From late-July to mid-September is the summer vacation of our group. I moved to a dormitory of The University of Tokyo called Kashiwa-no-ha International Village (KIV) on 21st July. So I started my summer vacation by setting down at my new home.
Daily life -- Moved to KIV and found an interesting book!
KIV is a nice place. Within a circle with radius 120 foots, you can get to the school shuttle bus head for Kashiwa campus in 10 minus, bus station where you can go to other places nearby, and Tsukuba Express, which can send you to center of Tokyo within an hour. A few steps away is a very large shopping center. So the traffic is perfect! Also, since many international students live in KIV, most people here are very friendly. You can easily start a casual conversation in the share kitchen, so it is a place you will never feel lonely.
I found a nice book probably in the late August called Good Work If You Can Get It. It is a very new book, published on May 2020. It mainly talks about how to success in Academia, or in other words, what to do to get a tenure in university and be productive afterwards. The writer is a Georgetown Philosophy Professor. I like this book very much and am now about halfway through it. It reminds me again I should work hard and manage my time wisely to make best of my graduate school period. I follow many tips in this book to make my study and research well organized. Now I feel very good and conformable with the current pace of my study, research and life.
Physics -- A nice way to understand gauge theory
I also discovered an interesting physics book called Physics From Finance. The author also has a series of non-sense books that look very interesting. I just read the first few pages, and it looks like the book mainly talks about gauge theory, but the author tries to understand using an analog in financial market. I think it is good start point to understand the mysterious mathematical concept called fiber bundle. As is mentioned in the book, the idea of using the financial model to understand the gauge theory originates from a paper by Juan Maldacena (the guy who proposed AdS/CFT correspondence) in 2014. Basically, the arbitrariness of the absolute value of a current corresponds to the gauge freedom in gauge theory. Imagine you can keep exchange currency of different countries according to a given set of exchanging rate, after you trace a loop back to the country where you start, if you end up with a different amount of currency, we say the “space has curvature”. It is a very simple example, but exactly reflects what happens in physics!
In late-August, a new general relativity (GR) course appeared in MIT/OCW. It has all the video lectures but no 2020-version assignments and solution (old version exits). I plan to go through it along with Sean Carroll’s GR book.
