Early this year, I was so exciting to find a series of lecture videos on YouTube about Classical Physics by Professor Alexander Polyakov. From the course website here or here, you can find the description of this course:

Discussion of the most beautiful and important parts of classical dynamics: variational principles, ergodicity and chaos, fluid dynamics of vortices, shock waves and solitons as well as the theories of developed turbulence. The main goal of this course is to demonstrate incredible power and elegance of theoretical physics.

Finally, the COVID19 fades away and many activities resume starting from this April. I flight to Sweden to attend a 2-week summer school called Quantum Connections in Sweden-11 from 11 to 24 June. It is really a wonderful and cozy 2-week holiday.

Three Nobel Laureates? I’m in!

One of the postdoc in our group, Wei-Lin Tu, told me this summer school in February. I checked the lecturers and recognized many familar names: Artur Ekert, David Gross, Gerard ’t Hooft, Frank Wilczek, and Krishna Rajagopal. The next moment, I suddenly realized that three of these names I know are Nobel Laureates! There is no way to say no to this opportunity! I have watched lecture videos of some of them, and I’d like to attend their real-time lectures.

Science creates a framework for understanding the material world, and Engineering creates tools for facilitating our lives based on this understanding. Two industrial revolutions have freed people from laborious work and travel to the extent that was hard to imagine for people before these revolutions. Understanding and manipulating the material world are great advances for human beings. How about applying this idea to life itself?

Lack of a user manual of one’s body and life

Science and Engineering are based on the basic expectation that the understanding and the tools they create can make the world a better place. However, just in the same way that a knife can be used to cook delicious cuisine and can be also used to commit murder, there is no reason to prefer to believe the produce of Science and Engineering to have good impact. If we don’t think about this carefully, it is possible to hold a sharp knife but to cut oneself constantly, without even noticing. That’s like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings. Nevertheless, I feel people have spent way too much time learning the Science and Engineering about the material world, following the western way of education. People spend way less time learning how to shape oneself properly. A good knife should be held in a steady hand. Carl Jung was very clear on this in his 1959 interview.

Today I suddenly realized that Kepler problem is easier than I thought. I first met this problem in high school physics class around 2010 and 2011, where we were simply told that the orbit of a planet is an ellipse. The statement is clearly very important and it has a name, Kepler’s First Law. However, all later calculations in high school are circular motions. I never actually derived this fact myself from Newton’s law of motion. I believe the reason is that Calculus isn’t taught in high school.

After coming back from the APS March Meeting 2023 in Las Vegas, I went to The National Museum of Western Art at Ueno, Tokyo, with two friends, Li and Zhu on 19 March. It was a sunny Sunday, and our original plan was to enjoy the cherry blossom. But, it was too early and there was not much blossom so we decided to visit this Museum nearby. We have no expectation of what we would see.

From middle July 2022, I started studying general relativity (GR) again. I use three resource at the same time: 1) Prof. Scott Hughes’s MIT’s physics graduate course 8.962, 2) the textbook by Schutz and 3) Taylor, Wheeler and Bertschinger’s book: Exploring Black Holes. I’m happy that I finally finished all the video lectures of Prof. Hughes’s MIT course today. I talked about the first part of this course in my 2022 summary of physics post. After that, the second half of the course focuses on applications.

I. Book, movies and TV dramas

This year, I’ve read many books that are related to psychology. One of my motivation is following the motto of Socrates,

know yourself!

A more urgent reason is probably I want to understand the puzzles I saw during my life in Japan. I just couldn’t understand the rationale or motivations of many behaviors of human beings or friends around me very much and I want to have a better understanding. Besides, I also continue my old hobby of knowing the life of great scientists and watching American TV dramas. Here is a list of books, movies and TV dramas I finished in 2022:

It’s a good time to summarize my 2022 journey of apprentice as a theoretical physicist. It’s my first year of doctoral course (in a Japanese university, the first year doctoral course, or D1, corresponds to the third year of the graduate school in the US). I will organize this year-end review into two sessions:

• one is related to my PhD research topic, and
• the other is about learning all areas of physics, not just limited to my current research topic.

Why do I divide my life in doing physics into two parts? The truth is, I’m not sure, and I’m still trying to understand this. However, it is a convenient and practical division, roughly corresponding to the “work-life-balance” idea. As an animal, we need basic needs to survive, including clothing, eating, living and moving (衣食住行 in Chinese). To me, this is core to the idea of working, and is related to my first division about my PhD research topic. In this sense, the first part is like my duty or job. The second division is more about interest and enjoyment. I got this idea after reading Bertrand Russell’s essay, In Praise of Idleness, back in 2021, where he discussed work and idleness.

One of the original motivations of this blog is to record my graduate school study and everyday life in Japan. For example, I had tried to use this site to keep my private research notes two years ago when working on my Master’s research project. However, later I felt the blog is not the right tool for keeping private diary or notes. As a result, this idea was put off.

I want to summarize the philosophy I had read during year 2021. I wanted to post this in June last year; eventually it comes this year. I plan to write this post in Chinese, since most material I read is translated into Chinese.

我一直会忍不住读一些哲学，这有的时候很难和身边的朋友或者亲人解释。 我是在一个经商的家庭长大的，大多数行为的出发点都是较为实际的。 我本科读的是工程类专业，身边的朋友也都非常在乎实际的用处。 更重要的是，中国的大环境给年轻人提供大问题也是具体且实际的：“有钱吗？有车吗？有房吗？有对象吗？” 自然而然，大家通常关注的（有时候是无意识的）问题是： 我的专业水平够高吗？ 我在同行中有竞争力吗？ 我可以有一个好的工作吗？ 我的工作可以给我体面的收入吗？ 我的收入可以让我的家人为我骄傲吗？ 我在我的朋友圈子里有一个体面的地位吗？ 在社会提供的这种大问题下，我们自然而然会把大部分的精力用在学习“工具性”的知识上——可以变成财富的知识，或者说“有用”的知识。