So I told several people that I would probably blog about the most recent Categorically Not! event that took place on Sunday night as soon as I got home. It did not happen because somehow I ended up late night dancing at a salsa club in Culver City, and did not get home until well after midnight. (You'll be pleased to know that I will not show you any pictures of that event.) I had to then get up in time to give a coherent 9:00am class on advanced and retarded potentials in electromagnetism. So sorry about the delay. Here's my report on the proceedings. Please come in and comment, adding bits that I did not mention, telling us whether you liked the event, and discussing the ideas, if you like. The topic was "Intuition". We had one of the most well-attended events in terms of audience numbers, and three really great presenters! Everybody was really engaged in the material and there were so many wonderful questions (and answers). We kicked off with Joe Polchinski (KITP-UCSB) talking about the creative process in science, particulalry theoretical physics.
It was done as a sort of Question and Answer session with our host KC Cole setting the stage first with some introductory remarks about that area of research, and then asking Joe some questions to which he gave answers in general terms and specific terms. The specific terms involved him talking about thought experiments (he mentioned for example Einstein's reasoning about the Equivalence Principle by imaginig freely falling in a elevator....). He explained why thought experiments are useful guides to new insights. (He talked about his own thought experiment that led to his discovery of D-branes. He imagined what happened when you start with a higher dimensional string theory and curl up one of those dimensions and shrink it. He referred to this process as putting open and closed strings into a box and then shrinking the box away...... I won't go into the details here. - For the string theorist readers: It is his famous T-duality argument I like to use in my lectures on the topic. Several of you will know it.) Here's Joe and KC in conversation:
