During the end of July and early August, I finish two books: Siddhartha and Bhagavad Gita, both related to Indian tradition and culture. Since I read in Chinese, the post will be written in Chinese. In summary, I just want to express my excitement to see a great epic like Bhagavad Gita, which is concise but very, very deep. Surprisingly, it is not hard to read. By the way, I choose this particular epic since Oppenheimer quoted it in some interview. I have known this since 2010 from my physics teacher. Finally, I read this book!

I finished reading several memoirs of physicists this month. Two are Russian-born physicists, Alexander Polyakov and Alexander Migdal. One is the author of a modern String Theory textbook, Polchinski. I prefer the memoirs of the first two, since they are much more colorful, lively, and interesting. I can feel their unique character behind the text. The early part of Polchinski’s memoir is also not bad, but the later part is a little too technical and hard for me to follow.

Early this year, I was thinking about how a person should act in the world. Very implicitly, I feel the key word should be authentic, without knowing much about the meaning of this word. I did some research online and discovered an inspiring essay called, Love, Open Awareness, and Authenticity: A conversation with William Blake and D. W. Winnicott [1]. I like it so much that I want to translate page 20 to 24 about Blake’s open awareness into Chinese.

I learned how to build a simple personal webpage using Hugo and deploy it on GitHub today. I must say it is not the simplest way to build your own personal website. In order to do this, you should be comforable with

• basic coding process and
• command line: for Mac it is terminal application, for windows, it is PowerShell

Why? The whole process isn’t through graphic interface through clicking and dragging. Instead, we rely heavily on create and editing files to modify and add contents to our webpage.

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.