Condensed concepts

Oxford University Press has a nice podcast on Very Short Introductions.  In each episode, an author of a specific volume has 10-15 minutes to introduce themself and answer several questions. What is X [the subject of the VSI]? What got you first interested in X? What are the key aspects of X that you would like everyone to know? The ones I have listened to and particularly liked are Infinity , Philosophy of Science , Evangelicalism , Development , Consciousness , Behavioural Economics, and Modern China. Tomorrow, I am recording an episode for Condensed Matter Physics: A Very Short Introduction. Here is a practise version  of the audio and the draft text is below.  I welcome feedback. VSI Podcast  I am Ross McKenzie. I am an Emeritus professor of physics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. I have spent the past forty years learning, teaching, and researching condensed matter physics. I really love the Very Short Introduction series and so I am delighted to share my

 I really liked reading Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi . She is an amazing writer. I recently reread some of it for an extended family book club. Just check out some of these quotes.  A colleague suggested I might like Lessons in Chemistry , a novel by Bonnie Garmus. I have not read the book yet, but I have watched the first two episodes of the TV version on AppleTV. I watched the first episode for free. The show contains a good mix of humour, love of science, and feminism. The chemistry dialogue seems to be correct. The show chronicles just how in the 1950s how awful life was for a young woman who aspired to be a scientist. Things have improved. But there is still a long way to go... 

A few months ago, the New York Times ran a fascinating Guest Opinion,  Why Universities Should Be More Like Monasteries  by Molly Worth, a historian at University of North Carolina. She describes a popular undergraduate course, the "monk" class, at the University of Pennsylvania.  On the first day of class — officially called Living Deliberately — Justin McDaniel, a professor of Southeast Asian and religious studies, reviewed the rules. Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him. This got me wondering about whether universities and funding agencies might experiment with similar initiatives for faculty. It might be a bit like the Aspen Center for Physics and Gordon Research Conferences were before the internet. Faculty would surrender their

The public release of ChatGPT was a landmark that surprised many people, both in the general public and researchers working in Artificial Intelligence. All of a sudden it seemed Large Language Models had capabilities that some thought were a decade away or even not possible. It is like the field underwent a "phase transition." This idea turns out to be more than just a physics metaphor. It has been made concrete and rigorous in the following paper. Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models Jason Wei, Yi Tay, Rishi Bommasani, Colin Raffel, Barret Zoph, Sebastian Borgeaud, Dani Yogatama, Maarten Bosma, Denny Zhou, Donald Metzler, Ed H. Chi, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Oriol Vinyals, Percy Liang, Jeff Dean, William Fedus They use the following definition, "Emergence is when quantitative changes in a system result in qualitative changes in behavior," citing Phil Anderson's classic "More is Different" article. [Even though the article does not contain the wor