Well I finally got off my butt and left the computer for a bit on Friday. I went out to Uni to discuss the papers I’ve been working on with my PhD supervisor. He thinks that the papers are ready for publication. So after a little bit of light editing they should be on their way to the physics archive and eventually (hopefully) to a print journal. I’ve had these papers on my desk in various forms for a long time and I’ll be glad to be finished with them.

Doing the research is alot of fun, but writing it up is really quite boring. We also discussed the research itself a bit and he gave me a few ideas to pursue. I have developed quite a few of my own ideas and have been scribbling away in my note books. The work is very technical and is hard to describe, even to other mathematicians. When I first started working on quantum groups the whole area seemd so opaque. Early on, my supervisor gave me a pile of notes he’d written on the subject, most of which was actually new research. To keep the size of the notes down (120 pages) he left out a lot of the working, so I spent the next 12 months filling in the details and learning the subject. When I was done he handed me a third set of notes (65 pages) describing more recent research he had done. I started working on these, checking the results and extending them.These results are now the basis of the two papers. There are many more calculations that can’t be put into the papers, but these will go into my thesis (it is currently at about 100 pages and growing in size at an alarming rate). The thesis itself is still in very rough form and will need a lot of editing, I haven’t put in all the recent results yet.

I’ve been invited to a small meeting of quantum theorists this week.They will be discussing variuos aspects of quantum computing and information. One of the fellows talking has been developing ideas in quantum computing that are closely related to research I did back in 2000, so I’ll be keen to talk to him. I never bothered to publish the research because I wasn’t happy with it and thought that the applications were too limited. Perhaps I didn’t waste that year working on what I thought was a dead end.

A beautiful light rain has started to fall. It’s a nice change from the merciless heat we’ve been having. A nice day to tuck into some books.

2005 is the World Year of Physics. This year marks the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s miraculous year   in which he published three revolutionary papers:

• March 1905 Explanation of the photoelectric effect.
• May 1905 Explanation of Brownian motion.
• June 1905 The theory of special relativity.

Three of his 1905 papers can be found at the Chronology of Milestone Events in Particle Physics. These papers are

• Concerning an Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation of Light. (Introduction of light quanta).
• On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. (The great relativity paper.)
• Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on its Energy Content ? (Septemebr 1905, E = mc² paper).

Einstein’s paper on Brownian motion is available here.

As part of the Einstein centenary I’ve decided that it’s time to brush up on some general relativity (GR). A few years back I was going to do the GR course in the local physics department. When I started my degree, there were no physics prerequisites and there was no way in hell I was going to do any physics labs, I’m a theorist not an experimentalist (I did a huge amount of lab work in a previous life). So I happily went along, until 4th year when they changed the rules, so a few of my fellow students and I were left up the creek without a quantum mechanical analogue of a paddle , we needed physics prereqs, even though the course was given by mathematicians and there were no formal prerequisites the year before. Actually the informal prerequisite used to be “sufficient mathematical maturity”, which meant having done such a shitload of maths that you could probably handle anything they threw at you.

Anyway, enough griping. I never got any formal training in relativity but that doessn’t matter, I think 5 years of research has given me enough mathematical maturity. When I started my PhD my supervisor gave me a rather large pile of notes that took me more than a year to work through, and that was only to get up to speed with the topic.

Fortunately I’ve been doing my PhD part-time (until recently I was working full time) so I’ve had more than enough time to read all the related literature (and it is voluminous, considering this particular field only begain around 1990). I really should be working on something related to my PhD but I’d rather fiddle with the equations a bit more than write them up and get them published. I have two papers sitting here that are almost ready to submit to the journals. I need to trim them a bit before submitting, I think I’ve put in too many details. I’ve taken an interlude in my PhD studies recently and have been reading on whatever topic takes my fancy: differential geometry, cubic equations, relativity and a fair bit of cosmology. Lately I’ve been fascinated by the accelerated expansion of the universe, but I’ll save my musings for another post.

I’ve got three wonderful books on relativity sitting on my desk right now and a bunch of reprints, preprints and other stuff all over the place.

Now I just need to find a few spare hours, a place to put my whiteboard and some peace and quiet.