A People's History I

I've been reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States . I wasn't planning on on blogging about it until I was done, but the book is so full of interesting information that I can't help myself! Right now I am to start chapter 7.

The first four chapters were largely what I expected. They tell the tale of the colonization period which is a lot of things but not romantic. Zinn goes into great detail while describing the atrocities committed by the colonizers onto the natives and presents a view of Columbus that is very different from the "mighty explorer and visionary who discovered the new world" one.

The fifth chapter, however, shook my beliefs a bit. I had always naively imagined the American Revolution against the British Crown to be widely supported in America in a somewhat homogeneous way -- one of those events that rarely happens. Not so according to Zinn. He presents documentation that shows that there was quite a bit of unrest, disagreement and perhaps even difference of ideology across the social and economical classes during the revolution and that there were several stages at which the armies staged mutinies and other forms or rebellion. Furthermore, certain groups of Americans even seemed to be professing loyalty to the crown.

Chapter six is devoted to the status of women in the new nation and the beginnings of the feminist movement. Again, I was surprised (in a good way) to find that the earliest feminists were also supporters of the abolition of slavery. This happening around the 1830s and 40s. The chapter, as expected, is very critical of the role women were forced to play in the 18th and 19th centuries -- as it should be!

All in all, the view expressed in the fifth and sixth chapters seems very realistic. It is very critical of the founding fathers and the social structure that was being setup in America. It could be summed up by saying that one was entitled to life, liberty and the pursue of happiness were rights as long as one was a white male who owned land. I know that I am to read a book as controversial as this one with a grain of salt -- specially since Zinn is very explicit about his "bias" -- but most of the time I can't help but to believe the book's arguments as they are very reasonable and seem to be grounded in facts and evidence.

The Trouble With Physics

It has been a while since any -- this one in particular -- of my blogs has seen me at the keyboard. No more!

After the blur of a weekend I had in Florida I decided I was too tired to do something "technical" during the flight and picked up Smolin's The Trouble With Physics which I've been meaning to read for a while. I ended up sleeping in the plane, but now I've finished the book and I can say it is very good.

The first two sections tell a story of modern theoretical physics while attempting to give the reader some understanding of string theory. Like most popularizations it only does so at a very superficial level and one is left with more questions than understanding, as expected. Along the way Smolin points out some of the problems the theory has, some of which are controversial. See here for an example.

In the third part of the book Smolin talks about some other subjects in modern theoretical physics in trying to paint a complete picture of the status of said science nowadays. Again, begin a popularization the account is good but very superficial.

The last part of the book makes the rest more than worth the time it takes to read (not much given how clearly it is written). I think one can understand all the points Smolin makes about how science has been and is done, what is currently wrong with it and the potential solutions he puts forth by just reading this part.

The last part of the book is very good reading for anyone interested in pursuing a career in theoretical physics. It paints a picture that I think is very accurate about how such careers are shaped by committees, grants, letters of recommendations, etc. I say the picture is accurate as what is said seems to resonate with other accounts I've read on the same subject. Smolin is very critical of the current system and I think his points are mostly valid. I thought the book was going to end with some mushy inspirational note to young physicists, but it didn't. Throughout and to the end it was very pragmatical and realistic. Nevertheless, and strangely enough, I found this part of the book, which paints the road to theoretical physics as a long and very difficult one to be incredibly inspiring. It must be the one chapter talking about the seers who followed alternative careers and were still able to pursue physics.

What You Can't Say

This is one of my favorite essays. I like the way Paul Graham writes and the way he thinks. Rather, I like that he thinks very profoundly about what he writes and that this shines through his otherwise mostly colloquial and casual writing. Besides, it references Fight Club and talks about Noam Chomsky and 'Physics vs Literature' all in the same piece!

Needless to say, what I think about the 'Physics vs Literature' part is one of those things we can't say. Yes, really and despite the fact that I love Literature and have tremendous amounts of respect for Professors, students and practitioners of this finest art. ;-)

There isn't much to say about the piece that it doesn't say already. So go read it!

Finally, most other essays on Paul Graham's site also make for very good reading -- well, you may have to be some sort of a nerd to like some (maybe most) of them, but still.

Uncle Vanya

It is due to Paul that I was introduced to Chekhov, and boy am I glad! I read Uncle Vanya in one sitting the first time around (which means it can't be very long :-). While the play seemed to be very well done, I just did not like it. It reminded me of the house my mom and I stayed at for a while when I was very little (2, 3 or perhaps 4). The house belonged to my great-grandparents and was an old large house from feudal times. I did not like it there at all. The house had a very sinister and melancholic feel to it, specially at night. Being reminded of this must've made me not like the play, I guess. There was a certain je ne sais quoi about Vanya and Sonya that I liked in a "I want to befriend them" type of way. Not enough to like the play, however. It seemed so depressing, just like that old house and so void of deeper meaning. Then, in class, Paul showed the film Vanya on 42nd Street. That changed everything. The movie is fantastic. It has a prerequisite of having read the play (according to me) even though it sticks to it word for word. I was pleasantly surprised by the way Vanya and Sonya were played -- it matched the afromentioned je ne sais quoi. I still don't know what is it exactly, so I'll stick to the french double-dyadic phrase :-).

I read and re-read Uncle Vanya having watched the movie and it was wonderful. I found that there was a lot more to the play than I had originally thought.

My favorite feature is either the sociological commentary or the characters -- both, rather. The characters are so well developed in such a short time and it is easy to identify with facets of all of them. I love how Chekhov is able to tell such long stories about his characters with so few words and events. Every conversation tells you a bit about the characters involved as much as it advances the play. He's got a way with diction and imagery that allows him to paint an intricate picture with just a few strokes (I find this in his other plays, too).

Somehow Vanya's bitterness is both sad and upbringing at the same time and his are such wonderfully executed commentaries about the stasis in late 19th century Russia. Oh I love it! The doctor is also easy to relate to and his interactions paint a protrayal that is upbringing but sad. Dare I call the doctor and Vanya dual characters? For the class I wrote a short paper about this.

It is easy to make the doctor an ideologist from the get-go, but Vanya not so much -- he's always bitter about everything! Furthermore, he is always skeptical about what the doctor says and is not afraid to let him know. But, they get drunk and the reader finds they have more in common than he may originally think. Specially, they share a love for the professor's wife, Yelena. I think Yelena almost serves as a metaphor for ideological change as I argue in the paper.

Finally, the overall feeling that the play leaves one with is bittersweet. Of course, this after one has gotten past unpleasant childhood memories! I place special value on bittersweetness for it seems a lot easier to leave a very dark and unhappy feeling and even more so to leave a happy and cheerful pink one. Bittersweet seems much more real and yet that much harder to accomplish.

QM Texts

I've been studying quantum for my quals. It is my nth time around reading Sakurai's book and some sections s have been read n+m_s times :-). Sakurai's Modern Quantum Mechanics is a great book... as long as you are a graduate student, have had QM before and (if it is your first time reading it) have plenty of other books to read alongside it. What makes it good is its approach to quantum theory. What makes it bad is that Sakurai seems to assume that you have some kind of intuition about this stuff and fails to provide explanations sometimes. This is fine if it is your nth time around, but not for newcomers -- even having had undergrad QM.

The usual approach in most texts (like Messiah, Griffiths, Shankar) is some variation of:

what's wrong with classical physics => old quantum theory => modern QM => the cool stuff of quantum theory

Sakurai's is more like:

the cool stuff of quantum theory => modern QM with a hint of what's to come if you keep going in physics (I think... I haven't kept going, yet :-)

I think this is the right way to go about it, not just for a graduate student, but for an undergrad as well. Let me expand on what I mean:

When I was an undergrad, we used Griffiths. The book was good (as should be expected after reading his E&M book). It takes the 'brute force' way into quantum mechanics: PDEs, wave functions, lots of messy integrals and the like. Those are all necessary evils; however, I believe Feynman said that he thought the whole PDE-approach to QM was not really necessary to gain insight into the fundamentals. I think he meant: start with the formalism and the simplest example of it! You don't need PDEs, those just come when your matrix representations of operators become infinite dimensional. And sure, you need to get there at some point, but at heart all you really need to understand the trickery is a spin 1/2 system and its 2x2 matrices. You can even get to Schrodinger's equation using only operators and algebra. I like to call the later this the 'algebraic' approach to QM. Instead of solving PDEs you play with commutators and construct "helper" operators to get to the eigenvalues and eigenstates you are interested in and so forth. This is precisely what Sakurai does and it is fantastic.

There is a couple of sections in Sakurai that seem to be misplaced: the 'stat mech' section in the middle of the 'angular momentum' chapter, and the one about Bell Inequalities in the same chapter. I think they should both be in their own (short) chapters. This is, of course, no real problem, just something to be aware of. The more important problem is that the text is unaccessible to an undergrad and I'll say why at the very end.

Since last year I have been thinking about writing a set of 'notes' to go alongside with Sakurai in an attempt to make it suitable for an undergrad's first-time around. If I pass the quantum qual and take QFT, that may have to wait til summer ;-), otherwise I'll do it as I go through the class here.

Shankar's book is also excellent. Specially the Math and Classical Mechanics reviews that are at the beginning. Nobody should attept to study QM without having spent some time reviewing this material and having it become second nature. I also like that Shankar is very clear (more so than Sakurai), explains things quite a bit (again, more so than Sakurai) and that has the exersies mixed-in with the text. With Sakurai it takes a bit of work to figure out when it is your time to try the next problem from the end of the chapter, but that's very minor as well.

Like I said before, Griffiths is also very good, specially when you get into the situation where you follow the math but have lost "the picture". He also includes a Math review in chapter 3 albeit not as good as Shankar's.

Now, on to why my 'notes' for Sakurai seem to be a good project and why I think it is important that we teach QM this way. The way we teach Physics needs to evolve according to what is relevant in current research. Sure there is a lot to be gained by following the historical path, or by following the messier but conceptually more familiar path (PDE-approach). But, there is much more to be gained by following the conceptual approach that exposes the fundamentals of the theory as...hmmm...well...fundamental. Afterall, the point of science education is producing new scientists, not so much producing new science historians!

Here are the QM books that sit on my bookshelf:
Sakurai
Griffiths
Shankar
Messiah (a true bargain compared to the others!)

Cien Años de Solded (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

This is not a book. This is *the* book. It is no wonder that it won Garcia Marquez a Nobel Price, though the price was formally for all of his stories and novels, I doubt that it would have been given to him without cien años. Since the book is so celebrated it is hard to say anything that has not been said before, so I'll keep this posting short.

The plot and story line are well thought out and set up and the execution is simply brilliant. Having grown up in South America, I can safely say that the book does give a lot of insight about the peculiarities of Latin American culture -- to me some parts might have as well been taking place not in Macondo, but in some small town in Bolivia such as Punata or Cliza.

This is my second time reading the book, though the first one was for a literature class assignment in high school and all I remember from that was that I really disliked the book. What I disliked back then was all the dark realism that is included -- incest, cold-blooded-killing, treason, etcetera which can be summed up as small-town drama. However, now, perhaps with a more mature view, I realize that not only is that probably actually very real, but it allows the story to paint a very emotional and powerful portrayal of Macondo.

My favorite feature this time around was paying attention to all the patriarchy in the story while realizing that most of it is told from the perspective of Ursula (the oldest female character). A couple of people have argued that it is not accurate to say that the story is told from the perspective of Ursula and they may be right; however, my reasons for believing are as folllows:
- she is present from the very beginning until almost the very end
- every time a character is near her (ie living at the Buendia residence) we know great detail about what is happening with them, but not so when they are far away
- she is the wisest of them all -- she always knows the cure, she is always right. Now, all the other characters are portrayed as having many deep flaws (which makes them real), but Ursula has very few, as if the person telling the story was not aware of her deeper flaws, but aware of everyone else's

Finally, I highly recommend reading this in Spanish if you can. It seems to me that some of the cultural delicacies would be extremely difficult if not impossible to capture in English. However, Zack has pointed out that the translation by WinninghamGregory Rabassa is very good as the translator is also a very good writer.