My favorite Q2C Festival moments.

Waterloo's Q2C Festival is over but its echoes will reverberate for quite some time.

Below is an improved version of my yesterday tweets on my favorite Q2C Festival moments:

1 .Witnessing great mankind thought provoking issues presented & debated in the Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas, among which I'll list the ones I've attended:
- festival's opening event "What keeps physicists up at night"
- Harnessing Quantum Physics, panel discussion on quantum computation
- Sean M. Caroll's lecture The origin of the Universe and the arrow of time"
- Craig Caplan's lecture on the fascinating world of pattens, symmetry and origami
- Stewart Brand deep thoughts on climate change, urbanization, energy and biotechnoogy
- Robert Spekkens' insights into the mysteries of quantum foundations
- Fotini Markopoulou intriguing view of spacetime.

2. The great events at The Princess Twin cinema like:
- the funny Art of Guesstimation
- all ages debates incited by the innocent physics adventures of Alice & Bob in Wonderland
- thought provoking presentations "The Mystery of Dark Matter" & "The Physics of Innovation"
- the excellent movie selection of Q2C film festival's first night
- Quantum world revealed by the entertaining PI movie The Quantum Tamers

3. Great insightful & dynamic TVO TheAgenda shows on robotics revolution, our belief in science and other issues that I still need to watch online

4. All the engaging Science in the Pub events where ideas were stirred, brewed and consumed.

5.The marvelous Physica Phantastica tent exhibits (Mars Rover, 2 qbits quantum computer), demos (of superconductivity train, cosmic ray detection, light polarization) & 3D Universe exploration movie narrated by Stephen Hawking.

What a great 10th anniversary celebration of a theoretical physics institute whose visionary founder, Mike Lazaridis, believes that
"The road to today's technological advancements was based on yesterday's ground-breaking theoretical physics".

It's an exciting time to be a thinking being.

Frank Wilczek ended his PI lecture with the following two enthusiastic statements:

It's an exciting time to be physicist, it's an exciting time to be a thinking being.

I was just thinking why he is so enthusiastic?

First of all since SUSY's experimental evidence "will be glorious" as he said. Then since "Unification loves SUSY" as he put it. SUSY will help theoretical physicists to get to the Physics' holly grail, the Grand Unification Theory, a theory that will unify the nature's 4 fundamental forces.

Frank confessed that his vision is only "la creme de la creme" of what the new golden age will be.

It just happens that these days I'm listening Fernández-Armesto's audio book "Ideas That Shaped Mankind: A Concise History of Human Thought" and learned that the idea of nothing has obsessed mankind for long time.

Now I found another reason of Frank's excitement. Mankind will learn at last what nature's nothingness looks like and what was before the Big Bang. Susy's third identity is the nature's deep inner space with its mesmerizing song of quantum fluctuations.

Sexy Physics.

OK, being sexy requires a good physique but physics could be sexy too not only hot, hot, hot or cool.

The recent news craze related to LHC launch is proving this.

Nitrogen fireworks in Waterloo.

Best ever!

This is how I would label PI's last public lecture of the 2007-2008 season "Time and Einstein in the 21st Century: The coolest stuff in the universe".

It happened at the beginning of last month but its reverberations will be felt for long time.

Here are some "keywords" that would characterize the lecture: time, atomic clocks, balloons, "really, really cold stuff", slow atoms, excitement, explosions, nitrogen "fireworks" (balloons exploding), "lots of really really cold stuff flowing on the floor", incredible clocks precision.

William D. Phillips, a Nobel Prize laureate, proved that science lectures could be really, really, really entertaining.

Alice and Bob continued...

Well, the tale was not mainly about Alice and Bob, even though they were part of the action as supporting characters. The tale revolved around a strange adventure Daniel Gottesman had that challenged his cryptographic skills. During narration we learn about different cryptographic techniques, RSA, quantum cryptography, digital signatures, qubits, how quantum computers work, etc.

Strange enough Bob was not part of the main action since the presenter kind of substituted him. To make the tale more thrilling other characters were introduced, for instance two guys with smoky glasses that abducted the narrator. I’ll stop here... since I don’t want to spoil your fun when the online lecture will be posted on PI’s site.

The main message I took home from the lecture is how quantum cryptography can guarantee that Eve has no chance to find out Alice and Bob’s secrets. In quantum world any interference with the quantum information is detectable. Eve’s attempt to eavesdrop on the message between Alice and Bob results in changing the message. This is the manifestation of a fundamental physics law that the observer of a quantum phenomena cannot learn about it without interfering with it.

POW-WOW !!!

Nima Arkani-Hamed started his presentation with a quick review of what will happen when LHC will be turned on.

Two protons will be smashed (POW) into each other after being accelerated close to the speed of light (.999c).

Since nature is not generous in revealing its secrets you need higher energies in order to go deeper in its understanding. Before collision the 2 protons will reach 7 TeV i.e. 7000 giga electron volts (eV). This is the scale of energy needed to see what happens at such small distances as 10^-17. Right before the POW it could be noticed as the time is slowing down (dilate) as predicted by Einstein's Special Relativity theory.

After the POW the nature reveals its wonders with a WOW. The 2 protons will give birth to new elementary particles that will be captured by LHC's observation equipment. That is the moment when we go deeper in understanding what nature is made of as theories are confirmed; and who knows... maybe the nature will reveal new secrets.

The next part of Nima's presentation was characterised by the UNIFICATION theme, that will make the subject of a future post.

It is all about 10-17cm.

10^-17cm is the introspection scale LHC will use to go where nobody have gone before to tell us how nature's fundamentals behave.

Why 10^-17cm is important? Since this is one of the nature's fundamental scale (called also the "weak length") where nature laws are clearly revealed. It is the intermediate fundamental length between the "ultimate small" (the Plank length of 10^-33cm) and "ultimate big" (the Universe's size).

It is where mass is predicted to be born,where Quantum Gravity could be probed, where the beginning of unification theory could start, where the first man-made black hole could be created, where we could realize that there is nowhere vacuum since there is always something, where space and time could be proven as not being fundamental ideas, where our parallel Universe of symmetric particles could be seen, where we could start to understand that our Universe is actually a small player in a huge cluster of totally different universes built on the same fundamental laws that LHC will reveal.

A Toronto star in Waterloo.

Nima Arkani-Hamed burst like a star on Friday with an enthusiastic cavalcade of ideas and slides that pointed out on one side the theoretical physics current struggles (characterized by crisis, paradoxes and controversies) and on the another side how LHC could provide by the year 2010, confirmations and open new research venues to revolutionary solutions in nature understanding.

He compared the current status of today's theoretical physics with that at the beginning of last century and postulated that the scale of physics revolutions to come is comparable with Einstein's Relativity theories and Quantum Mechanics.

One of these postulated revolutions could be the biggest discovery of our time, the Modern Copernicus Revolution that will tell us what our Universe really is and where it fits in nature's bigger picture.

It was a fascinating presentation on a fascinating subject. What a nice reward for his Grade 8 Toronto school mathematics teacher that was in the audience.

One thing I learned about the importance of LHS in theoretical physics is that it is all about 10^-17cm, which will be the subject of my next post.