Hey again! it may or may not be obvious from the tone of my last post that I wrote and scheduled it before I packed and boarded my plane to LA. here’s a brief chronology of the last couple of weeks on my end:
Jan 7 4 PM (ET): I reassure my parents that I’ve seen the red flag warning and that campus will still be open tomorrow.
Jan 7 9 PM (ET): I wash up and hop into bed.
Jan 7 9:18 PM (ET): The Eaton fire starts.
Jan 8 12 AM (ET): The fire spreads rapidly and my phone starts blowing up while I’m blissfully unaware. Caltech issues an alert that campus will be closed the following day.
Jan 8 5 AM (ET): I’m woken up by my parents, who insist on leaving early for the airport in case there’s traffic. On the way, I check my phone and try to understand the situation.
Jan 8 9 AM (ET): I briefly consider trying to find a plane heading toward the SFBA and ask to board that one instead, but I decide to stick to my original flight since I don’t think LAX is at risk. I text a friend who lives near LAX to ask if I can shelter at their place.
Jan 8 1 PM (PT): I deplane to the sound of every fire alarm going off, grab my bags, and head to my friend’s house for the night.
Jan 9 6 AM (PT): I wake up and check for updates. Since the fire is no longer spreading towards campus, I decide to go back to gather my documents just in case.
Jan 9 9 AM (PT): I arrive on campus and realize it’s raining ash. My eyes are also stinging so I decide to leave for the Bay Area, and navigate east past Ontario before heading up to Bakersfield to avoid the fires.
Jan 9 8 PM (PT): I exit the I-5 at the border of Alameda County and grab dinner before heading to Berkeley, where I’ll be staying for the foreseeable future (actually about a week).
Jan 17: Steady progress is being made on containing the fire, so I decide to head back to Pasadena to check on my plants.
(It happens that most of the plants are pretty low maintenance, which is important to me since I’m frequently traveling. however, I do own a maranta plant which is pretty sensitive both to pollution and to its roots drying out, and sadly it didn’t make it.)
I’m lucky in that my apartment and the Caltech campus were well outside of the fire perimeter, and that I still have my home and all of my worldly possessions. others in the Caltech community and in the area were not so fortunate, and I would urge anyone who has the means to support efforts to provide aid to displaced communities. here’s a link to the Caltech and JPL disaster relief fund, and another one for chili crisp mochi muffins with part of the proceeds going to the California Fire Foundation (you can also pick these up in person if you live in the Bay Area! they’re surprisingly pretty good, lol). there’s also a lot of through-provoking pieces on the internet on climate disasters and the long-term future of these areas, like The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, as well as many articles on hurricane-prone coasts in the Southeast. (while there are some parallels, I think it’s worth noting that historically, many people who choose to stay after a hurricane do so because their source of income and livelihood is tied to coastal resources. the reasons for rebuilding here are a bit less clear-cut.)
Pasadena is still recovering in many ways, and I’ve yet to return to working in Bridge, which unfortunately was never really weather-sealed. in particular, the window by my desk has a pretty big gap, and when I went by to check on the plants I realized quite a bit of soot had come in, leaving large yellow stains on the carpet. the last part was really annoying because as some of my friends and colleagues know, I had just gotten the department to deep clean the old and very fluffy carpet in my office in December! while things go back to normal, I’ll share a couple of other topics I’ve been thinking about recently.
on taking and retaking qft
Feel free to skip this entire section if you don’t want to read about physics and/or pedagogy. also as a disclaimer, I want to emphasize that I’m not really an expert on quantum field theories or quantum foundations. if anything, the kind of research that I’m interested in at the moment is probably spiritually closer to applied math. however, I’ve always been really excited about science, and I appreciate field theory as a way of trying to understand fundamental physics. so while I think everything I say here should be taken with more than a few grains of salt, I hope these reflections can be helpful to someone else who might be interested in these areas!
In undergrad, I identified as hep-th-curious, which translated to trying to take relativistic quantum field theory as soon as possible. in practice, this meant junior year, after I had already taken the undergrad quantum sequence, general relativity, and winter term classical mechanics, in addition to introductory grad statistical mechanics and some very basic math subjects, including one semester of algebra.1 I also took an undergrad string theory class which required undergrad relativity and quantum but didn’t use anything from quantum electrodynamics, which was fun because it was mostly pretty organized and self-contained, but confusing because at the end of it I didn’t really understand geometry or string theory.
Three years later, I’ve honestly retained very little about the class. partly this is because I took QFT at Harvard with Matt Schwartz, who is very interested in computing scattering cross sections, and the class took a pretty traditional particle physics approach. I had never thought very deeply about collider physics before, and at that point was already drifting towards quantum information, so I found it hard to appreciate this perspective. also, since then, I don’t think I’ve seen a single scattering cross section.
I’d actually had mixed feelings for a while about my experiences with this subject, starting from even before I registered for the course. my undergraduate academic advisor was supportive of my goals, but cheerfully cautioned me that most people would come to understand QFT much better after taking it two or three times with different instructors over the course of their academic career. at the time, I found this advice mystifying as well as deeply annoying, and chalked up this kind of take to poorly designed curricula.2 in hindsight, however, I’ve come to appreciate more that QFT is really such a broad subject that different versions of the course can be practically disjoint. although the particle physics-centric perspective might be sufficient for someone interested in working with a CERN collaboration, I guess my advisor was probably speaking from her own experience as a theorist who fell in between some of the traditional disciplines.
This past fall, I was talked into enrolling in a course on topological field theory, which was taught jointly by Profs. Anton Kapustin and David Simmons-Duffin. it was the first time the course had been offered in institutional memory (i.e. as far back as the condensed matter theory students I talked to could recall), which made it all the more mysterious and exciting. I have to admit my original motivations for taking the class were somewhat narrow-minded, because at that point I was mainly trying to decide whether I wanted to explore more traditionally-CMT-flavored research. I’m not sure I fully answered this question for myself, but I think the instructors did a good job of tying TQFT to the broader context of open questions in physics, and particularly its roots as a toy model for axiomatic QFT. other things I liked: David Simmons-Duffin’s take on the quantization of configuration space, and his “example” for teaching a first quantum mechanics class for undergrads.3 also, we spent a decent amount of time on discretized theories on spacetime lattices and how they could be used to understand the existence of the continuum limit, which I had seen briefly in the context of lattice QCD calculations but never fully appreciated. all this is to say that I came out of this course with much warmer feelings for QFT foundations, and I’m really glad I stuck it out.
on the videographer boyfriend
I don’t think this is really a new trend, but I found myself taken aback by a recent video from a influencer I follow, in which she revealed that the reason her partner hasn’t showed up much on the channel recently is because he’s usually behind the camera these days. this reminded me of a similar update I had seen from another Youtuber from a really long time ago (like, 2020 or earlier, I think), and also prompted some reflections about my reaction to hearing about these kinds of career pivots.
To be clear, I have a lot of respect for family businesses, as well as for people who choose to prioritize their partners’ careers above their own. part of my reaction is probably just surprise and curiosity around the unconventional career paths and lifestyles of these influencers, and the even more interesting (in my opinion!) but less visible careers of other people on their team. in other words, what makes someone decide to abandon all of their other dreams, accomplishments, and/or possible full-time pursuits in order to become the videographer (or graphic designer, or accountant slash manager) boyfriend?
In this case, it’s probably because some of these Youtubers have been wildly successful on the platform, to the point that the channel is a more reliable source of income than the other passions that the partner could have pursued. I can’t blame anyone for making this kind of decision, because chasing your dreams is typically a pretty long and painful process, especially when the reality is that the other person has already made it on Youtube. and by the way, I say boyfriend here (it’s a little funny that this happened with two separate channels that I follow!), but this applies to any couple in which one person decides to take on a supporting role to the other’s career. I also don’t think there’s anything really strange or wrong with e.g. getting a PhD before becoming a stay-at-home mother while your partner’s career blows up.
I do feel that there are some reasons someone might not want to make this kind of choice. (personally: it’s a bit terrifying to think about if I ever found myself without any kind of broader support network or financial safety net, and if something then happened to my spouse. in my own experience, although both of my parents are alive and well, I think having more flexibility has made our lives materially better. but also, do I have any reason to believe I would enjoy being a full-time videographer more than getting a normal job?) and while I generally don’t like to encourage parasocial feelings towards Youtubers, I think it’s sometimes reasonable to ask if I should be concerned about my friends putting themselves in situations where they’re heavily dependent on their partners. ultimately, though, I appreciate that different people have different priorities, and I admire them for having conviction in their way of life.
In hindsight I probably would have tried to take more math, e.g. a second semester of algebra
Partly this is because a lot of superficially similar (and similarly well-intentioned) advice is commonly circulated online, and is sometimes followed by textbook bashing...
The example was non-relativistic quantum mechanics of one particle as a 0+1d quantum field theory, with transition matrix elements defined in terms of the usual Lagrangian… by the way, I also TA-ed for David Simmons-Duffin last year when he taught the statphys class for sophomores, which included a homework problem on the imaginary time path integral. probably the most interesting class I’ve ever been staffed!
simply do not have partners :dab:
most people would come to understand QFT much better after taking it two or three times with different instructors over the course of their academic career » this is how i feel about cell bio lol
ask if I should be concerned about my friends putting themselves in situations where they’re heavily dependent on their partners » wow can't think of anyone who fits this description (i have also had this thought before..)