I have come to think more and more of the importance of good mentors and the personal training and career advice they provide. A number of online resources exist on the subject, including:

— Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science and references there;

— Other Naturejobs articles: Mentors & Protégés (see also, The hands that guide); Mentoring mismatch

— Compact Between Postdoctoral Appointees and Their Mentors (see also, A better deal for postdocs and their mentors?);

— NPA's Mentoring Plans for Postdoctoral Scholars;

— MentorNet, an e-mentoring network.

A but to my surprise, I have been selected as a journal keeper for the Naturejobs Postdoc Journal in 2010, based on an essay I submitted back in December 2009. That essay is now published as my first journal entry: Planning my next career?

A few nice articles on a career in science. I'll add some words of my own later.

• On Becoming a Scientist by Bruce Alberts


• A wake-up call by Bruce Alberts


• Audacious Science Series by Science Career Staff

Science News: Physicists Successfully Store and Retrieve Nothing

It sounds like a headline from the spoof newspaper The Onion, but for physicists, this is actually an achievement: Two teams have stored nothing in a puff of gas and then retrieved it a split second later.

I am attending a workshop at KITP on Sr₂RuO₄ starting this Monday, Dec 10th. I will be posting some news and development for my personal reference. It also has a wiki page.

Nature has a collection of articles on the "many-worlds" quntum theory 50 years after it was first expounded by Hugh Everett III for his PhD thesis. The articles have a running theme of science fiction as well. I have yet to read all of them, but the News Feature (subscription) and the Commentary articles are both nicely written.

It is said sometimes that physicists constantly simplify the problems they are trying to solve by considering simple models. This is true but not the whole story, or even the important part of it. Simple models must also be relevant, otherwise they are worthless. This is usually expressed by saying that the said simple model contains the important/relevant physics one is trying to address. This, I think, is far more crucial to what physicists do than the simplicity of their models which is a reflection of our modest abilities. It is a reflection of our immodest abilities in finding the correct solution.

The reason I am writing this is that today I saw Richard Muller's lecture webcast of Tue 11/7/2006, which started, due to the occasion, by his icecream model of elections. It is a simple model that argues there is no or little difference between the candidates in a two-party system. However, it does so by assuming a whole load of assumptions that are not explored in Muller's short discussion. For instance, it assumes there is a continuous, static, and spacially coordinated one-dimensional spectrum of political opinions. It also assumes that the candidates can move more or less continuously over this political spectrum without losing any votes on the opposite side of their oppponent. In short, it is a simple model, but one that does not contain the right physics.

Nature reports (subscription) that the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab is finally closed down by its founder, Robert G. Jahn, the former Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. In the 28 years that it operated it pursued, their web site says,

rigorous scientific study of the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes common to contemporary engineering practice.

Nature puts what the lab did more clearly as investigating "whether people can alter the behaviour of machines using their thoughts." But Nature seems to be a little confused about the real questions involved in this event. It says that "the closure highlights a long-running question: how permissive should science be of research that doesn't fit a standard theoretical framework, if the methods used are scientific?"

Is that really the question? The confusion comes from the bit about "scientific method". The same label enters the lab's self-description, augmented by the adjective "rigorous". However, these labels all ignore that the scientific method is basically an extension of the good old method of "trial and error", or as Popper insisted, "trial and elimination of error".

What the lab did, and other similar enterprises do, is only half the story, namely, the trial part. What's seriously missing is the part of elimination of error. The lab did not ask "the wrong questions" as Nature's headline claims (what does that mean anyway?): it refused to accept that the answers they were giving were false by the evidence collected by themselves and others. They refused to accept the almost trivial fact that whatever they found or didn't find were explained categorically better by competing theories.

Islamic "quasicrystals" predate Penrose tiles

Quasicrystals are patterns that fill all the space but lack translational symmetry. Such a structure will produce diffraction patterns when illuminated with light, but without the usual crystalline symmetries. It now seems that the findings of the University of Copenhagen crystallographer Emil Makovicky about the occurance of quasicrystalline patterns in Iran's Islamic architectural decorations and tilings are not just accidental. New findings by Peter J. Lu of Harvard University and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University (Science 315, 1106)

show that by 1200 C.E. a conceptual breakthrough occurred in which girih patterns were reconceived as tessellations of a special set of equilateral polygons ("girih tiles") decorated with lines. These tiles enabled the creation of increasingly complex periodic girih patterns, and by the 15th century, the tessellation approach was combined with self-similar transformations to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before their discovery in the West.

D-Wave Systems has announced a quantum computing demo that they say would be a first in computing history: an end-to-end 16-qubit quantum computer. The date of the demo in Vancouver is February 15, 2007.