Everybody's physics
Give me a moment of your day, and let me put a picture in your mind. Imagine you and a friend each have a soup in a plate, and each soup has two carrot pieces, one potato and not so much broth in it. You are bored, it is a slow afternoon, so you decide to perform a little experiment.
I remember the first time I saw a magnifying glass. I was absolutely fascinated by such an object. It allowed me to see so much more than I could normally (even then, when I could actually see something without glasses or contacts). It was the most amazing thing I had seen until then. Well, what was an amazing discovery for me, had been around for ages in human history. Lenses and objects which resemble magnifying glasses date back four thousand years! But of course, our curiosity is boundless, we humans always need more. I quickly found myself wanting to see even deeper into this weird, amplified creatures. Fortunately, humans didn’t wait a lot to yearn for better resolutions.
Today, in Venice, the sun does not shine, it roars. Yesterday, the city was completely soaked as a storm paraded through it, giving thunderous signals of its arrival. But today golden hues flood the air, contrasting with the shadows of the trees near the Palazzo del Casinó. The wind blows calmly and the smell of sea salt fills the air. Outside, the sea hums, the boats sail, and the tourists roam the streets of the islands in search of a taste of the past. I am sitting outside of the venue of the conference, drinking a coffee, admiring the day, and admiring the excruciatingly white buildings in front of me.
Science can be sometimes daunting for the unexperienced. Have you ever seen a scientific talk, or read a paper? There tends to be a lot of jargon flying around, circling the speaker to then buzz aggressively around the audience before it goes out the windows into the oblivion of the coffee break.
Continue reading “The Hitchhikers Guide to Many Body Physics” →
We really should have started with some fancy quote, spoken in the past, and reverberating into the ages to come. But we didn’t. So let’s start instead with a small experiment. Fill a cup with something. No, not coffee, we know you were thinking about it. Something clear. You need to see through it. You also need to have some little pieces of something floating homogeneously around in your cup, like chia seeds once they are really squishy, or that weird aloe drink they sell at the supermarket. The latter, in fact, proves to be the best for this experiment.
Many Body Physics