Saturday, May 27, 2017

#WIDOMSUMVAC — SHANGHAI: DAY 13!

It's Saturday afternoon in Shanghai and my flight to Dallas boards in an hour. Only 12 hours it looks. Great excitement and fun and research with Tim Byrnes at NYU Shanghai. Here is our farewell shot. 



We celebrate with sparkling grape juice!

When I arrived on Monday we made a to-do list and then when we pulled it up on Friday we could tick off many things, delete many things, and add new things. All in all in this two-week period we have either submitted or resubmitted or nearly submitted five refereed publications. Two per day!

Here are some parting shots of the NYU gang. 

Dr. Chandrasekar apparently has no limits.

Randomness.

The Qubit Caballero discovers inside is sticky rice filled with either sweet red-bean paste or savory meat paste.
It's Schrödinger's Dumpling!

Traditional last night dinner at the Wolf Factory.
Lamb shishkabops!

Last elevator ride. But where's Chenyu?

THERE she is!

Home in Baton Rouge for 24 hours then off AM Monday on a 24 hour flight to Okinawa where I'll visit OIST and the group of  fellow Irish person Sile Nic Chormaic (Sheila) along with our long-time collaborator, Irina Novikova at William & Mary College. We will discuss orbital angular momentum states of light interacting with nonlinear optical media! 

OIST! Rhymes with MOIST?
Stay tuned for #WIDOMSUMVAC — OKINAWA: DAY 1!





Thursday, May 25, 2017

#WIDOMSUMVAC — SHANGHAI DAY 12!

We are coming into the home stretch and have at least two theory papers in the works with our collaborators for USTC as co-authors. One Physical Review A article on quantum metrology has been resubmitted. One Physical Review Letters article we are discussing the response to the referees. 

Responding to the referees.
Tomorrow is my last day and we'll hammer out a game plan for modelling the USTC boson-sampling experiment. Collaborations between Louisiana State University, NYU Shanghai, and the University of Science and Technology of China are underway! Alas I depart 4:10PM SAT27MAY Shanghai time for my 20 hour flight to Baton Rouge via Dallas. I arrive at the DFW airport at 4:45PM SAT27MAY — only 35 minutes after I took off! Gotta love that International Dateline! Then I get about 24 hours rest before I board my flight 9:03AM MON29MAY in Baton Rouge to begin my 24-hour flight to Okinawa!

A recap in photos of yesterday and today where I have commandeered the camera to show we actually work all day!

I knight you Sir
José Eduardo Cejudo Grano de Oro
The Qubit Cowboy!
(El Caballero Qubit!)
Don't Panic. Carry on.
Tim and USTC PhD student Zuen Su.






The pointer is mightier than the pen!




At the other Middle Eastern Restaurant — Shally Lally!

"It's not a REAL party until somebody starts talking about delta functions?"

LSU-USTC-NYU collaboration!
More traditional fold dancing to the music of Shakira.
(The hips may lie?)
A boy named Su!
Chenglong is happy to be back in his home country!


"No! No! No! I'm NOT marrying the HACKER!" --- Eric Song


Monday, May 22, 2017

#WIDOMSUMVAC — SHANGHAI DAY NINE!


Quantum thermodynamics: The fridge in my hotel room is contained in an
airtight box and food placed in it actually gets hotter and not colder.

My name in Chinese in Starbucks.
Today Tim's group hosted Mile Gu and his postdoc Jayne, from the Center for Quantum Technologies, at the National University of Singapore, and they both gave some quite interesting lectures on a quantum theory of the quantum version of the barbed arrow of time, which Gu calls, "Occam's Vorpal Quantum Razor: Memory Reduction When Simulating Continuous-Time Stochastic Processes With Quantum Devices." (And I had thought I'd cornered the market on buzzwords?) The idea is that you can model the arrow of time with a simple Turing-like machine and a few simple assumptions allows you to tell the past from the future.

Today was also my Co-PhD student's last day in Shanghai before heading home, and she presented Tim and I with roses in thanks of her time here. Prof. Gu was a bit confused and asked, "Do you have this rose ceremony at ALL of your group meetings?"



Dancing the Quantum Fandango
Then after the talks, in honor of Prof. Gu, off we went to a Chinese hot-pot restaurant where they seat you around a boiling cauldron and bring you meat and vegetables to boil for yourself for dinner. The roses accompanied us for the rest of the night but began to show their age as the festivities progressed. 


The pot is hot.
Chenglong won't sit down.
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.
One side makes you spicy
And one side makes you bland
And the middle ones fuwuyuan give you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When Bob's ten feet tall...
Tim and I woo the Meat Lady with our roses.




Mile Gu gets the last rose standing.
A rose by any other name would smell sweet?

The Book of James - Musings from Dr. Dowling

Since these seem very popular here are the quotes the students collected from PHYS 7212, "Advanced Mathematical Methods for Physicists II," which I taught in the Spring Semester of 2016. The required book was:

 Elements of Green's Functions and Propagation: Potentials, Diffusion, and Waves
by
Gabriel Barton
Oxford University Press (1989) and Reprinted (2005)
ISBN13: 9780198519980, ISBN10: 0198519982

"The only good theorist is a lazy theorist. I just need to know how to set it up and turn the crank."

"That's the purpose of this course; to convert your nightmares into dreams."

"Like ancient Egypt, we write on walls and worship cats."

"You poor pathetic little man; do you find no joy in anything?"

"Zero dimensional children are very ill behaved."

I was making fun of the engineers; they deserve it."

"Cat on a hot tin roof; you can solve that depending on the cat."

"How much time am I going to torture you with that? A while."

"This looks like bullshit! There are no calculations at all!"

"My lucky number for today is -3pi/4."

"Somewhere in your brain, the voice of Dowling will come back to haunt you."

"I draw my potato."

"Now that you know what a propagator is, you can go out to the swamp, catch it, and cook it."

"You're learning little tit-bits of wisdom from Dowling the Great."

"Be prepared to have your mind numbed."

"Wrrwhhahaaa; the mating call of a Siberian musk ox."

"I'm glad I don't have that job; there'd be a lot of dead people."

"It's too tempting not to [torture your students]"

"We're going to work on this continuously until one of us drops dead or the end of class."

"I have a note: Barton should be shot."

"Good ol' Barton; Savior of Mankind."

"q/sqrt(2*pi), my lucky number."

"It's a really simple formula; you can use it over and over and impress your friends at parties."

"You will believe."

"Armagnac is better than cognac because it's cheaper."

"Sometimes people look like another person and I just assign them a name."

"[clicking tongue] Why I'm making clicking noises, I don't know."

"Barton is basically Jesus."

"I'm in a superposition of shooting [Barton] and not shooting him."

"3D is a little more complicated because it's three dimensions."

"32pi, my lucky number for the day."

"I just can't get excited about exploding balloons."

"Onward through the frog."

"Delta functions means I can do the integrals without any nightmares."

"This is going to plague your miserable existences."

"I will prove that the sky is blue."

"I'm getting lazier and lazier."

"Looking at this equation, we can immediately conclude the sky is blue."

"You could take any random talk at the AAAS meeting, replace all the words with 'chicken' and people wouldn't notice."

"Half of Barton doesn't make sense."

"This was known to bees and vikings."

"What we're going to do now is a little bit horrific."

"His name is Mr. Cow."

"What am I doing? Good question. It all made sense once upon a time."

"Crossing one eye is a trick Krystal and gecko's share. I can do it too!"

"The reason they're jealous ... I bring in more money than God."

"I like gloating."

"You can already see this is going to be a nightmare."

"This is the first and last time in your poor pathetic little lives you'll see this derived. Your lives are poor and pathetic because you have to see this derived."

"It's not a hard calculation like group theory; it just requires you keep track of your twiddles."

"[blows a raspberry] There's my retro-rockets. [blows again]. I worked at J.P.L."

"It's basically a torturous exercise working on the train rule."

"I was actually doing this without any wine."

"Good ol' vector hanky-panky."

"Today you can either write off as a complete loss or..."

"If it's tedious for Barton, you know it's gonna be rough."

"I spent a lot of time on antenna theory; my wasted youth."

"12 pi, my lucky number today."

"I don't have the heart to start chapter 13. That would be unlucky."

"The chances I can find my typos from 20 years ago is very small. That's your job now."

"Is it so bad that my jokes aren't even funny anymore?"

"Satan has a polarizer."

"You have to have a smart viking... Satan with a light-bulb."

"My brain says 'Don't tweet this; the dean might not like it.' "

"I like starting fights."

"My life has been very strange."