Strings, Rings, and Other Things

Classes in Claremont have been completely finished for a couple of weeks, and I have a busy summer ahead of me. A lot of that is research[1], since I really ought to finish a paper by the time I apply for jobs this fall. But I'm about to take a break from that: I'll be out of town for most of the next three weeks on back to back trips.

Our first adventure is a trip to Yosemite and Sequoia/King's Canyon National Parks, sandwiched between seeing friends at a pair of weekend parties in the San Francisco area. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to squeeze some final life out of the National Parks Pass we got on our trip to Nebraska last year. After the ABL party on the 21st, we're going to stick around for a couple of days: Kim and I realized that we've never actually explored San Francisco, so this is our chance. (Other than the Exploratorium and perhaps a bit of a walking tour in the city center, we haven't decided what to do yet. Any advice?)

Once we get home, we'll have about a day and a half to frantically pay bills and do laundry before we head off on trip #2, a visit to see friends in and near Chicago followed by a drive to see my family (and friends) in Nebraska. I'm going to get together with my graduate advisor in Chicago to talk about a paper we still need to push out the door, but most of our time there will be spent with friends or doing fun stuff in town that we've missed. The trip to Nebraska will have some friends and fun, too, but it will have a serious side as well (one reason for going is that my grandmother is ill, and we may not want to wait until Christmas to visit). Still, the scariest part of the whole plan will probably be the cost of gas driving from Chicago to Nebraska and back: we've gotten awfully used to our Prius, but it's hard to find them for rent.

After that, it's back home to California and to physics. (I probably ought to figure out how to teach quantum mechanics at some point...) Should be fun!


[1] I have a project related to "doubled geometry" that I'm trying to finish (though at the moment I might be tempted to say "salvage"); it's a fascinating idea, and I think it may be directly relevant to some work I did in grad school. But before I plunged into that, I spent the past couple of weeks trying to see if I had anything interesting to say about the recent string theory fad regarding a possible M2-brane theory proposed by Bagger and Lambert (the answer appears to be "no", especially given the recent discovery that their model may not have any new content after all, but I did spot an interesting brane configuration that I may explore more in the future).

Well, after two or three weeks of near-incessant travel (including one stop by home that lasted just 11 hours), I've finally made a decision on a job for next year. I've accepted the offer to be a visiting assistant professor of physics at the Joint Sciences Department in Claremont; I think that I'll officially be associated with Scripps, but Joint Sciences is fairly independent so that designiation doesn't mean much. This will be cool: after visiting other excellent places, I've really come to recognize how unique the environment in the Claremont Colleges actually is (lots of great shared resources, and other colleagues at nearby schools including a string theorist at Mudd). It's a good job.

Now I can actually get back to thinking about work. I've just published another paper and given a talk at a string theory conference, but there's a lot left to do before I can finish and defend my thesis. Plus, we need to figure out where to live next year. :) Meanwhile, to those of you currently in southern California, we'll be seeing you soon!

About a year ago, I gave a talk to the Chicago chapter of the MIT Alumni Club on the basics of string theory (with a few equations). It was a fun experience, and after all this time I've finally put the slides online (along with some explanatory text to take the place of my spoken comments). You can find it at my site on slimy.com if you'd like to take a look.

I haven't linked it up from my main website yet, because I get a fair bit of traffic (mostly from my Lagrange multipliers tutorial, with a little bleed-over from my Tolkien site and my Prom King story) and I still feel like parts of this thing aren't up to "final draft" quality. The slides are fine (I hope!), and they aren't going to change in any case, but I wrote some chunks of the explanatory text late at night (which may have made it even more rambling than usual). So if you have any helpful comments (or complaints), I'd love to hear them! Once I've gotten a few eyes to look at the thing, I'll go ahead and share it with the world more directly.