Last week I bought a plane ticket to the cheapest place that was reasonably far away from Shanghai that I had not yet visited, and that had a temperature above freezing; Chongqing. I flew into Chongqing with a backpack with 1 day’s extra clothes, a pen, a notebook, a toothbrush, a raincoat, a physics book, my passport, some cash, and a camera. I found a hostel that was quite kind, full of fun people, who put me up for $12 for 3 nights - meals included if I ate with the proprietors, and all the beer I could drink each night if I played along with the Chinese drinking games.
I wandered the biggest unknown city in the world with a friend I met from Wuhan, a neighboring (mega-)city. We ate the spiciest food I’ve ever eaten (the city used to be in the famed Sichuan province - famed for spicy foods and pretty women). We wandered up the old streets, the famous streets, and the newly built streets. Depending on how you count, Chongqing is the fastest growing city in the world and even the largest city in the world if you have a funny way of counting or want to write an interesting documentary… It is powered by the three gorges dam nearby. Many of the nearly-half a million new residents a year are from the regions along the Yangtze River who have been displaced by the massive engineering project. The city is full of peasants who walk around the streets with a rope attached to a long bamboo rod - their safety harness - signaling a willing intent to work on one of the hundreds of multi-million dollar construction projects underway in the city. After a few days I wanted to head down the Yangtze river to see the dam, and from there head further south towards China’s southern coast.
I asked the hostel to buy a ticket on a boat for me to head down the river. I speak enough Chinese to arrange such things generally, but when the details come, I just say ‘sure!’ without really understanding the times or details, and just hop in the next seat, ask for the next bus, or when the next train leaves…
So I blindly paid a single fare for one boat trip, and then:
5:32am Woke to catch a car they arranged for me with their friends
6:00 - 6:50am drive from hostel across town to the docks
7:20 - 11:45am ride in a minibus with some locals from Chongqing down the river to a nearby city
12:00 - 5:30pm speed down the river on a hydrofoil
5:45 - 7:00pm take a big bus past the dam from the very top, through the mountain tunnel to the nearby Yichang city bus station
7:30 - 11:00pm take a long-distance bus from the city of Yichang to Wuhan
11:05 - 11:30pm take a friendly taxi from downtown to the train station: (“can you please say again the difference between ‘apple’ and ‘airport’? They sound the same!”)
12:30am - 1:30pm take a train (hard seat! No beds left!) from Wuhan to Guilin
2:30pm - 4:00pm take bus from Guilin to Yangshuo
So, in a crazy, perfectly timed 34 hour trip (with about 3 hours sleep intermittently on the train…) I traverse some of the most beautiful parts of China along with an array of really interesting locals. I took about every form of transportation I could think of…
Then I spent 3 days in Yangshuo enjoying the river, the scenery, eating good food, meeting more friends and taking some pictures.
The Chinese coffee shop has a major flaw - it has no restroom. I go to the shop to study, I order some food, I get some obligatory tea and I start reading. Inevitably within an hour I must go home! I have no choice! I want to stay, read some more, eat another sandwich - but I simply cannot. There have now been many a studious evening cut painfully short for the lack a toilet.
Apparently China has one of the lowest restroom per capita of any nation. It is apparently not unusual for low-end housing to completely lack restroom facilities - which are consigned to a public restroom maintained (sometimes far better than the housing itself) by the local government.
There’s a ‘plaza’ near Fudan which has a set of newly built malls and stores including a Walmart. It hosts the more upscale consumer businesses in the area. Well, last weekend the food police (who wear all white with an official patch on their upper arm) were shutting down the restaurants right and left. Burger King, KFC, other restaurants, and my destination - the bakery (the only one I’ve seen in Shanghai that sells ‘real’ bread) - all had their doors sealed by red wax seals. It appeared as if they were setting an example in closing these upper-class style food places. Combined with crackdown on pedicabs last week, there seems to be a growing (or perhaps simply continued in novel formats) emphasis on order.
Today I couldn’t breathe well. The air was amazingly not good. I’ve never really understood ’smog’ before today. I’ve been in artificially cloudy cities, I’ve seen ‘a haze’ over cities, I’ve even flown through yellow and black clouds in southwestern China, but today I felt a lump in my throat just walking out the door. There was an odor that pervaded the entire city as far as I could see from atop the train platform. Not good.
People who wander up mountain trails seem to share a universal courtesy. I tend to wander - usually in the direction opposite of lights, people and noise… and I’ve now discovered that anywhere other than Indiana, this leads me to mountains. Most mountains within walking distance of mass transportation tend to have trails. So I hike up these trails to see where they go. In Japan no one will ever say “hello” (or “Konnichiwa”) to a complete stranger, much less a foreigner, - unless your on a mountain. In China people say hello all the time (see article below) but it is not a greeting of friendship said with a smile (see article below) - unless you are on a mountain. In Switzerland I was always in the mountains, as that’s what the country is, but on every path people would always say “hello,” “ciao,” “bonjour” or some other version of a human greeting. I would conjecture that it has to do with both the lack of density (you may only see three people an hour up on a mountain) and the kind of people who hike up mountains.
I’m curious, do people notice, care, or even intentionally leave a bag or backpack unzipped? In other words, am I crazy, or am I just not Chinese? In my lifetime I’ve been told ‘hey your bag’s open’ - not relating to anything falling out, simply the fact that it is partially unzipped - maybe 10 times over the past 5 years. I think all 10 warnings, in Japan, in the US, and in China have been told to me by someone of Chinese decent. I’m curious if it’s a pattern or a coincidence…
It’s cold now. And the huge cement building that we have class in has central heating only on seemingly random days. And more often that not, it blows cold air out of the vents when it’s slightly above freezing outside. We’ve come to think the heat goes on when there’s a conference downstairs. But on the unlucky day when no dignitaries or expositions are invited to Fudan we sit in our classroom in 5 layers of clothes, jacket and gloves and gleefully learn Chinese
I’m learning Chinese, a new musical notation for erhu, and reading a well written book about modern physics. Terminology is running me over I was reminded of the words ‘you don’t really know something unless you can put it into simpler words,’ and I kept thinking that there was some truth to that, but it seemed wrong at the same time.
Here’s what I’ve concluded:
A theoretical concept is built on a foundation (or successive foundations) of work and difficult thought. We can speed thousands of years through deep human thinkers’ progress in a few years study. Yet each layer was fought for with lifetimes of pondering. The terminology used is oftentimes used or optimized for reasons other than pedagogy. In music, the notation is sometimes unwieldy for certain pieces because the notation must be universal for all pieces. In physics, names can be exactly opposite of what ‘they really are’ by chance of discovery, arbitrary choice of direction, or pranks by bored physicists. In spoken language, words take on an evolutionary life of their own and for any number of reasons the modern use of a word can have little to do with its origins. Thus learning such obscured constructs can be difficult.
A good teacher is not one that ‘simplifies’ concepts for explanation, but one who has the ability to ‘translate’ from one set of terminologies to another set; to bring about an understanding using terminology familiar to the pupil and transition that understanding into its standard social form. Thus a good language teacher can communicate using non-linguistic terminology (body language, sounds, images, action) that can be conceptually understood and then connected with the standard term. Further, a good teacher can gear terminology to correctly correspond with the pupil’s experiences. It is only the self-righteous or pedantic who would think a difficult concept cannot be expressed in language other than that which is currently used.
Regardless, this does not excuse one from the ‘difficulty’ of the material at hand. There is no way to learn truly difficult concepts without the shortcuts provided terms and structured syntax. The actual representation is, in the end, irrelevant but some representation must be used. In a growing field, as found in academia, new words and concepts are being created - often growing from the terminology planted by others. One must be consistent if one wishes to be clear both to others and to one’s self; the definition of units is arbitrary, but if you keep switching them mid-problem you are bound to make a mistake.
It seems a good teacher is one who can translate concepts and create new, understandable terminology ad hoc to suite the student - and then suitably connect the idea sparked by the terminology to the standard understood by society. The conflicting interests of accuracy, fluency, discovery, pedagogy, reliability and universality among others make learning new ‘languages’ difficult. From the student’s point of view, one needs to be able to realize that the ’standard’ terminology really is arbitrary - and conceptual connections need to be made (hopefully) before (but sometimes after) the terms themselves are learned.
“When I was a kid we could see the stars here in Shanghai. Now it takes a really clear night, far from the city center to even see a few.”
“When I was a kid we would swim in this river and drink its water. Now there are too many boats, and the water is too dirty.”
“When I was a kid this (30 story) building was a landmark you could see from anywhere in the area. Now you can barely see it from a block away as it is obscured by a wall of skyscrapers.”
“When I was a kid we would fish in this lake. We’d catch fish and crabs and eat them raw on the bank. Now there is too much pollution to eat the fish and there are no more crabs.”
How old does one have to be for ‘Well, when I was a kid…’ to have a meaning? It seems one can judge the rate of change of a society by such a phrase. Each was said by someone around 22 years old about different cities in China in which they grew up.
I stepped out of the train station today to the hoard of pedi-cab things in my way. They say their customary ‘taxi!’ ‘where you going’ ‘hello!’ but I just walked on by. These pedi-cabs are little electric-powered tricycles with a back seat and a blue awning over the seat that can seat two, uncomfortably. They’ll take you within a few blocks for a few kuai.
Well, as I continue my walk I see a few rushing past me in quite a hurry. I turn my head and it’s a stampede. A herd of these blue, wobbly awnings are rushing towards me. I can only guess that maybe there’s a call somewhere of a bus-load of foreigners getting off at the hotel nearby - but there are just too many. Thirty of these things rush by as fast as their electric motors can carry them. They spill into the street and at the intersection they all blow the red light, turning left, turning right, continuing straight even in the face of busses plowing onward towards them.
It turns out the stampede was caused by a predator, the great white motorcycle. With its twirling red and blue lights and a squelch of its siren it had forced the herd of blue awninged pedicabs to flee.
There was a bit of an internet newslet a week ago about ‘Surfer Dude Discovers Theory of Everything.’ He’s a physicist who used a very complicated mathematical structure to create a version of a grand unified theory. These words sound big, and they are, but they are also very well defined and not mere headlines.
Here’s my attempt at understanding:
We know a lot about our universe. We can describe everything we understand with four forces: gravity, electromagnetic, the weak nuclear, and the strong nuclear force. Actually, nearly everything in your every-day experience can be described using a single force, electromagnetic, with a touch of gravity thrown in for laughs.
The Standard Model uses quantum mechanics and describes the relationships between all those subatomic particles and the three ‘small scale’ forces: electromagnetic and the two nuclear forces.
Relativity uses geometry and describes the relationships between huge things on a ‘large’ scale. It doesn’t really even make sense for objects smaller than a moon.
The problem is that we don’t know how these two ideas interact - when gravity becomes small it makes no sense, and when the quantum particles get together in big groups they make no sense. A ‘Grand Unified Theory’ would fit these four forces (which are grouped into two domains) into a single group, a single idea, a single theory. Everything from the subatomic to the cosmic could be described using a single idea, and a single set of tools.
This particular attempt describes all forces and particles as interrelated by a set of symmetries. Symmetries are beautiful. There are two-dimensional symmetries (clockwise & counterclockwise, positive & negative), there are three-dimensional symmetries (forward-backward, left-right, up-down). There are also some that only seen in subatomic particles and don’t really correspond to any concept in daily life: ‘spin’ and ‘flavor’. These are descriptions given to subatomic particles that work the same way as the other symmetries, but are not readily visible in our macroscopic world. All of these symmetries are cyclic in nature and can be easily and beautifully translated from one value of the symmetry to it’s neighbor; left can become right with a change in value, up can become left with a change in value and even positive can become negative with a change in value (as can ‘spin’ and ‘flavor’). This is what most ‘common’ interactions you see can be described as - just a simple twist or flip or change from one value of the symmetry to another.
But, we now know that you can change things between these symmetry groups - but you must follow specific rules. Einstein showed matter can become energy, and vice-versa under specific circumstances. For example, a left positive might become a down negative, but not a forward positive; whereas a forward positive might become an up negative, but not a right positive, or the like. Anyway, these interactions BETWEEN symmetries are the interesting parts. Remember how we understand the reactions between the ‘small scale’ electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces pretty well? What we’d like is a way to understand the reactions between these small scale forces and gravity.
What this guy did is he made pretty diagrams of the symmetries of interaction for each set of forces, and each set of particles we know. The diagram for quarks and gluons (the pieces protons, neutrons and electrons are made of) looks like a 6-sided star inside a hexagon. This makes sense as there are 2 sets of 3 kinds particles each with an opposite (look at those symmetries!) (2 x 3 x 2) = 12. (six-sided star+hexagon)=12. But when you draw lines on the picture it shows you can’t just go from the left side of the hexagon to the right top of the star - you have to follow the lines! As it turns out, these ‘rules’ correspond with experimental transitions of these particles from one to another. He ended up with a handful of these complicated diagrams of geometric shapes that described transitions of particles by each kind of the four forces. In total, by his calculations he ended up with 222 ‘dimensions.’ His calculations for making some of the shapes do seem to rest on unorthodox ground.
The part that is ‘hard’ is that he then took all of these weird diagrams and put them together in one gigantic diagram. So, imagine a 3D version of a 6-sided star trapped inside a 3D hexagon, and imagine that trapped inside a 3D Cube - each with their vertices connected by lines. THEN imagine a set of a dozen or so of those cumbersome shapes (all slightly different) each used as a single vertex of a HUGE shape. There are thousands of lines that are the ‘rules’ for connecting each ‘point’ on this HUGE shape. Each point contains in it a value for each of those symmetries described above - for each force we know. It is a beautiful shape that has very strict but very creative connections (ie. rules about transition from one point to another).
When all the math was crunched it was compared with experiment, and of the 222 ‘points’ we know of, all of them overlapped ‘perfectly’ (he says) with 222 of the 240 ‘points’ on a HUGE mathematical shape called E8. If correct, it means we’re missing about 28 possibilities, and that connections between previous of those smaller shapes are now much clearer - including the connection between the ‘gravity’ shape and the ‘electromagnetic’ shape and the others, ergo - a theory of everything.
The biggest problem with this use of symmetries is that we know our world is not symmetric, perfectly. Somehow there is more matter than antimatter, and their are more ‘left-handed’ particles than ‘right-handed.’ Why? If this shape was perfect, and our universe obeyed it to the T, it would seem that all the particles would just perfectly annihilate each other into perfect nothingness… So why do we have clumps of galaxies here and clumps of people here, with vast expanses of nothingness. So is our universe symmetric or not?
There’s still a lot to learn, but this theory does seem to provide a bit of insight, a bit of direction, and a bit of elucidation into our universe.
It is very interesting to watch news from abroad.
My roommate is Venezuelan, and I’m living in ‘Communist’ China, and I’m from The United States of America.
I’ve come to think that China’s brand of government is of a completely different type than that of ‘horrible’ countries (ie those dictators that have been vilified historically). It seems that China’s government is in some sense sustainable. It has a kind of stability that purely corrupt or dictatorial governments usually don’t have. Many people do dislike it, and it does curb some free speech, and it does disobey certain ‘rights’ we expect in the US - however it does not do any of these things to the point of revolution or internal hatred. The government is better than most. It’s been said that democracy is a horrible government - just better than the alternatives. China’s current government might be better at certain things than our democratic (sic - republican) government.
Further, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is exactly the opposite. That government is one that has no stability other than a huge bank account and the misguided support of the uneducated. There is nothing romantic about his government. It is actively destroying the country. There will be no end to it without a change in government.
If one wishes to evaluate governments based upon their stability and ability to help their people (and I think this could be a good metric), China must be evaluated positively even though its workings are quite contrary to those in the US. And this kind of stability must be contrasted with the purely corrupt power-grabs that occur in places like Venezuela under the (well-worded) guise of popular revolution.
What this guy did is he made pretty diagrams of the symmetries of interaction for each set of forces, and each set of particles we know. The diagram for quarks and gluons (the pieces protons, neutrons and electrons are made of) looks like a 6-sided star inside a hexagon. This makes sense as there are 2 sets of 3 kinds particles each with an opposite (look at those symmetries!) (2 x 3 x 2) = 12. (six-sided star+hexagon)=12. But when you draw lines on the picture it shows you can’t just go from the left side of the hexagon to the right top of the star - you have to follow the lines! As it turns out, these ‘rules’ correspond with experimental transitions of these particles from one to another. He ended up with a handful of these complicated diagrams of geometric shapes that described transitions of particles by each kind of the four forces. In total, by his calculations he ended up with 222 ‘dimensions.’ His calculations for making some of the shapes do seem to rest on unorthodox ground.
