The dire consequences of perfectionism

I have written posts previously about the dangers of perfectionism in research and teaching. Hence, there was a quote in a New York Times article about the nuclear accidents in Japan that got my attention.

Nils J. Diaz, a nuclear engineer who led the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2003 to 2006 and had visited the Daiichi plant.

Mr. Diaz suggested that the Japanese might have acted too slowly to prevent overheating, including procedures that might have required the venting of small amounts of steam and radiation, rather than risk a wholesale meltdown. Fear among Japanese regulators over public reaction to such small releases may have delayed plant operators from acting as quickly as they might have, he said — a problem arising in part from the country’s larger nuclear regulatory culture.

“They would rather wait and do things in a perfect manner instead of doing it as good as it needs to be now,” Mr. Diaz said. “And this search for perfection has often led to people sometimes hiding things or waiting too long to do things.”

Is space-time emergent?

On Friday at UQ we had a very stimulating colloquium A new view on quantum gravity and the origin of the Universe by Bei-Lok Hu (University of Maryland). A key aspect of this new view is that general relativity and space time should be viewed as emergent phenomena (more below).

There are six main points of experimental evidence in cosmology:
1. Hubble expansion of the universe.
2. Cosmic microwave background radiation (isotropy and uniformity).
3. Element abundance (+ nucleosynthesis)
4. Ratio of baryon/photon (entropy content of universe)
5. Structure: galaxy, clusters,...   hierarchy of scales
6. Cosmological constant ~ 0,  vacuum energy density

The fact that the night sky is dark implies a finite universe, and expansion or a hierarichial structure  (Olber's paradox).

Hu contrasted Two views of quantum gravity.

1. Bottom up view
Quantum gravity = quantisation of general relativity
This is the more traditional view and has been dominant.

2. Top down view
Gravity is emergent  and general relativity should be viewed as the "hydrodynamics" of some underlying "microscopic" theory.
This means that one must deal with a micro-macro transition as well as a quantum-classical one. This view has become more popular in the last 5 years.

Hu's advocacy of 2. is summarised in detail in a conference paper.

It should be pointed out that Bob Laughlin has also advocated such a perspective. His book, A Different Universe, has a chapter, The Fabric of Space-Time, which ends with the claim that if Einstein were alive today he would,

conclude that his beloved principle of relativity was not fundamental at all but emergent - a collective property of the matter constituting space-time that becomes increasingly exact at long length scales but fails at short ones. This is a  different idea from his original one but something fully compatible with it logically, and even more exciting and potentially important. It would mean that the fabric of space-time was not simply the stage on which life played out but an organizational phenomenon, and that there might be something beyond.

R.B. Laughlin, A Different Universe, p. 126

[See also his 2004 Perspective, The Cup of the Hand, in Science].

On monday we will have another colloquium, this one by Thanu Padmanabhan (IUCAA, Pune University), and advocating a similar view, and summarised in this conference paper.

Advice to beginning lecturers

Starting to teach/lecture is a daunting and often overwhelming task. Many a young faculty member has seen their research program grind to a halt as they embark on teaching their first course. Furthermore, it can be a very stressful rather than an enjoyable experience.
Here are a few things I wish someone had told me or if they did that I had listened and taken to heart!

• Your first lectures don't have to be perfect! Limit how many hours you spend on preparation. You can always polish lectures the second and third time you give the course.
• Your goal should be to just survive.
• Don't under-estimate how little students will learn or how little they know! Most of the new insights and subtleties you are getting as you prepare the lectures will be lost on the students. Just because they had covered a subject in a pre-requisite course does not all mean that they actually know and understand that material.
• Technology should be your friend not a slave master. Blackboard, TurnItin, course blogs, online quizes, computer simulations etc. can greatly reduce your workload. But beware of getting bogged down with technical problems with making these things work. Never write your own software. It just isn't worth the time.
• The textbook is your friend (and the students). The more you follow it the easier it is for everyone. Again, don't be a perfectionist and take material from lots of different books (unless you are teaching an advanced level graduate course).
• Don't pander to unrealistic expectations of a small number of students or fear student evaluations.
• Don't use Powerpoint too much. It may be slick but students will quickly go to sleep. Derivations should be done on the board by hand.
• Keep it simple.
• At the beginning clearly state the goal of the lecture. At the end clearly state the main point.
• Enjoy! It is  a great joy and privilege kindling student interest and understanding. An added bonus is how much you will learn too!

Good vibrations

 I have been trying to learn some of the basics of infra-red spectroscopy of organic compounds and found this site for an organic chemistry lab course at University of Missouri helpful. Why should a quantum many-body theorist care?
Well, it turns out that the frequency, intensity, and lineshape associated with particular chemical bonds are quite sensitive to the type of bonding involved and the local environment of the bond, including valence states, orbital hybridisation, charge distribution, and the presence of resonating valence bond structures.
Previously I posted about the vibrational frequencies of O-H stretches associated with hydrogen bonding. The Table below, taken from here illustrates and summarises some of these effects.

But maybe someone could recommend a good book or review article. I struggled to find one online...


Table 1. A summary of the principle infrared bands and their assignments.
R is an aliphatic group.

Objectivity has a price

The movie The Inside Job is an Academy Award winning documentary which considers the origins of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). It particularly focuses on conflicts of interest, including of economists in universities who write academic papers and books, sympathetic to vested interests, but do not reveal in those publications that they have received large consulting fees from those interests.

Last year, the director of the movie, Charles Ferguson, wrote a compelling and challenging article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Larry Summers and the Subversion of Economics, which documents these conflicts of interest, and how they represent a serious problem for the university and government.

It is worth reading a post on the Creative Destruction blog. One economics faculty member from Gettysburg College writes:

But are these economists corrupt? Have they been peddling the economic ideology of deregulated financial markets knowing that it is a load of crap? I don't know, but my gut tells me that's going too far. I think rather that they are the victims and perpetrators of groupthink. Having entered the world of high finance they become desensitized and sympathetic to the culture and stop questioning the worldview of those who are paying their consulting fees. They lose certain of their critical faculties - and that is a real problem, because the ability to examine issues critically is central to their identity as academics. In the end a guy like Frederic Mishkin comes off in the movie not as corrupt or malevolent, but simply clueless. He's so deep in the tank he doesn't know how deep he is. In the end my contempt for these guys is rooted not in my sense that they're corrupt but that they've made themselves lousy economists.

On a related subject, the Director of the London School of Economics (LSE) has had to resign because of links with Libya, including "giving" a Ph.D to one of Gadaffi's sons.
Gaddafi's thesis proves money talks, especially in halls of academe.

As I have said before, human nature is such that once large amounts of money, power, prestige, and/or bureaucracy become involved, the quest for the real truth becomes difficult. This applies in any research.

Downloading Youtube videos with Safari

There are great videos on Youtube that can be used for teaching and to liven up seminars. I found the method described here works fine. I only post this because I seem to recall last time I did it was more involved..

Seeking a universal description of hydrogen bonds

This morning I read a paper, Estimating the hydrogen bond energy, which is one of the most downloaded papers from the Journal of Physical Chemistry. It considers a relatively simple criteria (going back to Davidson in 1967) for estimating a bond energy in terms of the two-center shared electron number, sigma.

It also connects to the natural bond orbital approach of Weinhold where a hydrogen bond D-H...A is viewed as an interaction between the unoccupied anti-bonding orbital of the DH bond and the the occupied nonbonded natural orbital (e.g. lone pair) of the acceptor atom A.

The authors perform quantum chemistry [most DFT with B2LYP-D] calculations for hundreds of H bonds. They find correlations between sigma and the bond energy, the H...A length, the shift in the D-H stretch frequency.

There were a couple of things I found strange about the paper.

1. Many quantities are calculated with quantum chemistry at different levels of theory and compared. But, I could never find a case where a calculated quantity was actually compared to an experimental value.

2. It makes the following claim:

Intramolecular hydrogen bonds are very interesting, but they are not accessible directly from experiment. Hence, theoretical results are the only reference data. 

Surely this is an overstatement. Consider for example, the work discussed in this earlier post I made.