Smolin video LQG online course

[beta3]

Hi guys, do the LQG videos work for you all? Or do you have currently problems too?

it doesn't for me, after the information bar is displaying 'Transitioning' for a few seconds, it goes back to ready, meaning it stopped (play button available, pause and stop not)

edit:

just discovered something interesting:
none of the videos is working for me, but when i right-click on the video window and choose error details, i get this:
WMP cannot play the file because the specified protocol is not supported. If you typed in the Open Url dialog box, try using a different transport protocol (for example, "mms:")

Why doesn't my windows media player (10, on windows xp) support the used protocol? It should be one that it's supporting, otherwise Internet Explorer wouldn't load the WMP ActiveX control (and i can see from the URL, that media player 'WM7' is specified)

 

[marcus]

Hi guys, do the LQG videos work for you all? Or do you have currently problems too?
...

they currently don't work for me. I just tried.
this is when I expected things to be back up (Monday 27 Feb)
after what they said would be routine maintenance.
but at least for my system----with which I earlier didnt have trouble getting them---they arent available

I don't know how to interpret----I think the whole Perimeter streaming media facility is not working.
I don't think it is special to me or to the Smolin lectures.
but I could be wrong.

If anybody finds something different, or gets a rise out of them, please post and let the rest of us know.

About the rest of the Perimeter site----the regular stuff not including the streaming video lectures----everything seems to be business as usual, I have no problems

 

[rtharbaugh1]

A day for disappointments, perhaps. FQX has, as promised, posted on their site a call for research proposals. Sadly, from my standpoint, they seem to be calling for academic professionals who may be tempted to do some work that is too edgy for DOE or other usual funding sources, but they are not encouraging people outside the academic establishment who might like to get a chance to bat, for once. Money and honors, as usual, flow toward those who already have them, not to those who may have some merit but go unrecognised. I had hoped for something else, from the original announcements.

Anyway, it may be a small alternative entertainment for those of us who are locked out of the Mediasite Presentation Catalog to visit FQX at:

http://www.fqxi.org/index.html

R

 

[marcus]

thanks Richard, I followed your link and found food for thought:
=====quote=====
Relevance: Proposals should be topical, foundational, and unconventional.

Topical: This Inaugural Request for Proposals is limited to research in physics (mainly quantum physics, high energy "fundamental" physics, and gravity), cosmology (mainly of the early universe) and closely related fields (such as astrophysics, astrobiology, biophysics, mathematics, complexity and emergence, and philosophy of physics), insofar as the research bears directly on questions in physics or cosmology. Although the distribution of funds across subject areas will be driven in large part by the quality of proposals received, a goal of the review process will be to fund diverse research topics that span the small and the large, and range from the elementary to the complex.

Foundational: This Inaugural Request for Proposals is limited to research with potentially significant and broad implications for our understanding of the deep or "ultimate" nature of reality.

Unconventional: This Inaugural Request for Proposals is intended to fill a gap, not a shortfall, in conventional funding. We wish to enable research that, because of its speculative, non-mainstream, or high-risk nature, would otherwise go unperformed due to lack of available monies. Thus, although there will be inevitable overlaps, an otherwise scientifically rigorous proposal that is a good candidate for an FQXi will generally not be a good candidate for funding by the NSF, DOE, etc. - and vice versa.

...
...

INITIAL PROPOSAL - DUE April 2, 2006 - Must include:
A 300 - 500 word summary of the project, explicitly addressing why it is topical, foundational and unconventional
A draft budget description not exceeding 200 words, including an approximate total cost and explanation of how funds would be spent
A Curriculum Vitae for the Principal Investigator, in PDF format, including:
Education and employment history
Five previous publications relevant to the proposed research, and five additional representative publications
Full publication list
======endquote======

I won't comment on the issue that you raised about restriction to Academia.

Whether or not that restriction makes sense (especially for their maiden venture) there are already quite a lot of people in Academia who have UNCONVENTIONAL ideas they want to work on that are not likely to get funded by either DOE or NSF.

By saying "non-mainstream, high-risk, speculative" they are already inviting a lot of rather unconventional stuff.

In the US research community almost any non-string Quantum Gravity is unlikely to get DOE or NSF funding and for this reason it could be considered as high-risk to embark on non-string QG research.

There is a lot else besides. They could find themselves getting plenty of proposals submitted----that they then have to review and decide which ones to invite to the second round submissions.

 

[Mike2]

they currently don't work for me. I just tried.
this is when I expected things to be back up (Monday 27 Feb)

The video is now working again. I just finished viewing part 3 in his intro to quantum gravity series. Cool.

 

[marcus]

The video is now working again. I just finished viewing part 3 in his intro to quantum gravity series. Cool.

thanks for passing on the news, Mike

 

[Mike2]

thanks for passing on the news, Mike

I just viewed Part 6 of his series. It is only 53 minutes long when most others are an hour and a half. At the end of Part 6 Lee comments on how many in his audience appear tiered. I guess I don't feel so bad. After viewing it, I too could hardly keep my eyes open. Why...? It seems Lee Smolin makes quite liberal use of his previous results, and I felt unprepared for it. He should give some more explicit warning that these results will be used later. And it wouldn't hurt to give a one or two sentence review of where that result came from as well. (Take notes in parts 4 and 5) Overall I appreciate his efforts, he seems to be doing a fine job. Although I wish his writing was a little more legible.

Does he plan on writing a book on this stuff later?

 

[marcus]

Does he plan on writing a book on this stuff later?

bravo to you Mike!
I am glad you are going through them and are up to Lecture 6

I watched #11 yesterday and thought it was the most interesting yet

It is quite hard work for me, and i don't follow everything. Also I have to go over and watch some again. Each viewing a little more is understandable.

In one of the lectures, I forget which, Smolin referred to "a book I am writing"
but it wasnt clear that the book was a textbook parallel to this series of lectures. the main topic of the book might be something else tangential.

He is writing a book. But I can't guarantee that the book is an "Introduction to Quantum Gravity"----in the sense of this series of lectures.

For a while I couldn't find lectures 11 and 12 because when I clicked on "Introduction to QG" I got the TOC page for Lectures 1-10 only. Duh!
then I realized that this was just PAGE ONE of the TOC
and I had to click a box to get page two! Maybe i am the only one in the world who doesn't always notice these things.

Anyway, today I plan to watch #12, while my wife is out at a handcraft bookbinding class----she does beautiful leather and ornamental cloth re-bindings of books she likes which are falling apart----and I will turn up the volume and kick back and enjoy

 

[CD]

For a while I couldn't find lectures 11 and 12 because when I clicked on "Introduction to QG" I got the TOC page for Lectures 1-10 only. Duh!
then I realized that this was just PAGE ONE of the TOC
and I had to click a box to get page two! Maybe i am the only one in the world who doesn't always notice these things.

Haha thank you! I had not noticed that there was a page two.

 

[Mike2]

bravo to you Mike!
I am glad you are going through them and are up to Lecture 6

I watched #11 yesterday and thought it was the most interesting yet

It is quite hard work for me, and i don't follow everything. Also I have to go over and watch some again. Each viewing a little more is understandable.

I think I'm going to have to go back to part 2 and this time take notes. My overall perspective gets lost in the immediate details. The TOC page refers to Quantum Gravity, by Carlo Rovelli, Cambridge University Press 2005 as an accompanying text. I wonder if it includes all the wonderful math Lee shows on the board with Lagrangians, Hamiltonian, Poisson bracked, gauge fields, E and B fields, etc?

So marcus, what part does he start to actually quantize thing. Even up to part 6 he is still dealing classically. Thanks.

 

[garrett]

I can't confirm it contains all the math in Lee Smolin's lectures, as I haven't seen them all, but Rovelli's book does include Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, Poission brackets, gauge fields, spin networks, etc. It is very very good, and I recommend it highly. In my opinion it's the best book on quantum gravity. There's also an early draft available online for free:
http://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/book.pdf

 

[marcus]

I can't confirm it contains all the math in Lee Smolin's lectures, as I haven't seen them all, but Rovelli's book does include Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, Poission brackets, gauge fields, spin networks, etc. It is very very good, and I recommend it highly. In my opinion it's the best book on quantum gravity. There's also an early draft available online for free:
http://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/book.pdf

I defer to Garrett on this, Mike.

Two side remarks:

1. for a clear simple up-to-date summary of LQG including only the essential ideas, and a lot of pictures aimed at giving intuition, see
Rovelli's January 2006 LYON LECTURE----online are 59 slides

http://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/Lyon2006II.pdf

the link is at his website
http://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/rovelli.html

2. what Smolin keeps referring to during the first half-dozen lectures or so is sections of his own 2002 paper Quantum Gravity with a Positive Cosmological Constant hep-th/0209079

every so often he will say things like "today we cover sections 2 and 3 of the paper" or "now we are in section 4 of the paper"

sometimes on the blackboard he abbreviates the paper by writing "0209079"
and sometimes he refers to the paper in a kind of slang nickname way as
"$$\Lambda > 0$$"

standing for "...Positive Cosmological Constant"

in any case he says he is following that paper, at least in the early lectures

Although it is clear to him what the connection is, and how he is following the paper, the notation may not correspond in all details and I don't find that the paper necessarily helps. What I find myself doing is watching the video lectures repeatedly. second or third time through I grasp more.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Although I haven't been able yet to watch the later videos of Smolin's talk, I can say that I have found that repeated viewing really helps. Thinking back to the courses I took in grad school, I wish I had reviewable videos, or had had them then! I would be much better off today!

 

[rtharbaugh1]

The process of expansion or opening a node seems to me a sequence in which the observer's imaginary time line is projected through the node, thus making the node a step from which to then choose the other nodes with which it is connected as next possible steps. Note each transfer into a node (expansion of a node) can be thought of as the observer's regression into the world of that node. Some of the conditions for the node remain the same, but some may change as the observer chooses to negotiate through the matrix.

An old fashioned two step at light speed is continuous...otherwise the dance is discrete.

R.

 

[marcus]

Lectures 13 and 14, presented today, are now available on line

 

[CD]

Sorry I had midterms this week, but I'll try to get caught up more this weekend. Where is everyone in the series?

 

[marcus]

Sorry I had midterms this week, but I'll try to get caught up more this weekend. Where is everyone in the series?

I've viewed it up until Lecture #14. I get more out when I
go back and watch parts over again, so I will be reviewing

 

[selfAdjoint]

I'm still waiting to do three. I was away of course, and since I got back I've pampered myself by using my RealPlayer to play classical music radio station WFMT all day. It's really hard to turn off Mozart and Shostakovich for Smolin! And my bandwidth isn't enough to do both. Maybe over the weekend.

 

[marcus]

... It's really hard to turn off Mozart and Shostakovich for Smolin!.

a long-hair hedonist
and embarrassed to admit it!
probably lives somewhere in the Midwest where they feel guilty about too much pleasure

 

[marcus]

Lectures #15 and 16 are now online
according to what he said last week, Smolin should now quantize the Ashtekar variables in these lectures
(the previous two lectures developed the new-variables version of classical General Relativity)

when you get to the menu of the lectures, remember to flip to page 2 where there is a continuation of the menu

 

[marcus]

I've been watching Lecture #15.
it seems like the best yet
he's quantizing the classical theory and making a hilbert space etc.
giving intuition that had not come to me before

has anybody else been watching #15?
anybody else find it helpful too?

dynamics comes next week (#17,18)

Oriti just walked in, at the moment I was watching lecture #15

Oriti is supposed to give lecture #19 maybe also #20
because they get to spinfoam at that point

===================
BTW I've been learning to use the "slide list" menu option in sonicfoundry mediasite streamers

so I can watch particular parts of a lecture----or come back to where I had to stop the day before

if you are watching #15, well it has 64 slides
and a particularly cool part is right around slide 61 or 62
so suppose you want to go to that slide and start the whole thing there (instead of starting at the beginning)

you go to the slide list and you see numbers 1,2,...,7

each one of those baskets 1,...6 holds 10 slides
so they hold the first 60 slides
you click on 7 and you see thumbnails of slides 61,...,64
and you see which one you want and you click on "start from slide"
and it starts playing from that slide

has anyone else been using this feature? it really ups the efficiency of the whole process of watching

 

[Mike2]

I've been watching Lecture #15.
it seems like the best yet
he's quantizing the classical theory and making a hilbert space etc.
giving intuition that had not come to me before

What would really be cool is if someone would give a brief one paragraph summary of what will be covered in each part and even include some reference as to what course material will be covered.

 

[selfAdjoint]

What would really be cool is if someone would give a brief one paragraph summary of what will be covered in each part and even include some reference as to what course material will be covered.

Check out Christine Dantas' "The Hand of a Master" series of posts at http://christinedantas.blogspot.com/, She is doing just that, and she's up to Parts 5 and 6.

 

[Mike2]

Check out Christine Dantas' "The Hand of a Master" series of posts at http://christinedantas.blogspot.com/, She is doing just that, and she's up to Parts 5 and 6.

Thanks selfAdjoint.
It is also mentioned that one of the books used as reference is:
Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity (Series on Knots and Everything, Vol. 4) (Paperback)
by John C. Baez, Javier P. Muniain
at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9810220340/?tag=pfamazon01-20

It is $500.00 each.

I wonder if the followning book might contain the same material:
Loops, Knots, Gauge Theories and Quantum Gravity (Paperback)
by Rodolfo Gambini
at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521654750/?tag=pfamazon01-20

 

[selfAdjoint]

Thanks selfAdjoint.
It is also mentioned that one of the books used as reference is:
Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity (Series on Knots and Everything, Vol. 4) (Paperback)
by John C. Baez, Javier P. Muniain
at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9810220340/?tag=pfamazon01-20

It is $500.00 each.

I wonder if the followning book might contain the same material:
Loops, Knots, Gauge Theories and Quantum Gravity (Paperback)
by Rodolfo Gambini
at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521654750/?tag=pfamazon01-20

Yep, we all found out about that price for the Baez-Munian book It's because it is out of print and very much in demand. There is supposed to be a new edition coming out, but nobody knows when. I don't know the answer to your question about the Gambini book, sorry. Maybe Baez can tell us? He does check in here every now and then.

 

[marcus]

#17 and #18 of the Smolin Lectures are on line
(Hamiltonian constraint, area and volume operators)

this is from 22 March

on 29, next wednesday, Daniele Oriti will give the lecture, on spinfoam models (will have a review of Feynman diagrams)

the next week, 5 April, Viqar Hussain on black holes and elimating singularities

 

[Mike2]

Yep, we all found out about that price for the Baez-Munian book It's because it is out of print and very much in demand. There is supposed to be a new edition coming out, but nobody knows when. I don't know the answer to your question about the Gambini book, sorry. Maybe Baez can tell us? He does check in here every now and then.

I bought Rovelli's book, Quantum Gravity
at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521837332/?tag=pfamazon01-20
I was hoping it would help me with Smolin's video course. But chapter two of Rovelli's book starts out too dense for me. I'm getting lost in the indicies. Does anyone know a good primer for this notation he uses for GR? Thanks.

 

[garrett]

For a large and excellent treatment of GR, including index gymnastics, Wald is my favorite:
http://tinyurl.com/zs3u5

For a concise but thorough (and dense) online treatment, I like Peldan's review:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9305011

Indices are a bit like spoons in The Matrix... when you get really good at using and fully understanding them, there are no indices.

 

[rtharbaugh1]

Hi Mike2

I've been trying to get the indice idea from Baez on GR at

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/gr/outline2.html

but still getting stuck.

Thanks, Garret, for additional resources. I'll take a look at those.

R.

 

[rtharbaugh1]

#17 and #18 of the Smolin Lectures are on line
(Hamiltonian constraint, area and volume operators)

this is from 22 March

on 29, next wednesday, Daniele Oriti will give the lecture, on spinfoam models (will have a review of Feynman diagrams)

the next week, 5 April, Viqar Hussain on black holes and elimating singularities

Will this be broadcast in realtime? If so, what time CST? And how do I access it? I don't see it listed at the Mediasite link.

R.

 

[marcus]

Will this be broadcast in realtime? If so, what time CST? And how do I access it? I don't see it listed at the Mediasite link.

R.

I can't tell the future obviously but Oriti is scheduled to give the talk today Wednesday 29 March, and in the past when Smolin gave the talk it was usually up for download sometime the next day---Thursday.

I don't see why it should be any different. It is just Daniele coming in for a day as "substitute teacher" for Lee.

Hi Richard,
I don't know about realtime broadcast. I have been getting the Smolin lectures from the streamingmedia site anytime after they are posted. I don't know what they mean by the word "broadcast" that I see them use. To me it is just a sort of download. I hope you are having success with your computer connection getting as much (or as little) as you want.

I have learned how to skip around. I look at the "slide menu" and find a slide and then I can start it playing right at that slide and hear the spiel that goes with that slide and from thence onwards. Sometimes I'm excited and sometimes, especially if it is late at night, i almost fall asleep at the screen. Sometimes I experience frustrating bewilderment, sometimes flashes of insight.

 

[rtharbaugh1]

Hi Marcus

Yes, it seems that the rebuild at the mediasite was successful, and it is much easier to use now. I don't have to waste time downloading for hours anymore. The vid comes through right away and I can jump around forward and back as I like.

But I am never satisfied and even though I am slavishly grateful to be able to see these presentations, I still get irritable and want them to be better. I imagine editing them down to remove the hem and haw when nothing is happening. I think how wonderful it would be if I could speed them up or slow them down at will. I wish Smolin had better handwriting and that the slides would change more often, to keep up with the lecture. Sometimes I have to wait until the slide changes to see what he has written, and by then he has gone on to talk about something else.

Nevertheless the whole thing is very exciting. Many thanks for the discussion here, and Kudos for the Perimeter team that is putting this together.

Richard.

 

[marcus]

...I still get irritable and want them to be better. ...

Oh god yes. I know what you mean.

But it will take time. Smolin does not even have enough researchers to cover the interesting research problems that they've dug up. Nor do they have budget for everything that needs doing. Even though they could use more resources in the streamer department, if PI had some extra thousands $CAN I would rather see them take on another postdoc.

I'm happy the lectures are even as good as they are, and are available.

Nevertheless the whole thing is very exciting.

So glad your setup can get the lectures!

 

[Mike2]

Hi Mike2

I've been trying to get the indice idea from Baez on GR at

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/gr/outline2.html

but still getting stuck.

Thanks, Garret, for additional resources. I'll take a look at those.

R.

Thanks, but what I'm looking for is an introduction or perhaps even a summary of the tetrad version and how they are using the capital letter/ Greek letter indicies. I'd like to see how they are deriving the action integral using this notation and wedge product of differential forms, etc.

The references you gentle people have given so far either do not use this tetrad formalism (with the capital English letters and Greek lower case letter - It seems like they are being mixed in Rovelli's book), or these references already assume that you know all this. What do those tetrads mean again?

Rovilli references John C. Baez' $500 book, Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity, for an intro into the math. Does anyone know if this book introduces this tetrad formalism with the index notation that Rovelli uses and deriving these action integrals using the mathematics of diff geometry.

Thanks for trying.

 

[marcus]

Oriti's two lectures, #19 and #20, are posted, nominally ready for watching
But so far I cannot get the sound and video. All that I can get are the slides.

If anyone can get the video to actually play, please let us know.