An expert on fields, a man who believes that fields are the be all and end all of everything - which gave the talk a little added spice as there are some people who believe that a field might be the be all and end all of the phenomenon of consciousness, that consciousness is something which emerges from the contortions and perturbations of some field, probably a field which we know something of already, in much the same way as Tong explained that particles emerge from the contortions and perturbations of fields, with one field for each sort of particle.
Appropriately, the evening started with what I took to be two planets, visible in the sky in the south, over the end of my road. One low and very bright, one up and to the right, not so bright with a tinge of red. I guessed Jupiter and Venus respectively, but subsequent checking on my telephone suggested Saturn for the first and Mars, the red planet, as a further candidate for the second.
Green Park was very crowded when we arrived, a combination, so a policeman told me of one lot of people leaving the winter wonderland in some park or other outside and another lot of people trying to catch trains to Wembley for some sporting event or other. However, when we got home we learned of a power cut in the West End which may also have had something to do with it. A power cut which was visible neither at Green Park tube station nor in the vicinity. The Goat was also very crowded but demonstrated what sufficient numbers of efficient staff can do, with our being served very quickly.
I think the talk started with a picture of the periodic table, one of the wonders of its time, but which Tong said was hopelessly complicated and not very satisfactory from a mathematical point of view at all. He showed us a version of the quantum table, with just four entries, which he much preferred. Observing in passing that the quantum particle terms 'up' and 'down' we were just terms, without any up or down meaning in the ordinary sense of the word.
As noted above, a field man, and he gave us a couple of neat demonstrations of invisible fields which nevertheless did stuff. One was a picture of an apparatus used by Farraday at another Friday discourse, in the very same lecture theatre, which involved pushing one solenoid inside another, without touching, inducing a current which resulted in a needle fluttering in some other part of the apparatus a few feet away. The other was the more mundane business of magnets repelling each other if you hold them the right way around. Action at a distance, mediated by fields,
One of his visuals was an animation of one of the quantum fields throbbing away in a vacuum, but not throbbing quite to the point of particles manifesting. I associated to William Latham, a sample of whose video work we had been shown, many years ago, on a visit to the IBM site at Hursley, near Winchester, with Latham, at the time, being the artist in residence and having been given lots of state of the art computing toys to play with. Digging into reference 2 might turn up something of the sort that we saw.
Fields which were very continuous, not discrete at all. The discretion of quanta being an emergent property of said fields. A mathematical property or consequence of the way that these continuous fields were organised.
He offered a one line equation which he claimed to be the explanation of everything, or at least the best explanation on offer. An equation which I think started 'ΔV =', but when asked what V was, Tong went in for a bit of arm waving and said that that was not really the point. Wikipedia offers a rather more complicated version of what I think is the same equation, described as a Legrangian, which I used to know as being something to do with minimising something. I have no idea what is being minimised here, but I did notice that the equation appeared to contain quite a lot of repetition, with some features appearing several times in slightly different clothes. The wikipedia version is illustrated above, with still more details to be found at reference 3.
Strings only got mentioned as a bit of an afterthought.
Some talk of the LHC across the water, with the big news being, it seems, that there had been no news since the discovery a couple of years ago of the Higgs boson - which, we were reminded, manifested itself as a wobble in a statistical distribution. A wobble on a line graph: it was not as if you could actually see the thing in the ordinary way. Some people said be patient, something will turn up soon. Some people said let's build a big new collider. The Chinese were keen on this one, keen to move the centre of the particle physics universe back to somewhere near Beijing, where it belonged. While Tong belonged to a rather smaller camp which held to peering at the equation as being the way forward. There was some interesting wrinkle there, waiting to be found.
A very pleasant young lady to my right, with a Swiss-Swedish background. A young lady who reminded me of the dating opportunities waiting there to be taken up, in adult education.
Closed the evening with my first visit to the Rifleman at Epsom for what must be ten years or more. Seemed a very civilised place this Friday evening, with a proper mixture of people, but not unpleasantly crowded or unpleasantly noisy. And very convenient for the pole dancing club across the road, although, despite having, as it were, a ring side seat, I saw no action. No one in and no one out.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/john-nash.html.
Reference 2: http://latham-mutator.com/.
Reference 3: http://pdg.lbl.gov/.
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