Physicist Amok

Thursday, 7 May 2008

I took the night train from Lausanne to Padova, changing in Bologna. I shared my couchette on the way to Padova with three other people trying to sleep, one of whom snored intermittently. Drunken Swiss occupied the rest of the car. They drank wine, they yelled, from time to time they broke into song. This persisted across the border, until an Italian man boarded the train and swore at them ntil they fell silent. I heard nothing more from them.

There is a lesson to be learned here. I had asked them to be quiet politely in French. Everyone in the car heard the Italian, and “porco” — just about as bad as Italian insults get — figured prominently in his diatribe. In future, I shall subject all offenders to loud English and be sure to include a graphic description of their mothers’ habits.

The couchette was hot, stuffy, and uncomfortable. The conductor brought me two dry brioche and some acidic orange juice at 5:00 before I changed trains. But I arrived at 7:30 in Padova with the whole day before me. This is the only point in favor of the night train.

The Geneva pa kua instructor reserved rooms for us all at the Casa del Pellegrino next to the Basilica di Sant’Antonio. It’s clean (and the hallways smell slightly of disinfectant), as conveniently placed as is physically possible, and quiet when the basilica’s bells aren’t ringing. It’s cheap: €40/night for a single, and €50-80/night for a double. The staff are friendly. If the rooms had a refrigerator, what more could I ask? But they don’t, which makes it hard to keep food.

I unpacked and started walking. I saw the Basilica di Sant’Antonio and several other churches. I saw an interesting sundial. I saw a collection of old scientific instruments. The latter was sufficiently random to deserve further comment.

Pietro-Paulo Gallo is the physics teacher at a surveying high school (an Instituto della Geometria) on the west side of Padova. In two rooms on the school’s ground floor he has a couple hundred devices ranging from early lead batteries to telescopes. I followed a tiny sign in a back alley which named the museum, announced myself at the front desk in my broken Italian, and was introduced to a scruffy, older gentleman in a tweed suit, who spoke with a lisp that was pure dialect. He gave me an hour of his time, showing me his beloved instruments, and I have to say that it is a really fine collection.

Then I took myself south to the Prato della Valle to eat a lunch of bread, cheese, and apples in the shade of a tree — a pleasure somewhat spoiled because I had scalded the roof of my mouth on a cup of real, Italian hot chocolate that morning. But it was worth it: the milk frothed within an inch of its life, and the chocolate so thick you can stand a spoon up in it. No one makes hot chocolate as well as the Italians.

The Prato della Valle is a green park centered around a fountain, bounded by circular moat. The moat is full of fish, a fact that visiting school groups, all of which eat their lunch on the island, point out in loud voices daily. The school children fill the island’s interior during siesta, but the city has thoughtfully erected statues of famous Italians every 10m around the inner and outer rim of the moat expressly for people like me to recline against, or so I assume from the number of other people doing precisely the same thing. Beyond the outer ring of statues is a ring of grass, an empty, paved area, and then, and only then, a lane of traffic around the huge piazza.

This habitability is a characteristic that seems peculiar to Italian cities. Other countries have habitable towns — the south of France in particular — but major cities like Mantova, Bologna, Padova are as friendly to people as the villages. Constructing monuments to be sat on is only part of it. Padova, like Bologna, has arcades along all its streets. No matter where you go there is shade, shelter, something to lean against. It keeps the streets narrow so cars must conform to humans and not vice versa. But even these would be a prison if it were not for the magical sense of space. The streets bend continually, so what you can see is not much longer than it is wide. The buildings all connect, but they are different heights, different shapes, different colors, which sets a scale much smaller than that of the whole street. The effect is one of spcious back lleys you can span with your arms.

After lunch I went back to the hotel to sleep a couple of hours before the seminar’s first session started at 15:00. It started at 15:00, we took a break at 16:00, and continued until 21:00. Then Toni uttered the line, “Let’s meet in the hotel lobby in half an hour to go get dinner.” I was there. Ten minutes later another fellow showed up. We went on to the restaurant — it was apparently decided after I left — to find two more waiting for us. Toni and his girlfriend showed up about 22:00. Despite this, I had a very decent octopus salad and spaghetti alle vonghele.

Friday, 8 May 2008

After yesterday’s activity I need not say how well I slept. I awoke to my alarm just before the basilica’s bells rang 7:00. At this juncture let me add another item to my list of travel necessities: a knife. Fortunately I was perspicacious enough to hoard a plastic spoon from a cup of gelato yesterday, and it served to spread blueberry jam on bread for my breakfast.

I left the hotel with a simple agenda: buy food for lunch and dinner. In my walk from the train station the previous morning I had seen an open fruit and vegetable market in the Piazza delle Erbe, and I returned there.

Italian markets are glorious. It is torture to walk past butchers, fresh pasta stands, and seafood vendors, and know that I don’t have a kitchen. The stands in the piazza were part of just such a market, an open building whose passages hold the butchers, the cheese shops, seafood, fresh pasta, chocolate, coffee; the seasonal vendors set up in the Piazza delle Erbe to the south and the Piazza dei Fruitti to the north. I bought bread, prosciutto, and two kinds of cheese. I picked a fruit stand because he did not let customers choose or handle the produce, only supplied what they asked for, and bought strawberries and apples. And then I walked through the market one more time, salivating over neatly tied rabbit roasts, whole orata, and fresh ravioli.

But now my tale takes a darker turn. I wandered through Padova, followed the old city wall east, and decided to see the Giotto frescos in the Capelli dei Scrivegni. I went, I paid €5 for my ticket (that is the student rate), I checked my backpack, and went to await my admittion time, 10:45, at the glass and metal, hermetically sealed entrance to the chapel.

It is a cheat, pure and simple. The beauty of the frescos only makes it more infuriating. First they herd you into a chamber and make you watch an incredibly patronizing film for 15 minutes “while the microclimate stabilizes.” There is no such isolation when you leave the chapel. They do make sure you know you can buy the film in the gift shop, though why you would want to is beyond me. It includes such gems as attributing the “discovery” that Giotto got his three dimensional effects from using different shades of color for light and shadow to the experts who did the restoration of the frescos.

I could live with this inanity, but then you are permitted thirteen minutes to look at the actual frescos. This isn’t enough to give a third of them a cursory glance! I was so incensed when they shepharded me out — last, naturally — that I fear I was rude.

In short, the Capello dei Scrivegni is a preservationist’s wet dream. The frescos will be forever safe from the outside air and the prying eyes of art lovers. If we can’t come up with enough art of note to replace what crumbles during our age, who are we to have obsessive stewardship of the work of the past?

And now I will reveal a little secret. In the Oratorio di San Giorgio next to the Basilica di Sant’Antonio a bored attendant will take €2.50 of your money to spend as much time as you like looking at frescos painted by two of Giotto’s students. He’ll provide you with a one page description of the frescos’ subjects in you want, and you can sit on the chapel’s benches. Te art is less magnificent than that in the Capello dei Scrivegni, but not by much.

After soothing my anger in this chapel, I settled on a stone bench outside for lunch. The other benches were occupied by people asking frantic questions on cellphones, or frowning at guidebooks. The only creatures who seemed to know what they were trying to do were a German shephard and me, and we were watching the world go by and thinking about food. I, however, had bread and cheese and prosciutto. The dog had to content himself with an occasional glance in my direction. Then I got a gelato, one scoop each of baci and strawberry, and found another statue on the Prato della Valle in order to work on this account until seminar at 17:00.

Saturday, 10 May 2008

I ate bread, cheese, and prosciutto in the room last night, then awoke at 7:00 just before the cathedral bells, trying not to wake Manou and Manou, my roommates from Geneva who had arrived yesterday afternoon. At 7:00, the streets are empty, but the bakeries are open, and two brioche filled with marmalade fortified me for a morning’s exploration.

The most interesting thing I found today was a 15th century Franciscan church, not because it had amazing artwork, but because of its lovely sequence of vaults. I walked through many more streets before turning to the market. I found Manou and Manou when I got back to the rom, who informed me that Nico, another Swiss here for the seminar, had invited us for lunch, and off we went to the market again to buy antipasti to bring.

Nico found a lovely apartment on the edge of town to rent, though its two bedrooms appear to be rented separately. A very pretty young lady came and went several times from the other one. All the same, we had a nice spread: salad, tomatos and basil, pickled anchovies, grilled eggplant, grilled sandwiches on focaccia, and prosciutto and salami. Then the whole group walked over to the Prato della Valle. The others improvised rap in French, which sounds even more ludicrous than rap in English. I took a nap in the shade until seminar.

Sunday, 11 May 2008

I chose not to go out to dinner with everyone last night, and ate and read in my room. This morning I woke just before the Basilica’s bells at 7:00, forced myself back to sleep for 45 minutes, then took my bread and blueberry jam out in the piazza so as not to disturb the Manous.

After paying the hotel bill, I left the others at a cafe and walked down to the University of Padova’s Orto Botanico. The sign said entry for students cost €1, but when I presented my EPFL card, the attendant told me that university students don’t pay.

The gardens are easily the nicest thing I have seen in Padova. An assortment of hothouses, aboreta, and sprawling beds ring a walled, circular garden where each plant is carefully separated into its own plot. Several tour groups and the occasional wandering pair of English ladies infested the garden, but it winds enough where they all vanish among the plants.

My two favorte points were a hothouse full of carnivorous plants, with old hand drawings and typewritten captions,and a little wooded hill at the garden’s southeast corner. Two paths spiral to the top, but arranged so that each is invisible to the other. The view back down on the arboretum and the wall of the inner garden gives an illusion of height and space out of all proportion with an 8m high mound.

I returned to the hotel to collect my back, and we all descended on Nico’s apartment again for lunch, then set out for the drive back to Switzerland.

27 May 2008, Davos

I left EPFL at 11AM this morning. The beautiful train trip to Zurich seems routine, so I read a math book. The beautiful train trip from Zurich to Landquart I spent half the time reading a math book. On the unbelievably gorgeous train trip from Landquart to Davos I just gawked.

From Zurich, the trains were full of other people going to the ELMI conference. At the station in Davos, most stood around looking at bus schedules or being lost. But not me, no! I seized a map from the tourist information desk, and set forth on foot to find my hotel, the Arabella Sheraton Hotel Waldhuus (that’s Waldhaus, but with a quaint, Swiss misspelling).

Davos, the hotel, and the conference center are succinctly described “out of my price range.” The town sprawls over a long valley, with luxury hotels every block. My room is a two room suite, with a two section bathroom, a marble shower, and two balconies looking out on the alps. I am admiring the clouds racing over the snow-capped peaks in the last light of day as I write. I must add: there is a Gideon Bible on one nightstand, and “The Teaching of Buddha” on the other.

The conference center specializes in events like the World Economic Forum. Our conference has the feel of the gardeners who have convinced the household servants to serve them high tea in the parlor while the master’s away.

Axelrod from Michigan gave a talk on TIRF, including a couple of fun new ideas about measuring membrane orientation next to coverslips, then we all gorged ourselves on hors d’oeuvres. I was sociable and met four people, then took a long walk west along the valley through Davos.

28 May 2008, Davos

The Waldhuus has a splendid breakfast buffet, at which I fortified myself for two and a half hours of talks, followed by a coffee break with croissants, followed by more talks, followed by lunch. This morning’s talks were on thick specimen imaging and fluorescent labeling methods.

What should a talk for this conference be? Enough detail of optics, label chemistry, or application area to be more than a waste of time is impossible since the most of the audience lacks the necessary background for any of the three. Of course, most of the speakers haven’t even thought about this, and are giving the same talk they always give.

I went to one workshop, where a man soberly told me and a few others what a point-spread function is. I skipped the rest and took a hike up one of the mountains. A poster session — which is approximately the worst environment to discuss science possible — and dinner filled the rest of the day.

And after dinner, two men started playing alpenhorns, those long, straight things everyone sees in Swiss stereotypes. And then one of them played bugle calls on it while standing on his head. After this, I retreated to reading a paper on Galois connections, then headed back to the hotel.

29 May 2008, Davos

This morning’s talks focused on assorted new microscopy techniques, and were very good, particularly the final one by Tony Wilson from Oxford. He has figured out an extremely clever way to focus microscopes really, really fast. It turns out that you can only achieve 1.5x magnification and still optically image a volume perfectly.

So he takes the output of a microscope objective, images it backwards through another microscope and onto a mirror, then from the mirror back through the objective and onto a detector. The mirror is about the same size as the specimen — a few microns — so it can be moved extremely quickly and accurately. Viola: high speed focusing.

After lunch I attended a workshop by Definiens, who have turned image analysis around. Classically, you massage your image until you can segment it perfectly in one fell swoop. Instead, they oversegment horribly, and then merge regions until they achieve good segmentation. This turns out to be a much better way to do things.

I wasn’t interested in the other workshops in the afternoon, so I went hiking again. Davos lies in Grunewald, the easternmest, newest, largest, and least developed of Switzerland’s cantons. The canton consists of mountains striated with rich valleys. The woods are remnants from glaciation, which means they greatly resemble those of the high Appalachains.

Davos, in keeping with the Swiss obsession with outdoor sports, is laced with hiking trails. They stay in the woods up on the slopes in the main valley, but come down into the pastures in the side valleys, and wind past stone barns banked with dirt and sod uphill against the winter snow.

At junctures as I climbed towards the ridge I stopped and looked across the valley at fingers of white creeping down the mountains. Some were streams; others were still snow. Even in May, the landscape is dotted with snow packs several feet thick. In winter, this place must be impassible without snowshoes.

A gala dinner at a sanatorium-turned-ski hotel on one of the peaks filled the evening. We rode up by cablecar, and stood around on the terrace overlooking the valley sipping glasses of wine (or water in my case) until the black flies started bothering people. Then we trooped in for dinner.

From the Tiffany-esque stained glass, I think that the building has been maintained in its grand state of the 1920s. The walls are muralled. The fireplace is lined with sculpted ceramic tiles. We filled the grand dining room with its enormous mirrors, and I pontificated at my neighbors over a dinner of perfectly normal roast chicken masquerading under some pretentious and singularly unappetizing name. After dinner I skipped the disco and caught the first cable car down to the city.

30 May 2008, Davos

Those who made it to the first talk this morning coincided exactly with those to take the first tram home with me last night. The highlight of the morning was a talk by a lady from McGill which showed that fluorescence recovery after photobleaching measurements require an additional set of controls: in the range that causes bleaching, the photons can also reversibly dissociate protein complexes.

The only workshop of any interest after lunch was an open session about the Open Microscopy Environment project by Jason Swedlow, but I wasn’t feeling sadistic enough to go ask mean questions about a project I’m already acquainted with. I took the bagged lunch the conference center provided, tossed in a couple extra croissant which I hoarded from the coffee break, and caught the train home.

Friday, 2008-3-21

I left EPFL this afternoon, took the train to Geneva, and joined the mass of people waiting to pass through French customs there to board the the TGV. Next time I will arrange to go from Lausanne, where you just board the train.

The TGV, despite its reputation, is less comfortable than the Swiss trains, much less so than the ICN.

In Switzerland, it was snowing, halfway to rain. There was no sun. As I went east, along the Rhone, through the valleys, and as we passed through green farmland, the sky cleared until there were only scattered clouds to reflect the sunset.

The TGV arrived in Paris at 8PM. I went to the 1 line and took it to Place Charles de Gaulle. I oriented myself quickly on the Arc de Triopmhe and the Eiffel Tower brilliantly lit to the south, and walked up a few side streets to the Hotel Acacia Etoile.

My room is small, but impeccably clean.

I walked a couple of blocks east to the Cafe d’Angel, which mama found a recommendation for online. It’s a small restaurnt, decorated with line drawings of chickens and a set of chalkboards displaying the day’s menu: a pea soup, then a springroll of blood sausage (boudin noir) with mashed potatos, and a pot au creme du chocolat. With a quarter of the house’s red wine and a cup of the tisane de la maison (peach and ginger and I could not tell what else, and served with a tiny madelaine), this cost me 36 euros.

There was a bit of confusion when I ordered: I had forgotten what boudin was, and the waitress told me ’sang’ — blood — but the Parisian accent threw me for a loop and I heard ’sens.’

Saturday, 2008-3-22

I remember now why I don’t drink. The two glasses of wine with dinner last night put me out of sorts all night. I still woke at 7:30, and after abluting, bought myself some pastries on the way to start my tour of Paris.

My first stop was the tourist information office in the shopping section under the Louvre to buy a museum pass. I assumed it would open at 9. I should make no assumptions about the French getting up early: it opens at 10. It was raining, so I shuffled across the river and had a hot chocolate in a bar, wandered through some residential streets, and returned at 10.

The Paris Museum Pass, available for 2, 4, and 6 days, gets you into essentially every attraction in the city, and it lets you skip most lines at those attractions. When I went to the Orangerie, there was a line that represented an hour’s wait. Did I dutifully queue with the plebs? No, I did not. I marched right past to the “reserved” line, proferred my Museum Pass to the guard, and he sent me right in.

Though I bought my museum pass at the Louvre, the museum itself isn’t worth the time, so I headed out immediately.

The line at St. Chapelle for security — which the pass cannot skip — was about 200m long, so I passed on to the south to the Musee de Cluny.

I must remark in passing on the latest scam the gypsies are running: they go out with clipboards saying they are from the international federation for the deaf and mute, make a couple of signs at people and try to get them to sign up for a contribution, usually ten euros. It’s amazing it works since aside from not speaking and pointing at their ears when you say something to them, they don’t act deaf. For instance, they react to the noises of people around them, and they don’t continually scan with their eyes. I wish I knew sign language so I could have started berating them in it.

The Musee de Cluny is the medieval museum in Paris. They have sundry tapestries, dishes, benches, bits of stained glass, everything you would expect from a solid Medieval collection, but they also have the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries.

This is a set of six tapestries. The basic structure is the same: a red field with sprigs of greenery and bunnies, small dogs, and the occasional fox scattered evenly across it; an ellipse of grass floating in the lower half of this red field, and on this ellipse, two trees, one at each side, and a lion and a unicorn flanking a lady, plus whatever other props such as mirrors, tents, and servants the artist deemed necessary. The diagonals which the lion and unicorn form with the grass frame the lady and make her the center of the composition, except in the one with the portative organ, where the tablecloth under the organ occupies the strongest position for some reason.

And visitors come in, photograph the tapestries, listen to their audioguides, and leave. It’s incomprehensible.

The Musee de Cluny isn’t overly crowded once you get in. They don’t limit the number of people, they just have a bottleneck. Everyone comes in through a tiny entry chamber where, to get their free ticket from the lone clerk, they must edge past everyone checking their coat, everyone retrieving their coat, everyone going to the toilets, and everyone trying to get out of the museum. Then they must fight their way again through this throng to the bookstore, which is even more cramped. If you make it through the bookstore, the museum opens up. As a result, the displays aren’t that crowded. It’s ingenious, really.

I tore myself away from the tapestries about lunchtime, and bought a ticket for a concert of troubadour songs to be held at the museum that afternoon by their ensemble in residence, Ultreia.

Just to the north of the museum is one of the tourist areas of Paris: Saint-Chapelle, Notre-Dame, and the surrounding streets, reaching to just a block north of the museum, are full of restaurants for tourists. Obviously, I headed south, but the concentration of restaurants, albeit it ripoffs, to the north, empties out the adjoining region. Luckily, I found a very nice Japanese place:

Akiko
51, rue des Ecoles
75005 paris
01 43 54 23 22

decorated in black painted wood, mirrors, and Hokusai prits. It’s a block from the musum’s entrance. A four course lunch of miso soup and a salad, a platter of sushi, a platter of salmon teriyaki, tea, and a block of nougat ice cream cost me 20 euros. I recommend it.

My next goal was the Orangerie, what was the decorative greenhouse attached to the Louvre at the far end of the Jardin des Tuileries. Now it’s a museum housing the enormous panels of waterlillies Monet painted late in his life. The museum opens to individuals at 12h30. I know this because I had stopped there in the morning before going to the Musee de Cluny, and was so informed by the guard.

Oddly, though my French isn’t wonderful, people don’t try to speak English to me even when they speak English to the person next to me. I finally found out why when one told me, “Sorry, I don’t speak German.” They think I’m German! Bizarre!

I did not go directly to the Orangerie. On the way is Gibert Jeune, one of the biggest bookstores in Paris. I spent less than ten euros, everyone will be pleased to know.

But then I spent twenty euros on a three volume set of the complete poems of Verlaine from a stall along the river. I found a sheet music store and of course stopped to browse. Encouraged by the broad selection, I asked the lady if she had any consort suites for viol by Lawes. When she had satisfied herself that I really did mean viola da gamba, she said “Non” with a shake of the head and an expression that added, “and you and I both know that you’re the only person in a span of ten years to walk into this shop and ask for such a thing.”

I did escape from temptation eventually, bypassed the line at the Orangerie, and ensconced myself on a bench to contemplate.

The panels are set all the way around two oval rooms with an oval of bench in the middle. The staff let about one and a half times as many people into the museum at a time as can sit on the benches. However, this is not the problem. For the sake of the rest of my species, I am now going to enumerate the things that will result in me wanting to smite you when you are in the presence of a great work of art such as the waterlilly panels or the lady and the unicorn tapestries:

• If you stand between me and the painting, and you are neither quickly walking past on your way to a position where you are not standing between me and the painting, nor an artist studying Monet’s individual brush strokes.
• If you are standing closer than three meters to an impressionist painting of this size.
• If you take a picture of the painting before seriously looking at it. If you take a video of it, or even worse, a video of your family or friends posing in front of it, you are a prime candidate for eugenics or euthanasia, depending on my mood.
• If you listen to an audioguide for the entire time that you look at the painting. This implies that you never bothered to actually focus on it, just on what someone was telling you about it.

For the record, I saw all of these things today. I actually had to get up and tell an distinguished looking gentleman to please conduct his conversation somewhere that was not directly in front of where I was sitting.

The waterlillies are wonderful, though.

I only had about forty minutes with the paintings before it was time to rush back to the Musee de Cluny for the concert. I took the subway part of the way, and made it with ten minutes to spare.

Ultreia is of the school that performs troubadour music with instrumental accompaniment. There is about equal evidence for and against this, but it is certainly easier for modern listeners with accompaniment. The method is frowned upon in some circles because early attempts drew on eastern European folk music as a pattern for improvising accompaniment, leading to a series of unfortunate recordings that have been ostracized for twenty years. Ultreia did a much more tasteful job, and nowhere did violence to the music. However, as they say in the program, “The accompaniments have thus been reconstructed to lend color to these songs, trying to render their emotions more accessible, but they are very much an artistic proposition having neither scientific ambition or pretension to authenticity.” The quality of the musicians was very high. The quality of the audience wasn’t, and I think the director — who was playing, not conduting, which is as it should be — was a pleasantly surprised when I came up and gave him comments on ensemble balance in the space.

Then I wandered south to the Jardins de Luxemborg. I only walked through, so I won’t attempt a detailed description. I will say that it is among the most habitable public parks I have seen in large cities: lots of benches and chairs and trees dividing things into people-sized spaces. I may try to drop by again tomorrow morning.

I thought about going into the Orangerie again, but it was already too late. They close at 19h, and it was 18h30. Instead I proceeded along the left bank, but a couple blocks away from the river to avoid the traffic, towards the Eiffel tower.

At this juncture, I must say something about the Eiffel tower. I saw it when I got out of the metro heading to my hotel last night. I saw it as I left the hotel this morning. I saw it throughout the day at various points, and my first reaction every time was, “Gak, but that’s ugly.”

The Eiffel tower was just a navigational landmark on my roundabout route home. Nor was my trip direct: I stopped for a hot chocolate; I stopped to buy bread and pastries for tomorrow morning. Halfway down the block, I realized the bread was warm. Before the end of the block I had a hunk of it in my mouth. This is the only reaction available to anyone but the cretinous or glucose-intolerant.

After all this, I just went to the little bistro next door to my hotel

Restaurant Le Meli
9 rue des acacias
75017 Paris
01 44 09 99 99

which is best described as small and hip. Everyone there was dressed in black, the girls in high heels, and often pearls, including the waitress. However she was very nice to me as I stumbled in in my fleece.

She carries the blackboard wih the dishes of the day to each table along with the menu, until they run out of dishes of the day, and then just she just carries the menu. By the time I got there, the steak and pommes frites were alreay gone, so I ordered a jambonette with spinach and rice. It arrived, was small and somewhat tough. She looked at it, and said, “I’m going to bring you a piece of chicken instead.” She did. It was good. That and a cup of Earl Grey tea was my dinner. Now I’m turning in for the night.

Sunday, 2008-03-23

I slept in today until 8, then ate my croissants from yesterday in my room, packed, and checked out of the hotel. And lugged those books I bought all day. That will teach me, though whether not to check out so early or not to buy books I’m not sure.

I went outside and promptly found that all the groceries, pastry shops, and butchers were open. It’s not Switzerland. I bought pate, fruit, cheese, and more bread and pastry to be my dinner.

My goal for the morning was the Musee Rodin, in an old house off Les Invalides on the left bank. It’s a small, specialized museum and doesn’t get nearly as many visitors as the quality of its collection deserves.

I waved my magic museum pass at the guard, then earned a panicked expression from the girl at the coat check for the weight of my backpack. She at least laughed about it.

The museum is not just finished pieces but molds and models of various stages, including some that were incorporated into other works. Apparently Rodin sculpted every female head that caught his fancy and kept them around to use in other works. The head of his pupil Camille appears in an astonishing number of these.

Of these heads, one stands out, labelled only as a young Slavic lady. Among the pronounced noses and pointed chins of English and French females, the rounded, flattened features are a surprise. More surprising is the absolutely closed expression. No wonder Rodin wanted it for his collection, the old scalp hunter.

And he used it. Upstairs in the house is a sculpture ‘Devant la Mer’ (’Beside the Sea’) with this head attached to a nude body leaned over with arms stretched out to the sides as if trailing them through the sand. I spent quite a bit of time examining this figure, both for how Rodin matched the body language — closed, but not displeased — to the head he used, and for its spatial composition: it’s the same base with angles rising towards the center (the arms in this case) used in the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries and one of the waterlilly panels I had particularly studied yesterday. Again, the effect is to focus attention on the head, here looking away and down.

The majority of the pieces are in the house, but the garden contains bronze castings of the best known Rodin works: the gates of hell, the burgers of Calais, the thinker, and Balzac.

While I was looking at the Balzac statue, a group of English kids came running up, and after looking at it felt the need to run around it and stamp on its base until their parents arrived to stop them. I only mention this because it describes so many people’s reaction to Balzac when they first see it, particularly those at its unveiling. However, it was was only about fifteen years later that ballet-goers rioted at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, so we must take this with a grain of salt: the educated Frenchman of the time was inclined to riot at exhibitions. Musn’t disappoint the artist.

I tore myself away from the museum at noon as an enormous schoolgroup arrived, and began a long walk through the city to the Marais for lunch. I kept to the side streets until I was past Notre-Dame, when I took to the quai, crossed to the very east end of the Ile de la Cite, to the very west end of the Ile St. Louis, then up into the Marais.

The Marais was the Jewish ghetto in Paris. Now it is the gay quarter, but it has a high concentration of very nice traditional restaurants, the kind of places where ordering consists of choosing the plat du jour, and one or two of the soupe du jour, entree du jour, and dessert du jour.

I arrived at Les Philosophes, a place I knew from my last visit to Paris, at about 13h30, where a flamingly gay Oriental man showed me my table (this is a change. Last time the waiters were old, crotchety, and very, very professional, but it’s Easter and they’re probably all on vacation).

The food is still very good. Euros 16.80 got me a big bowl of soup of pureed asparagus and zuchini, and a piece of ham still on the rib with a honey sauce on a bed of semolina cous cous. And the basket of bread I consumed. I declined dessert, and walked two doors down to a lovely patisserie I know, bought a mille-feuille, and took that down to the riverside.

On Sunday mornings in Paris the city closes the main road right by the river and the city turns out to walk, bike, and rollerblade along it. I ate my mille-feuille, and walked east towards the Gare de Lyon.

Naturally I arrived two hours early, crossed the river and installed myself in the botanical gardens. Unfortunately there were sizeable lines for everything, incuding the Grande Galerie d’Evolution, so I contented myself with a bench in the rose garden until it was time to head back to the station.

At the gare, I had time for a cup of tea before they posted the track for my train. I am onboard now. We are scheduled to arrive in Lausanne at 20h. Interestingly, the train to Lausanne goes via Dijon and Dole, and doesn’t stop at Geneva at all.

As we climbed out of Dole snow started to appear on the landscape. By the time the train reached Vallorbe, the world was white, and remained so all the way across the Jura until we descended to Lac Leman. It was lovely to watch as the light faded.

(I’m posting a lot of things that fell through the cracks, beginning with this. )

CERN had an open day for the Large Hadron Collider before they turned it on. A group of us, biologists all except for me, headed out bright and early on Sunday morning from Lausanne to see the great machine, along with 15,000 other people.

The primary attractions were of course the detectors and a tour of the tunnels, but by the time we arrived at the Meyrin site at about 11:00, there was at least a four hour wait to get a ticket, assuming there were any tickets left at that point. This didn’t stop us: CERN had arranged many other attractions. There were demos of superconductivity and superfluidity, the requisite freezing of things in liquid nitrogen and shattering them for the children, and a display of artwork inspired by the LHC. I didn’t see any of this.

I dragged the unfortunate biologists who accompanied me to the magnet factory, to the magnet testing center, and to the prototype of the linear collider that will succeed LHC. They were good sports, even as I quizzed them on the discoveries of the famous physicists whose names the streets bear.

One thing that astonished them was the amount of prefabricated construction. The buildings aren’t pretty. I explained that this is a working lab: the buildings have to go up fast, and if you need a hole in the wall, you can’t wait for approval. You just grab a drill. Under these conditions, prefab is the best option.

CERN put an enormous amount of effort into this open day. The magnet factory had magnets in various stages of construction set up throughout the room, and the engineers of the facility giving tours in English, French, and German. We were lucky enough to get a tour by one of the head engineers of the division, who gave us a wonderfully detailed description of the construction process.

In any circular accelerator, you have to bend the beam, accomplished with magnetic dipoles, and you have to focus it, using quadrupoles. The LHC ring consists of a series of 50m long dipoles with smaller quadrupoles of 6m interspersed. Protons traverse narrow tubes through the length of these magnets. The magnets look almost straight, but the accelerator is a circle. They must be curved. But if you do the calculation for an accelerator 27km in diameter, a proton only has to shift 7mm to the side in a 50m tube.

Actually, the quadrupoles are straight. The dipoles are ever so slightly curved: the physicists insisted that the beam could deviate no more than 1mm, not 7mm, from the center of its containing tube all the way along the accelerator. Our guide recounted a scene anyone who has dealt with physicists will find familiar:

“We need 1mm precision the whole way.”

“Impossible.”

“1mm.”

“Alright, it’s possible, but it will be enormously expensive.”

“1mm.”

To curve them, they string the plates that form the magnets on the beam tube, put the whole thing in an enormous press, forcefully bend it, then weld it in that shape.

How do they know they have met their required precision? They transfer the magnet to a sealed room where they use a laser/reflector system to measure the geometry to a fraction of a millimeter precision.

Once it has passed that test, the magnet is transferred to the testing facility, which we also visited. Here they seal the magnet into its insulating jacket, insert the tubes that carry liquid helium to cool the coils of the magnet, and check that it’s air tight.

The coils are superconducting. This is one of the most important facts about LHC: it’s what makes the machine possible. A superconducting wire can carry seven hundred times the current of a copper wire of the same cross section. A comparable magnet made with superconducting wire is 25 times smaller than its copper counterpart. LHC’s coils are a few cm across. In copper they would be almost a meter. In the tight spaces of LHC’s underground tunnels, this is a vital concern.

The superconductors carry a price though: NbTi, the only one commercially viable when LHC’s development began, isn’t superconducting above a couple degrees above absolute zero. The only practical coolant at these temperatures is liquid helium. Making and distributing that much liquid helium demands cryogen facilities as expansive as the magnets themselves.

The test facility has a direct link to the tunnels. When a magnet is declared complete, it is lowered 100m to the tunnels and slowly, carefully dragged to its final position. The pit was closed to prevent anyone falling in it, but they had a movie of the magnets being hauled at 2km/h through the tunnels, with a selection of charmingly incongruous background music along the lines of ‘Carmina Burana’ or the closing march from ‘Star Wars.’

All of this occupied our afternoon, after we had eaten lunch at a nearby Indian restaurant, and half our party (including a nine and ten year old boy) had departed. Before lunch was the hilight of the day: CLIC, the Compact Linear Collider, or rather its prototype. LHC smashes protons together. Protons are heavy, which makes it easy to reach high energies, but they consist of three particles. Making sense what happened when two protons, six particles, smashing into each other is difficult. LHC gets us to high energies to see what’s there. Then we need a collider that uses truly elementary particles — in this case electrons and positrons.

The day of circular electron collider is over. Electron radiate their energy as X-rays when dragged in a circle, and it swiftly becomes impractical to push energy in faster than it radiates. Modern facilities using electrons are straight, but unlike in circular accelerators where you can increase the energy just a bit with every circuit, all the energy must be given in one pass. As the energy grows, the distance you need to do this gets longer and longer.

CERN’s cost constraints dictate an accelerator no longer than 50km, but you can’t get close to the target energy of 3TeV in this distance. CLIC’s designers have found an incredibly clever solution.

Instead of accelerating one electron to 3 TeV, accelerate a thousand in a bunch to 3 GeV, which is perfectly possible in a reasonably sized linear collider. How does this get us closer to 3 TeV? It’s only the energy of individual particles that count, not the combined energy of all of them.

Someone person figured out how to build a device, two specially shaped metal chambers connected by a mass of fiber optic cable, that saps 96% of the energy from those thousand electrons as they fly into one chamber, and transfers it all to one electron just entering the other chamber. That single electron goes flying out at the required 3 TeV. The technical difficulties are enormous, but suddenly a sub-50km, 3 TeV collider seems possible.

It was a lovely day. My biological colleagues learned something about smashing very small things, and I relived my childhood dreams of building particle accelerators. And I bought a t-shirt with the Lagrangian of the standard model on the front.

I found myself in need of a rough form for the -decay spectrum, so I went and fetched Fermi’s Nuclear Physics from the library. I thought I would share a passage which suddenly made a lot of things go click for me:

According to the relativistic theory of the electron, an electron has energy . This equation permits negative energy values.

In Dirac’s theory, practically all negative states are filled at all points in space. A vacuum is then a sea of electrons in negative energy states. The presence of this charge is not observed because it is uniformly distributed.

A photon of sufficiently high energy may lift an electron from a negative energy state. The energy threshold for the photon is , since for a free electron there are no states between and . Physically, this means that the photon must supply enough energy to create two particles of mass . Momentum must be conserved and this requires either that the negative energy electron be near a nuclear or an electron, i.e., not free, or that two photons coming from different directions coalesce and lift an electron from a negative energy state. If the electron is near a nucleus it may occupy discrete states just below . These are within a few eV of 510,000eV. Strictly, then, the threshold for pair formation near a nucleus is . This is of no importance because binding energy and because transitions from negative energy states to the discrete part of the spectrum are improbable and not yet observed.

Everyone is familiar with the derivative of a function in terms of limits: for a sequence converging to , . I spent a couple days playing with sequences which accumulate but do not converge, seeing if I could do calculus without limits. I came to my senses and realized I’m a biologist, but not before I stumbled across this:

Treat values of a sequence as values of a random variable with uniform probability density. Then if has an accumulation point at , . To see this, when you’re close to , you get enormous denominators. Since you get arbitrarily close to arbitrarily often, you have infinitely many denominators as large as you like. These completely swamp any contribution of points of the sequence away from .

I suspect that there is a “fundamental theorem of analysis” which says that a statement about a space is true is equivalent to the statement being true at the accumulation points of all accumulating sequences in that space. But I don’t know how to define the above expectation except as a limit of finite sequences, so this doesn’t advance the program at all.

(Before people misunderstand, I like limits. I use them constantly. Some of my best friends are limits. This is a mathematical diversion.)

First off, happy birthday to Don Knuth. If you don’t know who that is, just crawl back under your rock.

Among the things that came to light while reading people’s response to this occasion was the font Euler. Add the following code to your LaTeX preamble, and suddenly your mathematics goes from slick, standard, LaTeX, to a gorgeous idealization of the best mathematical handwriting:

\usepackage{ccfonts,eulervm}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

A little more digging found this wonderful post discussing the font, and its sibling Alcuin Light. Alcuin Light is not included in TeX distributions, and must be bought separately and converted by hand, unfortunately. Knuth paired Euler with Concrete Roman. In isolation I prefer the default Computer Modern, but Concrete Roman does fit better with Euler.

But I admit I’m tempted to drop the $20 for Alcuin.

Most metrics to compare programming languages — lines of code, number of symbols, compressed lines of code — hover between useless and harmful. Most of these metrics have one fundamental problem: they compare apples and oranges. Here’s a way to get past that hurdle. The resulting metric still seems broken and unjustified, but it’s an improvement.

A data model is a set of data structures plus all the operators on them. I don’t mean the implementation of these, I mean the abstract mathematical definition. Relational databases are a mathematical definition distinct from any given implementation, and include both the underlying structure (the relation and a set of projectors on the tuples which constitute the relation), and all the operations to manipulate relations.

Given a particular data model, how much code is required to ensure that an implementation of that particular data model is sufficiently close to the mathematical ideal that the programmer can treat it as such in all further work? The only difficulty is saying when an implementation is sufficiently iron-clad to be so treated. This can be done experimentally.

We are comparing languages A and B. We take a group of subjects who all know both languages. Each produces an implementation of the same data model in both languages.

Different programmers may have different tolerances for abstraction leakage. To fix this, take each implementation and mark all the testing code (unit tests, run-time checks, etc.). Partition it randomly into equal subsets. Sequentially remove subsets of testing code. This gives a sequence of monotonically less assured mutilations of the original implementation.

Give each programmer who submitted an implementation a randomly chosen mutilation of each implementation he didn’t write. He marks each of them as iron-clad or leaky.

When we have all the marks, we find the level of mutilations for each implementation which gives some fixed fraction marking it as iron-clad, say 95%. This gives us a distribution of amount of code for each language, controlled for how faithfully it implements a data model, and we turn to standard statistical techniques to ask if they are different, and how different.

This presupposes that a shorter program that truly does the same thing than a longer one is better.

I’ll get around to quantum mechanics eventually. Bear with me.

Biology is autonomous from physics. Any change to quantum mechanics will have at most cosmetic implications for biology. Quantum mechanics contributes nothing more than the existence of atoms and molecules, which are necessary for the lossless transmission of information. However, anything that replaces present day quantum mechanics must also predict atoms and molecules. The interactions between the two subjects a minimized because their interface is pinned by experiment.

Within physics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, elasticity, and the other macroscopic theories bear the same relation to quantum mechanics. The interfaces between the subjects are experimentally pinned.

A similar pattern appears within biology. Population genetics is built on molecular biology, but their interface is pinned by the existence of genes. We can replace our understanding of an allele’s molecular character, but that allele’s propagation in a population isn’t going to dramatically change.

This pinning is a form of damage control. All fields of science depend on other fields to be able to bootstrap themselves. The only way to keep the structure from falling to shreds is to pin the interfaces. A particle physicist uses macroscopic equipment, which experimentally obeys classical mechanics and electromagnetism. If the relation between his equipment and what he studies weren’t experimentally fixed in the intervening scales, his experiments would be impossible.

It is worth keeping your field as self contained as possible. Black boxes that reach into the heart of entirely different fields are a recipe for disaster.

This is why I dislike the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. It posits an observer, whose observation collapses the wave function to an eigenstate of the observation in question. In so doing, it reaches directly to the heart of neuroscience, and builds quantum mechanics on the hardest, most central questions of an even larger area of science.

If the neuroscientists come up with the answer that consciousness isn’t anything special, just a pattern of spikes in neurons, then we have an insoluble problem. Further, there isn’t likely to be a physically robust structure of these firings which is consciousness, so what’s to stop other random patterns of particles from observing and collapsing wave functions? These difficulties are so great, that any interpretation — that is, a connection of the undisputed mathematical structure to reality — which is properly pinned at its boundaries are immediately preferable.

Yet most physicists aren’t willing to accept a new interpretation which requires conceptual gimmicks. Visualizations are tools with local use, not integral parts of theories. Since Heisenberg, we want our theories only to relate observable quantities, not enforce a particular picture. This was the great downfall of the Bohm-de Broglie pilot wave mechanics.

Thankfully, there is an interpretation which is both properly pinned and satisfies the Heisenberg aesthetic. There’s a beautifully written, absolutely simple book on it (Consistent Quantum Mechanics by Robert Griffiths). The book is available for free online.

There’s been a hullabaloo about a New York Times op-ed by one Paul Davies which claims that rational ordering of the universe is an article of faith. Blog posts followed.

Some gems: “The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics.” (Paul Davies) No, the most refined expression of rational intelligibility is a properly randomized experiment. Theoretical physics is not king of the sciences, and most of science won’t change one whit if the entire forefront of theoretical physics reaches a dead end.

“Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are.” (Paul Davies again) He gives various naive answers. The proper answer is, “I don’t know, and I can’t think of a good way to answer such a question, so I’m going to keep it in the back of my mind in case I do, and get on with questions I can answer.”

“The only problem is that inductive reasoning is not sound.” (first comment on the first blog post I linked to above) Here is someone with little exposure to logic, who doesn’t realize that deductive reasoning isn’t sound either. You can choose any of an infinite number of rules for manipulating sets of well defined strings of symbols. The applicability of any of them is an empirical question. Classical deduction occupies no privileged place. It’s just old.

Then Davies rambles about how the emergence of life is sensitive to the details of the universe. We don’t know this, and no one has thought of any way of finding this out, hallucinations of a few experimentally-challenged string theorists aside, and they have no idea how to construct a science from the ground up. I might even use the word parasite.

Aside from all this, everyone seems to agree that they’re arguing over the proposition “The universe behaves in an orderly and rational manner.” I have no idea what that actually means, and I think there’s a better statement of the required proposition: “There exists some finite level of detail which guarantees the outcome of a protocol/algorithm/recipe.” (I don’t think we have a word for what I have offered three to convey.)

That statement is much weaker, and can be considered in an even weaker form: “For a GIVEN protocol/algorithm/recipe, there is a finite level of detail which guarantees the outcome.”

If we assume that tomorrow will be much like yesterday, then this statement’s converse is falsifiable, though it may not be finitely so. This isn’t perfect, but it’s a long way from a leap of faith.

If we don’t assume that tomorrow will be much like today, we can’t get anywhere. Christians don’t assume this (they expect a Judgement Day, when tomorrow will decidedly not be like yesterday), but fail to realize that you could just as strongly assert that tomorrow there just wouldn’t be a god anymore. So, although I don’t know how to demonstrate the axiom, I don’t have demonstrate it in an argument between science and faith. I would need to demonstrate it in an argument between science and skepticism.