Degrees Kelvin:  A Tale of Genius and Invention, by David Lindley (Joseph Henry Press, 2004).
• True Genius:  The Life and Science of John Bardeen, The Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics, by Vicki Daitch and Lillian Hoddeson (Joseph Henry Press, 2002). 

I've also read the autobiographies of Max Planck and physicist-turned-quant, Emanuel Derman.

Future ambitions include tackling substantial biographies of Planck, and more on Galileo, Newton, and Maxwell.   In addition I'd like to add biographies of Leonhard Euler, A.-L. Cauchy, Lord Rayleigh, J. W. Gibbs, Lise Meitner, R.P. Feynman, and P. W. Anderson.  And ultimately I'd like to include 20th century fluid dynamicists; there exist biographies of Ludwig Prandtl, G. I. Taylor, and James Lighthill, and an autobiography of Theodore von Karman, though realistically I may only get to Prandtl and Taylor.  (I have read Iris Chang's Thread of the Silkworm, on H.S. Tsien, which I would strongly recommend.)

 

Chien-Shiung Wu

This month's issue of Physics Today features Chinese-American nuclear physicist Chien-Shiung Wu on its cover:

I was delighted to see this cover.  The article by Kam, Zhang, and Feng inside discusses Wu's "trailblazing experiments in particle physics".  Best known is her experiment confirming parity violation, which earned the theorists who proposed it, C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee, a Nobel Prize in 1957.  Many (including Yang himself) have commented that Wu should have been a co-recipient of that prize.

The authors go on to make the case that Wu's late 1949 experiment, which they say was "the first conclusive verification of photon entanglement", may also have been Nobel-worthy, given the 2022 Nobel Prize awarded to Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger for their work on photon entanglement and the violation of Bell's inequalities".  However, during Wu's lifetime (and well beyond, until quantum information science emerged as a viable discipline in the last decade or two) this field of physics was considered peripheral.  It is only now, in retrospect, that the importance of the work of Wu and others is being fully acknowledged.  Perhaps most unjust of all, John Stuart Bell himself should be recognized as a physicist who should have (but didn't) receive a Nobel Prize.

Earlier this year, I read a biography of Wu by Chiang Tsai-Chien, Madame Wu Chien-Shiung:  The First Lady of Physics Research (World Scientific, 2014), so Wu has been on my mind recently.  I previously blogged about her when the US Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor in 2021, and more recently in my post about the APS March Meeting in Las Vegas last year, where I attended a talk by Michelle Frank about Wu.  Frank has called attention to Wu's work on quantum entanglement in a Scientific American article in April of that year.  Wu's granddaughter, Jada Yuan, published a lovely article about her grandma in the Washington Post in 2021.  The online biographies of Frank and Yuan suggest that they are both at work on biographies of C.-S. Wu.  I think both books would be most welcome.  The Chiang biography, despite its many strengths, leaves much to be desired, and Wu deserves a more substantial biography.  She should be considered one of the titans of 20th century experimental physics.

 

Fluid Dynamics in Salt Lake City

I have blogged previously about attending the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego (2018) for the first (and so far only) time, and the APS March Meeting in Las Vegas (2023), my fourth time attending that meeting.  I don't typically blog about the conferences I attend, but it behooves me to post today about one more, the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics annual meeting, which took place last week (Nov. 24-26) in Salt Lake City.  This is because fluid dynamics has been a central part of my scientific career, as well as a cornerstone of this blog.  Indeed, the Salt Lake City meeting was my sixth DFD.  My previous five have all been after I left graduate school:

• 2003:  Meadowlands, NJ.
• 2005:  Chicago, IL
• 2009:  Minneapolis, MN
• 2012:  San Diego, CA
• 2014:  San Francisco, CA

As can be seen, I had not attended DFD in exactly a decade.  Partly this is because I decided at the 2014 meeting that the APS March Meeting was probably of greater interest to me than a conference specialized in fluid mechanics, especially since the March Meeting had plenty of fluids sessions itself.  However, the March Meeting tends to be attended by physicists who do fluids; while DFD is dominated by engineers, applied mathematicians, and various Earth & planetary scientists who do fluids -- a much better representative group of this discipline. However I have found in my latter years that my interests in fluid mechanics tends towards historical, pedagogical, and foundational issues, rather than the cutting edge of research, which is what DFD showcases.  Nonetheless, attending DFD once a decade, while attending the March Meeting more often, may be quite appropriate in order to nourish my intellectual interests in physics and fluid mechanics.

Anyhow, this year's DFD was held at the Salt Palace convention center in downtown Salt Lake City.

The West Temple entrance to the Salt Palace Convention Center

I arrived on Saturday evening Nov. 23 to pick up my badge, but through a different entrance where a cheer-leading competition was taking place!  There was glitter all over the carpet, and children practicing their routines in the hallway.  I ran into a colleague in the hallway who must have seen my utterly bewildered expression, and he kindly directed me towards the DFD registration area.  Here is a shot of that part of the convention center at a calmer moment.

The DFD registration area at the Salt Palace Convention Center, as seen from near the West Temple entrance.

The meeting got going promptly at 8am Sunday morning, while the evening reception ran well into the night.  I don't think I headed back to my hotel until around 9pm that night, despite having forgotten that I had been given two free drink tickets for the reception.  (Thus I never used those tickets.)  The second morning session on Sunday featured a new "Interact" poster session, which began with one-minute flash talks by each poster presenter, followed by time for the audience to speak with the poster presenters one-on-one.  I attended the session on Rayleigh-Benard convection, which was graced by two top figures in the field:  Robert Ecke and K. R. Sreenivasan.  Unfortunately the latter's poster consisted of printouts of a recent paper published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the author did not stay very long, as I'm sure he had other people's posters in other sessions that he wanted to see.  Logistically, the flash talk portion of the session was difficult to execute gracefully, despite everyone's best efforts.  I'm not sure if this was much of an improvement over a regular poster session.

Hall C, where many of the plenary events, including the awards session, took place.

After lunch, the awards session took place in Hall C, presided over by this year's DFD chair, Peko Hosoi of MIT.  The reception, which was not a full scale banquet, took place in the exhibit hall (Hall A) at 7pm.

Entrance to Hall A, the exhibit area.

In the previous 5 DFD meetings, the reception included a real banquet.  Most memorable for me were the receptions for the 2003 and 2012 DFD meetings.  In 2003, the reception was held at Tavern on the Green, in Central Park of New York City.  Buses were provided to take us there.  I recall having conversations with Stephen W. Morris and (more briefly) Troy Shinbrot there.  At dinner I was seated with a professor and his wife, of Eastern European origin, whose names I cannot recall.  I remember the conversation turning toward the professor's son, who had pursued a non-lucrative career in avant-garde film-making.  Alas, the good professor appears to have been incredibly disappointed with his son's career choice.  He seemed to praise my contrasting choice to pursue a scientific career, albeit not one centered in academia, and not even closely related to fluid dynamics.  At the 2012 DFD reception, I befriended a French post-doc, and after dinner we went for a long walk along the marina, almost reaching the U.S.S. Midway, before turning back.  The post-doc had once worked for a technology start up, but their product, while technically quite innovative, provided only a marginal practical improvement over its existing competitors, and customers found it difficult to justify the cost (not just financial, but in requiring specialized training) to use the product.  It was a sound lesson in scientific entrepreneurship.  Eventually I began peppering him with questions about French politics and culture (this was the era of the presidencies of Monsieurs Sarkozy and Hollande).

Alas at this year's reception, I didn't have any interesting conversations at all.  I have also noticed across several conferences that I've attended this year that there are fewer exhibitors, especially book exhibitors.  Here, only SIAM and Cambridge University Press were purveying books (the latter was also promoting the Journal of Fluid Mechanics), while AIP Publishing and APS' Physical Review Fluids were hawking their journals.  I placed an order for two books with SIAM, and picked up a book (60% discount with reservation if picked up on site) from Cambridge, Joseph Powers' Mechanics of Fluids, which look to be very promising.  After returning home I placed an additional order for more Cambridge books, using the meeting 30% discount code.  I've felt for over a decade that they are the lead publisher in fluid mechanics, and I am pleased that they have not yet abandoned the conference circuit, though they may be feeling less and less competition these days.  JFM was celebrating its 1000th volume, and a commemorative brochure was distributed at the conference, which I think will be a lovely keepsake.  However, unlike the previous DFDs I've attended, there was no brochure prepared regarding the Gallery of Fluid Motion entrees.

Monday morning I mainly attended the Education and Outreach session, which featured many talks on in-class lab demos as well as alternatives to traditional textbooks.  I then attended the Fluids Education lunch, which was not clearly described ahead of time.  It turned out to be a panel discussion with lunch provided.  The table I sat at was not very talkative at all, so it wasn't a very social event, unlike the various mixers featured at other conferences I've attended this year.  Monday afternoon featured a poster session.  I zeroed in on one poster that was closely related to my graduate work from over 20 years ago, and while initially the presenters were absent, two of the authors eventually turned up, and I was able to talk to them.  There were also at least two rather controversial posters, which I will not discuss here, as they do not deserve any further attention.  (I am told that an ethics complaint was filed with APS regarding one of them.)

That evening, attendees were invited to visit the Leonardo Museum, a few blocks away, which currently has a major exhibit on flight, as well as smaller exhibits on AI, water, and a special exhibit related to the meeting, the Traveling Gallery of Fluid Motion (TGFM).  This is the second year of the TGFM, and this year's exhibit is titled "Spiraling Upwards".  For an additional $15, we could attend a private reception welcoming the TGFM, where the artists (one was a real artist, the others were DFD researchers) each gave a few words about their works.

The Leonardo Museum in Salt Lake City.

The Leonardo Museum was quite an appropriate venue for this event, as Leonardo DaVinci, its namesake, was a keen observer of fluid motion, and he rediscovered what we call the hydraulic continuity equation, a precursor of the mass balance principle in modern fluid dynamics.

I attended additional sessions on Tuesday, though I took a long lunch break to enjoy pho at a busy downtown eatery called Tamarind, which I highly recommend!

I've been away from physics and fluid mechanics for over two decades, so unlike conferences in my current field, where I constantly run into people I know, I am very much an outsider at the March Meeting and DFD conferences.  Indeed, I met only 3 people that I knew from before at this year's DFD, though I intend to reach out to a few others whom I met there and have some professional interests with.