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seven months pass...
Pontzen, The Universe in a Box
The catered lunch that day happened to be American-style pizza, and I asked Governato -- a proud Italian -- whether his simulations looked a bit too much like thick-crust monstrosities, rather than the thin-crust beauties they ought to be. With a trace of irritation, he explained that other simulations had only ever managed to produce dough balls. We hit it off immediately.
Parisi, In a Flight of Starlings
This book is so short that you can't protest that things aren't covered enough. There is a chapter about flocking in birds, and another about the statistical mechanics of spin glasses.
There is also a crazy reconstructed conversation with 't Hooft about trying to do something with 't Hooft's calculation of the beta function for Yang-Mills theories. Forces become strong at larger distances and weak at small distances, kind of like the way quarks are confined in hadrons. Parisi asked 't Hooft about applying the result to hadrons. But what force to use? Electromagnetism wouldn't work. They gave it up as a bad idea.
We did not give a moment's thought to the color charge proposed by Gell-Mann. It would have been enough at that moment to have seen his name written somewhere (on a blackboard, for instance), or for someone to have casually mentioned Gell-Mann's model at lunch or supper, for me to have been able to run to 't Hooft with a cry of "Eureka!" In a couple of days we would have done the checks, written it up, and sent it for publication.
Gross, Wilczek and Politzer did it a few months later.
On that morning in 1973 we let slip the chance to win a Nobel Prize. Forthunately, for both of us, it would not be our only chance.
Not everyone can say that.
― alimosina, Tuesday, 31 October 2023 22:35 (seven months ago) link
four months pass...
Stein and Newman, Spin Glasses and Complexity. This was a real find. Giorgio Parisi is a world authority on the subject, but in his book he managed so say almost nothing on it.
― alimosina, Saturday, 16 March 2024 23:37 (two months ago) link
one month passes...