Physics Camp

I’m here to work. So I don’t have as much time for temples, meeting people and learning Chinese as I would like. My number one priority is to do physics. I’d like to graduate someday. Right now I have the attention of my advisor. I’m surrounded by excellent students; and 90% of my favorite distractions have been removed.

Except this week: this week I am giving four lectures in the String Theory course at the CMS. I gave the first one today. We covered sections 3.7 and 4.1 of Polchinski (strings in curved backgrounds and old canonical quantization).

I had never given a lecture before. My prior teaching experience has been as a TF at Harvard and Berkeley where I’ve lead sections for courses. This type of teaching is pretty fun—the students and I work out problems together. We interact a lot and I get a good idea of how well they’re understanding the material.

My other related experience has been giving research seminars. (See the Tokyo blog, for example). Usually people ask questions for a little while, occasionally argue amongst themselves, and then fall asleep after about 20 minutes.

Giving the lecture today was nothing like either of those. I was a tornado at the chalk board. I would look at the students to see if they were following and I’d be met with blank stares. I think there were two questions in the entire lecture. So I went faster and faster. The chalk was soft and kept breaking in my hand. I was covered in dust. I had to step on my tip-toes to write on the top of the board. I finished my notes ten minutes early. I was convinced that this was a distaster. Wei and Aaron told me that it was fine. I guess it was fine.

I didn’t sleep last night. Well, I laid in bed, half asleep for the entire night, rolling in circles (both clockwise and counterclockwise. Neither worked). The culprit was not pre-lecture anxiety. The culprit was the fact that I had not had enough caffeine during the day and, being the junkie that I am, I was craving it. So I had coffee with my dinner. It was delicious. It was a terrible idea.

So not only was my lecture fast, I gave it on pure adrenaline. I’m not sure that it made a lot of sense.

Tomorrow I’m giving a lecture on parts of Chapter 5 of Polchinki. (“What?!? “you say… “you’re skipping BRST quantization!?!” Yup. We have two months to teach a course in string theory. If we have any hope of getting to the superstring and all the fun stuff in volume 2 then there is no time for BRST. It’s a damn shame. I think BRST is wonderfully fun and cool.) So right now I’m procrastinating. I’ve written up my notes but I haven’t practiced my talk. Here are my (current) favorite procrastination activities:
1. blogging
2. reading novels
3. planning travels for when Mike visits
4. physics
5. cleaning
6. fantasizing about dropping out of grad school and living as a bum in Yosemite
7. cooking dinner: boiling frozen glutenous rice balls filled with sesame

I’m living in a physics bubble. I conduct my life in English or in pointing/hand signals. I socialize entirely with physicist. We talk about physics a lot. We live together, eat together, work together, and hang out together. This is not a good way to see what China is really like. I’m not going to get to see that until I take a break from Physics Camp. I can’t wait until Mike gets here.