The Ongoing Work Stoppage

This is a stealth dual-purpose post, as it’s both my latest ‘What I’m Reading Entry’ and me talking about my daily life. The book is Symmetry, A Unifying Concept by István and Magdolina Hargittai, and it was given to me by my boss in preparation for the course that we’re teaching. The first class is tomorrow. I’ve known that we’d be teaching this fall for a while now, of course, and I’ve actually been bugging him to let me teach almost since I started, but it really just sunk in – I’m now on the other side of the student-teacher relationship. Like, for real. I think the moment it officially hit me full force was when I saw my name on the class schedule, just like a real instructor.

I’ll be fine, I know. We’re both doing this together, and I imagine he’ll do most of the heavy lifting tomorrow. And I have taught before – the first year physics labs back in Ottawa (how could I ever forget marking those rassa-frassin’ lab reports?) – and I suspect I got reasonably good at it by the end, because they gave me an award, but it was a few years ago and I vividly remember those classes where I made an ass of myself –

(Of course, I also remember those classes where I got to demonstrate explosive vaporization of liquid nitrogen.)

Right, never mind me. Just a few pre-class jitters. It’s all part of my master plan to acquire a sofa.

Anyway, back to the book. It’s basically a hard-copy version of what we hope to accomplish in the course – an introduction to the concept of symmetry and all the many ways it occurs both in the natural world (plants, animals, and of course minerals) and in man-made creations (art, architecture, music, even literature), with introductions to some of the fundamental concepts like rotations, reflections, translations, point groups and space groups. It’s full of great pictures, many of which I’m sure we’ll be ganking for in-class examples, and has already given me a few neat ideas.

Gene Shalits with 4-fold rotational symmetry

One unique thing I like about the book is its a short chapter on antisymmetry – i.e. where an operation doesn’t transform an object into itself, like a symmetry does, but into its opposite. Think of the two opposing sides of the chess board, black and white, or of an operation where you exchange all the positive electrical charges in a system for negative and vice versa. It’s a topic you don’t see treated in many discussions on symmetry, but in certain areas of physics like quantum mechanics it’s almost as crucial.

Antisymmetric Gene Shalits

It’s not a textbook, though, and we won’t be using it as such. It’s a pretty basic book – no math or advanced theoretical discussion, mainly just a pictorial introduction. I browsed through it on the bus and before bed yesterday, so it’s not particularly text-heavy, either. But symmetry really is primarily a visual concept, one that can be elaborated mathematically, so it makes a good introduction.

Now I have to find a way to work Gene Shalit into my lectures, but how…?

I woke up Friday at 3:45 AM Budapest time [6:45 PM Thursday, PDT -- Ed.] to get ready for the airport. Three flights and 24 hours later, I finally made it to my apartment in Vancouver. I stayed up until 11 PM, puttering around, unpacking, watching some DVDs, under the theory that a normal bed-time would help the jet-lag.

I ended up sleeping until 9:30 PM on Saturday. That’s about 22 hours.

I mention all this because I am genuinely impressed at how messed up my circadian rhythms are. I am now literally 180° out of phase.

All that aside, I had a pretty great time at the conference. I saw some fantastic talks, and met some interesting people, reconnecting with some I’d met at conferences past and meeting others that I’d only know (in some cases for years) as names on journal articles. I got a tonne (metricized for that European feel) of ideas for things to work on, current projects, old projects and new projects.

I got to do a little bit of sight-seeing, but to be honest I found it kind of exhausting, and was most interested in the sciencey stuff.

Not even a cretin like me can avoid a little culture, though! The conference was at the Eötvös Loránd University, which is right on the Danube River separating Buda from Pest. Our hotel in Pest, the University in Buda, and it was just a short walk (or tram ride) between the two. We were also in sight of several landmarks, such as the Castle Hill and the Parliament buildings.

(I didn’t get to most of the touristy sights, but I did do a lot of walking, so that I had blisters by about the third day. Also, it was a humid 28° C or more most of the time, so even the short walk across the bridge had me sweating like an overweight Canadian physicist. [Speaking of which, there were two Japanese guys at the conference who looked like such stereotypical otaku, down to the bandanas and wispy facial hair, that I swear they'd taken a wrong turn on the way to Comiket.] So I ended up using the tram quite a bit, which was fast, easy to figure out, and generally air-conditioned.)

Here are some pictures:

This morning I was trying to take a picture of one of our dumortierite samples so I could put it on the poster. Unfortunately neither my photography skills nor the equipment at hand were up to the challenge of producing a high-enough resolution picture. Valette clearly needs to move closer.

I did get one halfway decent picture, using the desktop scanner, of all things, but again, not high enough resolution. So here it is: dumortierite, the pretty blue aluminum borosilicate with an awesomely cool crystal structure that I’ve spent the last year and some studying.

You may well have seen this photo elsewhere, but it’s too amazing not to share:

That, my friends, is a Martian sunset.

I think that’s the most beautiful photo from space I’ve ever seen. What strikes me is how lonely and serene the scene is, how the little-tiny-sun is sinking behind the barely visible distant edge of the crater. It’s almost like an “uncanny valley” for landscapes – it’s similar enough to any desert sunset you might see on many places on Earth, but not quite – the sinking sun is too small, the sky is too mauve, the horizon is too flat. But unlike the “uncanny valley” of creepy puppets or CG humans, these little touches of alienness make it more beautiful. Better than anything George Lucas ever dreamed up.

Needless to say, my computer has a new backdrop.

I was out for a walk after dinner today when it started to rain a little bit. Not a real rain, but just the sort of spattering that happens when the clouds are heavy and not quite committed to whether they want to rain or not. As I walked home, hoping that the clouds wouldn’t firm up their commitment and drench me, I could clearly smell That Rain Smell.

You know That Rain Smell. You smell it in conditions like I just described, when it just starts to rain , or rains for only a brief shower, after it hasn’t rain for a while. That very sweet smell which, apparently, is one of human-kinds most favoritest smells. Well, I’d have to agree.

Being the science geek that I am, and one fond of obscure chemical terms, I remember That Rain Smell actually has a name – petrichor. From the Greek petros, “stone”, and ichor, “blood of the Elder Gods”. (Ia! Ia! Quinon Fthagn!) Apparently, the stuff you are smelling when smelling petrichor is a product of rain, which is slightly acidic thanks dissolved carbon dioxide, gets all up on the assorted oils that vegetation lays down on soils and rocks. The stuff was named and studied by a pair of Australian mineral chemists in this paper and also this one.

The exact identity of the chemical compounds in petrichor is, deservedly, nebulous. I say “deservedly” because there are probably dozens, all organic with lots of rings and ridiculous names like “4,8a-dimethyl-decahydronaphthalen-4a-ol”. Most people who study minerals – like me – prefer short, pithy names for our mostly non-carbon compounds like “ferrihydrite” or “astrophyllite”. The sheer volume of organic compounds that pop up when living matter gets involved in your system can be kind of intimidating. Which is why we tend to lump dozens of different chemicals together under names like petrichor and humic acid.

I guess that’s one reasons I like minerals – not as dull as, say, semiconductors, but not as baroque as organic chemistry. Though I totally admit, no minerals smell as nice as petrichor.