Tres físicos no hispanohablantes

Well, we are wrapping up here in Spain. Today Garrett gave a good talk on what he was doing, which I am sure he can fill you in on. After that Chema took us, along with his wife Elizabeth and approximately one year old daughter Dakota, to a restaurant across the bay in Pedrena. There, we feasted on Bonito (a type of tuna) and mussels. To get there we took a nice ferry across the bay from downtown Santander. While I was on the ferry Chema described some of the sites of Santander that we could see, the largest being the Royal Palace. This was a gift from the town of Santander to the Royal Family, and they would live there in the summer. The Palace was returned to the city more recently. Another magnificent building was the royal hotel; this is where the royal family stayed in the summer, before the palace was built. In addition there is a nice view of the Santander opera house.

This is the Royal Palace the summer home of the Royal family of Spain

We got to see our lunch being grilled right next to us. Bonito is like a white tuna.

Today was a good day, but I would like to speak even more about yesterday. We again took a siesta, going to the beach about 3:00 though we were then doomed to work very late into the night. It was a windy day with lots of waves, we even saw a few surfers. After we were on the beach, doing a few calculations, we decided to walk around the point of Santander, where the land juts into the ocean. The view was beautiful and the walk enjoyable, though we had a long way to go on the return leg. Here are a few pictures so that you can share in our amazment:

This a picture of a lighthouse that is sitting on a rock near the beach.

This view made me think we were on a tropical island

Here is a picture of the ocean. We would like to point out how blue the water is from the water crashing into the rocks.

This was a lighthouse that we saw on our journey. As well as some of the cliffs that gave us a great view.

An excellent view we were awarded with after our walk

We swear we are doing work

A lot has happened since we last posted: it’s been busy on the research front and we also didn’t have great access to internet over the weekend. But, the good part is that we’ve had lots of adventures so you get to see pretty pictures.

After getting lost on some of the steepest hilly streets in the city, on Friday night we ate with Chema and his wife and Stephon at this charming little tapas restaurant. Unfortunately none of us thought to bring a camera, so you’ll just have to take my word for the fact that this place was eye-candy. Along one wall where huge vats of the house-wine, above which was a nice wooden balcony where there was a piano player. The food was excellent and probably the most interesting we’ve had so far. We spent Saturday morning wandering around downtown Santander in the rain. Although we weren’t able to find everything we were looking for the architecture in the old quarter of downtown is substantially prettier than anything else we’ve seen.

This building was particularly pretty. I was surprised to find the rosy tint to the sky that my camera picked up.

At the end of one street there is a very large arch that is part of the Bank of Santander. We were a little surprised when we first saw it.

I think the best part about the old districts of European cities is the random little churches you find peaking out at the end of a random street.

We stocked up on bread thinking that the bakery would be closed on Sunday along with everything else. Oops! It turns out that it’s the only thing that doesn’t.
We were sad to discover that just a few days after we leave Santander the Red Hot Chili Peppers will be playing a free concert as a part of a festival here.

Sunday was a beach day. It was a little cool at first but after a while the sun really came out and made everything beautiful… well, except for the whole sunburn part. I am still shocked at how clear and warm the water is here given that we are on the bay of Biscay.

Most of the times we have seen it the water has been very calm, but one day the wind picked up a lot and a few surfers even showed up.

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 .

As told through pictures and captions.

What better way to start the day, than with generic cereal and boxed milk...

..and some light, morning reading.

Our walk to work includes a trek down a nice (read: remarkably steep) hill, and a walk by a local skatepark.

The Universidad de Cantabria, where physics (magic?) happens.

The "glass box" in the library, where we set up shop for most of this week.

Shots of Alex...

...myself...

..and Martin at work!

...And I do too!

And, of course, dinner and relaxation followed. I’ll try to get pictures next time we go out to eat, but forgive me if I don’t want to be “that guy with the camera.”

Also next time, that physics post I promised to put up yesterday (oops, sorry).

Sardinero, one of Spain's famous beaches, just happens to be within walking distance of our apartment. We're not complaining.

To break the monotony of reading, calculating, and preparing presentations, we decided to take our first authentic siesta. Santander is known (amongst a few other things) for its beaches. Thus, it only seemed proper that we follow the local customs and get some afternoon sun. Our destination was Sardinero (see above, and below).

Now, I’ve visited a few sandy shores in my day, but I have to say, this one takes the cake. It’s split into the “primera playa” and the “segunda playa,” two sections that are essentially identical. They’re about one half to three quarters of a mile long, flat, and have extremely fine sand. The water is fairly clear, and fairly warm (not quite ‘Florida clear and warm,’ but definitely not ‘Cape Cod dark and freezing’). There are plenty of people around, but the area never feels too crowded. 

Of course, nothing great comes for free. If you take a siesta, don´t expect to be eating dinner before 10PM; your workday still has a long way to go. Herein lies the dilemma of the siesta. Is an afternoon in the sun worth a loss in evening free time? I´ll leave that question to you.

Oh, and to prove that we actually are working, more on Physics tomorrow.

So this is our second full day of work so I guess things seem to be settling down.  We finally  had a meal that we cooked ourselves (some pasta and chicken) and we got a good night of sleep.  (The night before Garrett and I slept very little due to serious jetlag).  We have been enjoying ourselves in the apartment and have found some nice places around us. There were also some `experiences´, such as lighting our gas stove without matches and we still do not have a real clock, phone or internet. This means that we have had time to do other things, play cards, read and explore. Also, I will be sleeping a lot.

As far as work goes, Martin and I are learning the first order formulation of GR, which is different than the previous formalism that we learned. Now there are two types of indices, internal and spacetime. We are trying to learn the Ashtekar variables in the next couple days (these are a three dimensional projection of our four dimensional space-time picture and a new way to write the equations of relativity). We will let you know when anything exciting shows up.

Last night we met up with Chema, our primary collaborator, and Stephon, our advisor, for dinner at a nice little restaurant overlooking the beach and ocean. Each hour makes me feel a little more settled, but it is amazing to me just how many little things feel different: boxed milk in the grocery store, no tips at restaurants. I’ve traveled to Europe before, but always for vacation. Everything feels very different as a research assistant because I am a little more worried about where I have to get to than what I will see along the way.

The IFCA itself is an unassuming little building located behind the physics department.  This section of campus is just a few minutes walk away from our apartment.  Just about everything is a pretty manageable walk in Santander but this is literally just 2 blocks down the hill from us.  We worked at our apartment in the morning and met up with Chema and Stephon in the afternoon to discuss the overall direction of our research.  The meeting was productive and I think we are off to a good start.

As promised, here are a few pictures from our adventures so far.

As we walked toward the bay I was captivated by the scenery. There is something breathtaking about the landscape of northern Spain. The rocky hills are sharply defined and very colorful.

This is the hall leading to the jetway in the Bilbao airport. The entire airport looks very modern and like an airplane.	Our luggage took forever to arrive and we were a little worried, but the airfoil-like architecture was stunning.	Our bus passed right by the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.
Not far from our apartment we found a staircase that has a wonderful view of the bay. We walked down to the pier and through a little bit of downtown. True to its reputation Santander is indeed a port-city.	As we wandered down to the bay yesterday we had a nice view of many interesting parts of the city.

In case any of you were wondering, flying through a thunderstorm IS as frightening as it sounds.

We´ve safely made it to Santander, in spite of a few hiccups during the travel process. Our first flight, originally scheduled to leave Philly for Frankfurt (Germany) at 8PM, left the ground at about 10PM. Also, first lesson of international travel: never book two international flights with only an hour layover between them (oops). Needless to say, we missed our connection to Bilbao, and were left with a 4 hour layover in Germany. Sure, not too bad, save the five or so ¨foreigner¨ mistakes we made, probably incurring a loss of €30.

All that aside, we´re having a great time. Our mid-air thunderstorm was an experience to remember, and quickly led to the most beautiful ¨blood red¨ sunrise Martin has ever seen (Alex and I were condemned to the middle rows). If you ever have a chance to fly into Bilbao´s airport, it is far cooler than any other that I´ve seen; the rocky coastal region surrounding it is absolutely beautiful. Note: tapas are quite delicious, yet difficult to procure when you don´t speak much Spanish. And while international travel may completely warp your internal perception of space and time, the 15 hours of sleep you can get when it´s over are glorious.

We´ll post pictures as soon as our apartment gets internet. If it ever does. We´ll probably try to get a phone too. I hear those are useful.

Passport? Tickets? Check.

This week has been filled with sorting out all kinds of last minute details.  Like figuring out what odd combination of buses we need to catch to get from the airport outside Bilbao to Santander (the city we’ll be staying in), figuring out how to get from there to our apartment building, and of course packing!  We were all relieved when Garrett’s passport arrived last week.  Aside from the minor stresses of getting ready to travel, our anticipation has made this week has felt very static.  Occasionally it will hit me that I’m the only member of our group that speaks any Spanish.  I haven’t been to Spain since sophomore year of high school when I went on a concert tour of the Basque Country with my orchestra so I’m curious to see how different it feels now that I have a few more years of studying Spanish under my belt.  I’m excited about the chance to explore a different provence of Spain, albeit one right next door.

Packing has a way of revealing the most interesting little treasures. I couldn't exactly tell you why, but I found this image oddly compelling. It either says something about my sense of cliché or just embodies the fact that I'm nervous about how rusty my Spanish has become since last spring.

Living room of our apartment.

Chema, the main researcher we will be collaborating with, generously found a place for us to stay and has told us all about Santander.  Santander is the regional capital of the province and autonomous community of Cantabria, just east of the Basque Country.  It is a small port city with a population of about 185,000.  We’ll be working at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA), a research center at the University of Cantabria.  The main areas of research at IFCA are nonlinear physics, astronomy, and instrumentation/software development (many researchers at IFCA contributed to the Planck Satellite).  We’re all really excited to have this opportunity to spend time at a professional research center and hear a little bit about what Chema’s colleagues are working on.

” Travel has a way of stretching the mind.  The stretch comes not from travel’s immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad new sights, smells and sounds, but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way.”

-Ralph Crawshaw

More than anything else I’m looking forward to the change of pace.  What’s exciting to me about theory work is that you can never predict what’s going to trigger an exciting and productive conversation.  Discussion, argument, and varied setting are so central to the process because anything that will push you to think a little differently is a valuable contribution.

Once we get ourselves settled in I look forward to exploring the city.  The food in Cantabria is supposed to be excellent and I’ve heard that there is a nice beach within easy walking distance of IFCA.

You may have read (somewhere on this blog) that my summer research concerns this thing called the “CMB” – the Cosmic Microwave Background (sometimes called the Cosmic Background Radiation, or CBR). Being able to study the CMB is, in some ways, a fulfillment of dreams I had when I was 10. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Big Bang; the supposed beginning of the universe, or as some would claim, “the beginning of time” (whatever that might mean). Well, back when Garrett was a little 10 year old, the Big Bang was still called the “Big Bang Theory.” And back then, I had to wonder why humans thought that everything started with a really, really, really big explosion. How could we make any educated guess that the ENTIRETY of the universe just blew up out of nothingness? Nearly 10 years later, I now know why scientists supported the big bang theory: because it predicts the existence of the CMB.

So, what is the CMB?

That’s it!

(…Was that not helpful? Sorry, I’ll explain.)

In 1964, the physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were testing a sensitive communications antenna at Bell Labs. In an attempt to test the antenna in a radiation-free environment, they calibrated the device to a relatively quiet wavelength in the microwave range. They found that their antenna detected a constant low level background noise in any direction they could point it. After accounting for all foreseeable errors, they concluded that the universe was filled with a constant radiation background.

Penzias and Wilson couldn’t explain their finding, but in fact, it had already been predicted. In 1948 Georg Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman did some theoretical work regarding the Big Bang Theory, a theory then considered to be incredibly speculative. Their work (essentially) calculated the temperature of the universe, and they found that the universe should be permeated by a residual radiation corresponding to a temperature of 2.45 Kelvin. Funny enough, the radiation measured by Penzias and Wilson corresponded to a temperature of 3.5 K.

And that’s all the CMB is – a bunch of photons (packets of energy). Granted, they’re incredibly special photons. It’s the oldest bunch of radiation we can detect! And the great age of the CMB is what makes it so useful; it’s a snapshot of our Universe at an early age. I can’t stress enough how important the CMB is. When Penzias and Wilson detected it, they created a fundamental benchmark for the fields of Cosmology, Particle Physics, Astronomy, etc.. If any theoretical model of the universe has the potential to be correct, it must explain the CMB. Thus, the CMB has become a type of “laboratory” for physicists. By analyzing its properties, we are able to test and eliminate theoretical models. This is exactly why the “wildly speculative” Big Bang theory gained a wealth of support after the CMB’s discovery. The Big Bang Theory predicted our observations and their origin, and rightly received public approval.

The picture above is a modern map of the CMB (taken by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe; a.k.a. the WMAP satellite). The many colored spots on the image correspond to regions of varying temperature, with the traditional (blue/green/yellow/red) hot-to-cold scale (note, our galaxy’s radiation has been subtracted from the image). I’ll explain the details of this image in a future post.

(PBS Voice:) If you’d like to learn more about the Cosmic Microwave Background, a brief (but comprehensive) review can be found on Wayne Hu’s webpage ( background.uchicago.edu/~whu/). Or, you can check out one of the many accessible undergraduate texts on Astronomy or Cosmology.

References: Historical facts credited to Matts Roos, from his text “Introduction to Cosmology.”