Tres físicos no hispanohablantes

On the physics front Alex and I have continued to make progress with our understanding of the Ashtekar variables.  We haven’t done anything particularly new or exciting with them yet because we’re still aquatinting ourselves with the formalism.  One thing about theory work in gravitation is that there is a tremendous body of literature out there that takes a lot of work to even begin to understand the basics (true in all research really but it gets accentuated a bit in theory work because everyone has their own unique notation so the equations don’t even look the same from paper to paper).  But the basic idea behind the Ashtekar variables is that they provide a way of writing the theory of general relativity that draws some pretty neat connections between gravity and Yang-Mills field theories (basically fancy mathematical descriptions of the three non-gravitational forces: electromagnetic, weak, and strong).  The advantage of this is that if you are interested in writing down a quantized theory of gravity this formalism allows you to take advantage of the large body of clever mathematics and quantization schemes that come from work on Yang-Mills field theories.

Garrett in front of the IFCA. We have been alternating working here and in the library of the faculty of sciences.

To give you a better sense of our local environment I’ve included some more pictures of what we see every day. We’re not quite sure what’s being done to the sidewalks and curbing but we seem to be surrounded by construction on three sides. Walks in other parts of the city rapidly become more pleasant. Although Santander is hilly I find it to be a very enjoyable little city to walk around. However, our favorite walk is not very far: to the bakery that is in the bottom of our building!

This nifty solar clock resides outside the faculty of sciences at the University of Cantabria. We haven't figured out how to read it yet, but Chema tells us that it is accurate to within 1 min.
Every morning at 8:30 our friendly neighborhood alarm clock goes to work.	Of course, as Alex discovered the accuracy decreases a lot if it's a cloudy day.	After last night's cooking adventure Garrett remains skeptical of chorizo.
View from the living room of our apartment toward the University. There is a nice little park that we can go running in at the bottom of the hill .