Some good stuff in Quanta magazine

I'd like to highlight a couple of excellent physics articles that appeared in Quanta magazine last month.

First, Thomas Lewton profiles Jonathan Oppenheim's work on hybrid classical-quantum theories of quantum gravity.  The idea seems to be that instead of attempting to quantize the gravitational field, let it remain classical.  To reconcile quantum uncertainty with a classical spacetime, gravity must be stochastic; it must be noisy.  

Second, Katie McCormick discusses a topological insulator analogy that has been used to explain atmospheric motions such as Kelvin waves in the Earth's atmosphere.  Taruh Matsuno's successful prediction of equatorial Kelvin waves in the 1960s was, evidently, one of the only times theoretical work in geophysical fluid dynamics was predictive of phenomena later discovered in nature.  The article focuses on Brad Marston and collaborators' theoretical and observational work demonstrating that Matsuno's waves can be understood using a topological insulator analogy (think quantum Hall effect).  Once again, a theoretical prediction (Poincare gravity waves in the stratosphere) was subsequently confirmed observationally.  Finally the article discusses David Tong's quantum field theoretical framing of coastal Kelvin waves.

I had attended a talk by Marston at the APS March Meeting earlier this year (see my earlier post), but did not quite follow it.  I am grateful to Quanta magazine for distilling the story into a form that can be consumed by a wider public (including me).

A decade of DTLR

The Diffusion Tensor Literary Review celebrates ten years of operation this month.  DTLR's first post is dated July 21, 2013.  In the decade since, the world has changed considerably, as have science, engineering, and medicine.  When I started this blog, I did not foresee it continuing for as long as a decade.  

Looking over the record of previous posts, there were some lean years from 2017-2019, when output was less than ten posts per year. The most productive year was its first, 2013, technically barely a half-year, and the second most productive was, more recently, 2021, measured by number of posts.  It seems the most popular topics have included fluid mechanics, reproducible research, and scientific publishing.  There have also been book reviews, and salutes to departed scientists Jerry Gollub, Edward N. Lorenz, Steven Weinberg, and Gordon Moore.  Two of my favorite posts are memoirs of conferences, the Joint Mathematics Meeting (2017) in San Diego, and the American Physical Society March Meeting (2023) in Las Vegas.  There has been plenty of criticism and opinion on this blog.  All together, an eclectic mixture.  Let's see what our second decade will bring.

Prometheus' Great Minds series on physics

Continuing the theme of my last post, the publisher Prometheus (which is now owned by Roman & Littlefield) has perhaps a more extensive catalog of "classics" in physics and astronomy than the others mentioned in my previous post.  As far as I can tell, their Great Minds series includes:

• Moritz Schlick's Space and Time in Contemporary Physics:  An Introduction to the Theory of Relativity and Gravitation.
• Fred Holye's Of Men and Galaxies.
• James Clerk Maxwell's Matter and Motion.
• William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait's The Elements of Natural Philosophy.
• Marie Curie's Radioactive Substances.
• Michael Faraday's The Forces of Matter.
• Johannes Kepler's Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World.  (Selections of both works are published together in a single volume.)
• Nicholaus Copernicus' On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres.
• Galileo Galilei's Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences.
• Isaac Newton's Principia.
• Albert Einstein's Relativity.

Some of the above volumes consist only in selections, rather than the entire work.

This series is perhaps second only to Dover Publications in its effort to keep in print some of the classic works in the history of physics and astronomy.

Oxford World Classics volumes on physics

Continuing a theme from my post last year on the Norton Critical Editions in natural science, today I'd like to take a look at another series, the Oxford World Classics.  This is a series of classic works, mostly in literature, though other subjects are included, including natural science.  There are two volumes of Charles Darwin's works, two of Sigmund Freud's, and a few works in medicine and natural history.  I'm going to focus here on works in physics.  As far as I can tell, there are only three:

• Aristotle's Physics.
• Galileo's Selected Writings.
• Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Greatest World Systems.

I see then that this series does not overlap with Norton's, whose only physics contribution I know of are selected works of Newton.  The other, and most famous, competing series is, of course, the Penguin Classics, of which there are well over a thousand volumes.  Theirs is a catalog so vast that I have not attempted to mine it to see what volumes of physics interest there may be.  However, according to Wikipedia, one is Albert Einstein's Relativity:  The Special and General Theory.  I see that separately, Penguin also publishes The Essential Einstein, edited by Stephen Hawking, a collection of selected works.

New images from the Inouye Solar Telescope

Evidently a couple weeks ago the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope released a set of new images of the solar photosphere.  The new telescope is still in its commissioning phase.  The images are quite impressive.

H/T:  Sabine Hossenfelder

Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science celebrates 50th anniversary

The Verlag von Julius Springer, now called Springer Nature, is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science this year.  As I write this, there are over 13,800 volumes published in the series, though most of the earliest ones are long out of print.  The series also boasts two subseries, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics.  Most of the volumes in LNCS are actually meeting/conference proceedings.  Indeed, almost 20 years ago I co-authored a paper published in the refereed proceedings of a workshop that appeared in LNCS.  In the nearly 2 decades since, that paper has garnered well over 300 citations, according to Google Scholar.  Based on that n=1 case, I would say that the series successfully disseminated the research we reported in our contribution.

DTLR congratulates Springer on the 50th anniversary of LNCS.

The 2023 Abel Prize

Additional news this week includes the awarding of this year's Abel Prize in Mathematics to Luis A. Caffarelli, for his work in nonlinear partial differential equations.  Of interest to DTLR is his 1982 work, with Robert Kohn and 2015 Abel Laureate Louis Nirenberg, on singularities in the Navier-Stokes equations, work directly relevant to the topic of the (still unsolved) Clay Millenium Prize problem related to the Navier-Stokes equations.

The Abel Prize was begun a few years after I left graduate school, so I consider it a recent phenomenon.  It is intended to be considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics.  In reading the list of past laureates, I realized that I've attended lectures by several.  I attended a lecture by 2015 laureate John Nash at New York University, likely in 2008 or 2009.  Unfortunately Dr. Nash and his wife were killed while traveling home from the Abel Prize ceremony.  Also around the same era (Dec. 2008), I attended the 100th Statistical Mechanics conference of Rutgers University.  There were many notable speakers there, and as I reread the speaker list, I am amazed.  The 2007 Abel laureate, Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan, and future 2014 Abel laureate Yakov G. Sinai, both spoke there.  I honestly can't recall watching their lectures, nor those of many other luminaries on the list (including names I did not come to fully appreciate until over a decade later).  I do recollect sitting next to Juan Maldacena at the conference dinner, where I couldn't resist bringing up Lee Smolin's argument against string theory (see Smolin's book, The Trouble with Physics).  Dr. Maldacena's response (I'm paraphrasing) was that many smart people work on string theory, and they wouldn't be doing that if it were as hopeless as Smolin seems to think.

I have only met one Abel laureate in person, and only briefly, Peter D. Lax (2005), during a visit to the Courant Institute in the mid-2000s. Similarly, while I have attended lectures by dozens of Nobel laureates (too many to attempt to list here), I only met one in person, and again only briefly:  the late Paul C. Lauterbur, 2003 laureate in physiology or medicine.  I met him at a book signing of his at the San Francisco IEEE EMBS annual meeting in 2004.