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Cliff Harvey

Cliff Harvey

I love high energy physics and giant robots

Above all, Im passionate about physics. More generally Im interested in furthering understanding of this world at all levels, from particle physics to economics to galactic superclusters and everything in between. I have an artistic side I once cultivated aggressively but has somewhat fallen by the wayside. My inner artist/musician is howling to get let out soon.
As a physics major at WPI, I did a couple major research projects on quantum information theory, specifically on proofs of Bell's theorem involving 4 and 5 qubits. Those projects heavily shaped the way I view physics in general, and its deep foundational issues in particular. Despite the difficulty of the subject, I am convinced there is much more confusion than is necessary, as sloppy reasoning and explanations persist.
At the moment Im mostly spending my time learning quantum field theory and string theory. I am consistently amazed by the unity of physical and mathematical logic, and as I've studied the structure of this logic I'v
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English Oakville Connecticut United States Worcester Polytechnic Institute Person

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Recent Popular Posts
+345
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About 10 weeks ago Dirac: 1975, New Zealand (h/t to +Igor Khavkine) 
Dirac Lecture 1 (of 4) - Quantum Mechanics
Dirac Lecture 2 (of 4) - Quantum Electrodynamics
Dirac Lecture 3 (of 4) - Magnetic Monopoles
Dirac Lecture 4 (of 4) - Does 'G' vary? (Large Numbers Hypothesis)

These look like a total treasure. I've never heard Dirac's voice before, which is awesome by itself, but these also appear to be great lectures as well from what Ive seen so far. Take a listen to this giant of physics and co-father of quantum mechanics...

Funny, there is so much fuzz and distortion in the first minutes of the lecture they seem to give it a kind of 'quantum' feel. ;]

I also really like Dirac for being one of the earliest champions of the theorists's perspective (for lack of a better name) that I subscribe to, and whose best modern day proponent is Nima Arkani-Hamed. Dirac said things like:

The most powerful method of advance [is] to perfect and generalize
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+164
108 Shares
About 11 weeks ago The Inevitability of Physical Laws: Why the Higgs has to exist
This is probably the best introduction to particle physics I've ever seen. An awesome presentation of 'the big picture' from the particle theorist's perspective, proving that accessibility and depth are not mutually exclusive. I'm grateful to see these ideas presented in such a crisp way, because it allows for such a dramatically better organization of physical knowledge that more people (especially quantitative literates) should benefit from. 

Some basics: At the broadest level the 'inevitability' in the title refers to the rigid framework that results from putting together quantum mechanics with special relativity: quantum field theory. These two starting principles force many surprising restrictions on us from the start, for example, that every possible elementary particle must come from the tiny menu of spins:

0, 1/2, 1, 3/2, 2

While relativity implies the classification in term
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+42
16 Shares
About 5 weeks ago Six Shin Bet leaders on the urgency of a policy change
There has been much more heat than light in the G+ discussions surrounding the reports, now confirmed, that Stephen Hawking will not be attending a conference in Jerusalem in protest of Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories. I tried to think what nugget of information might address that in the most productive way. This interview is one valuable piece that comes to mind.

Director Dror Moreh made a film called The Gatekeepers primarily revolving around all six former heads of the Israeli Shin Bet (the internal security force), and you can see some clips of it in the interview. They are speaking out about their serious concerns that their government has not acted to move away from the occupation in a meaningful way. Not since the years of Rabin, who paid for his moves towards peace with his life. 

I'm still waiting to come across a copy of this film itself, but the interview and included footage powerfully frame the c
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+29
5 Shares
About 4 weeks ago http://fractal.io/

http://butdoesitfloat.com/And-it-occurred-to-me-that-these-must-be-holographic-viral-projections
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+23
10 Shares
About 4 weeks ago This is the prettiest 100 TeV muon I've ever seen...

In other news the +IceCube Neutrino experiment, basically a giant particle detector buried in the antarctic ice, is on Google+. Thats good because I'm extremely interested to see what the cosmos communicates to us with its high energy neutrinos, especially considering the intriguing 1 PeV events it reported recently, Bert and Ernie. 
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+21
3 Shares
About 1 week ago This is a really clear and informative interview with a really impressive person: Edward Snowden, the PRISM leaker, a 29-year-old NSA infrastructure analyst employed by Booze Allen Hamilton. If there was ever any doubt about the gravity of these issues and the urgent need for public accountability, you should hear the case directly from him.

The total surveillance system that has continued its development under this administration provides the government with unprecedented power and knowledge about everyone, power which will continue to grow exponentially as Moore's law allows for ever-greater information storage and processing capability. These systems are dangerous not only because they can be abused today, but because they enable incredible abuses and retroactive violations of privacy arbitrarily far in the future. As Snowden explains, it essentially allows any authorized personnel, which included him, to bring up this stored information from far in the past to target anyone.

To s
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+21
14 Shares
About 3 weeks ago The Power of Principles – Nima Arkani-Hamed is proving once again to be an inexhaustible source of wisdom and insight on fundamental physics. This is an awesome interview to give a sense of the basic character of the field and the shape of the challenges we're trying to tackle, especially quantum gravity and the emergence of spacetime. There is a huge communication gap in terms of the perception of physics that comes through pop-sci media versus the reality, and this video is a welcome corrective. It's also filled with lots of great discussion about the currently fundamental laws and some very promising ideas to unify and go beyond them. Major props to +Ideas Roadshow for drawing out such a great conversation.

The conversation is far reaching but the most important message to underline is what Nima rightly describes as the "straightjacket" we're in with respect to monkeying with the currently fundamental framework – quantum field theory – due to the constraints of mathematical
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+20
6 Shares
About 7 weeks ago Progress on the strong force: Its confinement, vacuum structure, and monopole condensation
Mother Nature has decided to take her sweet time in revealing any new physics to us during this first part of the LHC era, besides the awesome but completely unsurprising Higgs discovery. However, aside from any totally new layers which may be hiding in wait for us somewhere, there are some incredibly fascinating mysteries that remain even in the well-known theory of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics. The abstract definition of QCD is well-known, but turning it into a formulation that is fully useable and explanatory has proven to be a much greater challenge, with only partial successes to date. That is what this paper addresses in a possibly quite substantial and meaningful way, it seems to me. 

Among the things one would like to gain is a more complete analytical understanding of the confinement of the "color" charges of QCD: the fact that single color charges cannot exist on their own
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+19
8 Shares
About 2 weeks ago Artificial magnetic monopoles, not the same thing as actual magnetic monopoles, have been the subject of some pretty cool research thats been covered in +Phys.org recently. Even though the search for real magnetic monopoles is the much more important one for physics, these engineered analogs are pretty fascinating as well. In fact, the methods that can be used to engineer generic field theories are a whole other fascinating layer of this story, maybe the most interesting for some. For me, its the fact that they are instantiating a concept that seems valuable and important for a full understanding nature, though one which hasn't been observed experimentally yet in its natural form.
http://phys.org/news/2013-05-artificial-magnetic-monopoles.html

You can see in the image how the monopole is essentially a 3D generalization of a vortex, in this case in an effective psuedo-magnetic medium, created at the intersection of two ring-shaped defects called skyrmions (also not to be confused with a fun
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+18
3 Shares
About 12 weeks ago The Planck mission's first map of the cosmic microwave background suggests that the universe is slightly older than scientists thought. Also slightly less strange. Or slightly stranger.

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/21/17397298-planck-probes-cosmic-baby-picture-revises-universes-vital-statistics?lite

Photo: ESA
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