Why should I write in public? 3

Previously, I made the arguments that writing in a nominally-public setting has value because

1) We are forced to do accountable deliberation, and
2) We are forced to tolerate mediocrity.

Now, I want to consider the duality of the character and the person.

I think, to really make use of public figures, we need to begin to dissect the different people that make up a particular person. To make sense of our different selves, and to grow as oneself, we have to facilitate communication between our personae: who we are, who we want to be perceived as, who we used to be, who we are on the internet.

The Duality (n-ality), examples

Bill Cosby, the man, is still alive. Yet, I could write a eulogy for Bill Cosby the public figure.

John Cena, the professional wrestling character, is notoriously over-successful and largely uninteresting and unoriginal. He is potato salad. Yet, John Cena, the public figure, seems to be by all accounts a great human being. John Cena, the man? We have no certainty in any answer.

Ike Turner and John Lennon have both made remarkable contributions to popular music. Turner arguably invented rock n roll, and Lennon wrote a number of decent songs (I'm understating, ok!). Why is one remembered as the man who beat Tina and the other as the man 'imagined' a utopia free of borders and violence? The answer is probably an important one. On the face of them, one notices conspicuous differences. Admitting that it could be a complex answer as well, probably it is a complexion answer in part.

Ok, but my purpose is not to point out the discrepancy in legacy, but to point out how the existence of a single, unified entity for what is actually a multitude of people, most of them fictional, is counterproductive. With Turner we don't know a duality. Maybe because we have only been given one Ike Turner, a consistent thread that makes seamless sense. Ike Turner is only his worst self. But with the mixed Lennons, there is a cognitive dissonance and somehow 'that' Lennon is forgotten, unbelievable. John Lennon could not reconcile John Lennon and John Lennon, and neither can we.

One of the Bill Cosbys is a great guy. That the man Bill is quite the opposite sort of figure creates a cognitive dissonance. But of all the selves of Bill Cosby, what is the the sum-of-selves? We are only as good as the sum-of-selves, which is the oneself. We cannot let ourselves culture a cognitive bias where the actions of one self are 'true', and of others 'false'. Like mind-body, there is not one mind struggling to control one ineffectual vessel, there is just one body. There is just one self.

Oneself

More historically significant examples could be given, but at some level we know that anyone known for any particular greatness, must ultimately not be as likable, as admirable, as moral as their public character. This knowledge carries over directly to less-famous people, and to our own public and private personae. We all have secret, shameful selves in the shadow of our public personae. With the internet, there is now even an additional layer of self.

And in the view of duality (n-ality), some of those selves are immutably weak, immoral, malicious. They are for us to regret and hate. They are monsters who cannot be reasoned with, but only controlled or slowly killed. Or who slowly kill us.

I don't know where my hero Bill Cosby ends and the man Bill Cosby begins. I don't think he does. I don't think those guys talk to each other. How could my hero Bill Cosby accept and support the actions of the man Bill Cosby? He can't, he doesn't. They are estranged. I want to think that!

But there are not two Bill Cosbys. There is just one. There is not a 'great guy Bill Cosby' who is distinct from the serial sexual assaults. Bill Cosby is his lowest self, because he is only one self. He is not just good, or just bad, but he is actually as bad as his worst.

That is the mistake, I think. Moral, mental, physical growth is not achieved by excommunication and incredulity of a 'lower self'. The growth of us is not the growth of our highest selves, but really the growth of our lowest selves. If we purport to grow by incrementally distancing our highest self from lowest, we are only increasing their separation, not their summation.

In the context of writing in public, there is an incessant question of 'which self?' As I have asked earlier, in anything one writes there is always a question of perception, and how it in turn reflects the author. As the writer for a nominal audience, we are forced to consider in that perspective who that author is. 'Who is the author?' is at many times the central question for any critical reader to answer. For myself, the critical reader, is the author-self myself?

So that is reason #3. It is a way to facilitate communication, to unify, and fully grow the selves into one self: oneself.

Why should I write in public? 2

Previously I considered writing in public in more or less personal terms. Is it a great way to look bad? What I concluded was that it is! However, the essential strengthening force of writing in public, psychologically speaking, is the inherent risk one takes. Accountable deliberation, which is to say deep thought in a nominally public setting, is dangerous but motivating.

So this is a tangible thing to hang on to. The poetry of it is this: you make yourself smarter and stronger by the potential embarrassment of revealing that you are neither. Richard Hamming's 'You and Your Research' (text) mentions a similar kind of ego-splotation, namely submitting important results in the abstract sent in advance to a conference, before actually achieving said results. It's an extreme measure! Without necessarily condoning it, this battle of the self with the ego has to be preferable to the notorious practice of cutthroat research professors: assigning two graduate students to the same project. Both are effective and inject a sense of urgency and accountability. Ethically of course, self- or ego-destruction must be preferable to collegiate collision courses.

Wrapped into this is the necessary evil of unpolished work. There is a sensibly high expectation of polish in final works in academia.

To be sure, there is a curve of polish-reward. Devils are in the details. In academic papers, little inconspicuous typos evolve into monstrous wrenches in the gears of reproducing results. However, extreme and meticulous detail must come at the cost of time and effort, which at a certain point must be stolen from more important tasks. This is the equipoise of doing anything well: tolerating your own inevitable mediocrity, but fiercely refusing to accept it.

In the present context, the moral is: to become better (at writing, thinking, at 'life', generally), it is equally important to be able to tolerate mediocrity as it is to incessantly strive against it.

Donald

Her hair was the color of the first ray of sunlight through a closed window and Donald felt it was equally, if not more, beautiful. He spoke nasally, hesitantly, the sound of a veteran of trepidation, the buzz of an alarm clock.

“Ms. Raedona, how do you respond to the critical consensus on your role in Murders in the East?”

She stared at him blankly, and then subtly rolled her eyes, as if she was hoping he would not notice the movement. Donald was proud of the chic décor of his office, but the colours seemed to blur and fade in her radiance.

“I don’t think people should listen to critics. When have critics ever made any great films? How do I know they know anything?”

Her voice was as soft as the edge of a shadow and Donald felt himself quiver with each felt syllable.

“That should be fine, Ms. Raedona,” he managed before his vocal cords were overcome by the nervous twitch. He diverted his eyes and turned off his recorder.  She passed her hand through her luxurious hair and stood to leave. Donald desperately tried to force himself out of silence. She walked out of the room, her movements defining grace. Donald blurted out a declaration he immediately wanted to tape over,

“I adore all that you’ve done!”

She did not turn back, and Donald was grateful to find he’d already turned the recorder off. He could only imagine how torturous it would be to listen to his shrill, ill-at-ease voice over and over again. As he heard her scream though, he wished he’d left it on.

           Donald jumped to his feet, and warily moved towards the sound of the scream. His curiosity conquered his nervousness and he stepped through the door that beauty had just passed through. He surveyed the hall and could not see any movement. His eyes were then drawn to the window across from him. He moved closer, ignoring the spectacular view of the city, intent on the glass. Something was terribly amiss, he thought, and put his hand out towards the pane so that he could look down at the bustling streets.

           His hand met only air, and he fell forward. He twisted violently, and managed to grab a hold of an edge. The street seemed incredibly distant and he stumbled backwards, his heart beating rapidly. For a few seconds he could only stare at the floor. He eventually looked back towards the panel-less window. It was difficult to tell the glass was now 300 feet below. It was several minutes before he began shouting, but much longer before he felt safe enough to stand.

Why should I write in public? 1

There are several features of blogging which I find appealing and what has kept me from it, through flirtations, has been my inability to settle on what exactly those features are and how best to manage them in the context of the anti-appeals. How can I blog without resenting myself?

The first appeal is accountable deliberation. It is that slowness, the requisite doubt, consideration, and ultimately regret and reflection that one makes in writing. We have to consolidate, evaluate and coherently tie together our thoughts - thoughts which race much, much faster. It is the sense that I am evaluating what is at the eye of the mind storm: the logical epicenter of the feelings, intuitions and swirling notions that -- maybe -- underlines what rational, or at least essential, thing I am trying to develop. Writing is the creation of a Cole's Notes, of the essential constituents of thought and feeling. Deliberation is one, the act of asking "What is essential to my thoughts?", "What have I learned?", and "What do I really know?" and two, proceeding to answer at the necessarily glacial pace of written thought. 

Secondly, accountability, is the looming pressure of being correct (or more correctly, not being especially wrong). It is the anxious element. And it is the one that allows completion, and relief, and the approach of truth. By asking ourselves critically, "Am I actually right?", we have to cut through and identify what certainty and conclusion we can draw. While those will tend to be images of uncertainty and questioning, paintings of ambiguity and doubt framed in "at least certainties": things we cannot necessarily carry to any conclusion but can "at least" assure ourselves of. 

Either way, we have one, the act of asking "What is essential?" and two, the act of asking "What is right and wrong?". For here I can say both are essential, but that I don't know they are all that is essential. But, at least their confluence feels more satisfying than either alone, which each feel more satisfying than neither. 

The corresponding anti-appeal: when we ask "What is essential?", and "What is right?", we also ask "What is the value?" and "Why?". When I deliberate, and when I am accountable to the outside eyes who may see, I also have "Who cares?" as a background sound. When I write, I have whether that writing is motivated by a goal of finding something closer to truth than a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings. I have whether the accountability of a possible reader is there so that I have to, each time, ask carefully, "Is this right?" (and "Is this really right?"). There's a background answer of "No!". How much of what I do, and say, and culture in view of others is anything other than marketing? Am I writing, reflecting, concluding, or failing to conclude on the basis of how it makes me look? Do I care about approaching truth or do I care more about appearing something admirable and enviable? In other words, if I am motivated to write, and to be read - am I writing to be read, or am I writing, to be writing, to be read? Is blogging only an outlet for ego-stroking, or for acknowledgement and external assurance? Is it only a way to construct a fictional Logan?

So the essential qualm is this: am I really interested in approaching truth, or more in constructing a fiction - one which may win (or lose) social capital or tip the scales in a job search? 

I don't know. I do at least like the feeling of attempting to answer. 

The Evolution of a Scientist

High School:

Undergraduate:

PhD:

Professor:

1. Obtain physics degree, 2. ?????, 3. PROFIT, or Experimental and Theoretical Physics

I recently graduated with a degree in Engineering Physics from Queen's University. Four years of virtually unwavering keenness and four summers of challenging but rewarding research seemed to leave no other option than the PhD. And while many of my colleagues were meticulously self-dissecting and weighing their options, I was pleased with what appeared to be a painless process.

But choosing a PhD barely filters the career spectrum. If anything, it applies a phase delay of 5-7 years and rolls off the tails a bit. Recently or soon-to-be-recently minted physics graduates have already applied a filter to the spectrum. However, as was probably an oft-cited feature of the physics degree, it is a broadband filter (for engineering physics, the filter is broader still). The ultimate destination for a physics or engineering physics major may lie in a range of industries: electronics, communications, petroleum, acoustics, medical imaging, teaching, finance or medicine (to name just a handful). It may also lie in academic research, in a dedicated research lab, or in some fusion of them all. And with the possible exception of the tenured professor, it may not even be useful to consider any destination remotely ultimate.

The bandwidth, B, of a physics degree filter is very large

Immediately, one can observe that the many-parameter space I've described, with all its possible wiggly traversals (not to mention start and end points), is beyond the scope of a single blog post. So, following the great tradition of spherical cows, I will consider instead the simpler problem of a relatively research-oriented student intending on probably pursuing an academic-track career or at least pursuing a PhD.

Spherical cows in a vacuum. 

The first question that comes up is then, well, should I be an experimental or theoretical physicist? 

Before discussing the recommendations, here they are. These are not as scientific as they may seem!

1. If you are absolutely, without the slightest doubt, certain you can and only ever could be a theoretical/experimental physicist, ignore that unless you've been through the steps 3-4 times already. If you are very certain you don't care, be an experimentalist.

2. Decide if you want to work in academia or industry and gauge how certain you are. If you are very uncertain or you very much want to work in industry, consider being an experimentalist.

3. Think about the people who are at the schools you've applied to and/or about the people within the field you would like to research in. Ideally, you would make a decision beforehand, and would choose accordingly a school, but many schools have many choices. If the top groups and/or top papers/authors in your school/research field are almost exclusively experimental or theoretical, you should probably do mostly that. 

4. Talk to graduate students who are doing theoretical or experimental work in the field you want to be in, at the school you want to go to or wherever. If you have done research with graduate students doing either sort of work, also think hard about that. 

5. If you are not an experimental or theoretical physicist, go back to step 1. 

ZapperZ, in his blog Physics and Physicists, has been making a case against the theoretical route. His biggest argument: supply and demand. He has recently brought up some empirical evidence for this by counting the job ads in the latest issues of Physics Today.

Walking the beam

"Walking the beam" is a staple of any laser-using experimental lab. Simply put,

These are the steps, which will be explained below. We'll assume each mirror has two knobs (i.e., two angles can be adjusted). If this isn't the case then well, you can guess what kind of time you'll have (or you will need four mirrors with two different kinds of mounts).

1. Mark the line in space you want the laser beam to occupy (the optical axis) at two points using irises (adjustable circular apertures).

2. Place one mirror (M2) very close to the first iris (I1), and another some distance away, closer to the laser.

3. Reflect the laser off of the two mirrors into the vicinity of the irises. This is a rough alignment, probably by just shuffling the position of the laser and mount around by hand.

4. Adjust the mirror closest to the laser (M1) to get the position of the beam right in the center of the first iris (I1).

5. Adjust the mirror closest to the first iris (M2) to center the beam on the second iris (I2).

6. Repeat steps 4-5 until the beam passes through both irises.

Why does this work? The beam itself travels in a straight line and can be described fully by 4 positional variables in a coordinate system defined by your line. One set of possible coordinates are, at a given point of the line, its x and y coordinates and the angles between the line and the z axis and each of the x and y axis. Alternatively, a line is just defined by two (x,y,z) coordinates.

If you could place the first iris right at the second mirror, it would be impossible to adjust the position of the beam on this iris using this mirror. By placing the first iris near the second mirror, you are making the second mirror the "angle controller" of the beam at the first iris (and the position of the beam on the second iris). The closer I1 and M2 are to each other, the more this is true. M1, on the other hand, will control the position of the beam on the first iris. Then,  "walking the beam" is essentially the iterative optimization of the angles and x,y coordinates of the beam at the location of I1. The process converges faster if the inter-mirror and inter-iris separations are large and if distance between I1 and M2 is very small.

There are some other tips to keep in mind when doing this.

First, any optical axis you choose should probably be parallel to the optical table you are mounting all your equipment on. There are at least two reasons for this:
1) if your line has a large angle relative to the table, the beam is probably aimed at eye-height somewhere away from where you are working (which is hopefully well-below that height!)
2) most optical mounts which are fixed to the table are designed to operate with an optical axis (i.e., your beam line through space) that is parallel to the table. This makes alignment of refractive and diffractive components much easier, since you can work in a more-or-less 2D world if you mount them properly. If you are aligning a diffraction grating or, worse still, a sequence of them with some lenses thrown in (such a sequence is found in a grating dispersive stretcher) and your beam path is not confined to some plane parallel to the table, you can guess what kind of time you're gonna have.

Second, you want your irises to be very precise and rigid. In the typical case, one would walk the beam and then use the subsequent, well-defined beam in a much more complicated optical sequence. One can use the irises as a tool to re-align or to put a different beam through the sequence, since they define the optical axis of the whole assembly. If they are aligned in a bit of haphazard way, somewhere down the line you'll eventually notice that the optical axis you wanted is not the optical axis you've got. This is probably the result of having I1 and I2 too close together and having them at different heights. Deciding on which height to use is generally one that requires having planned out the entire assembly. As for rigidity, if something in your assembly is bumped, rigid irises will allow you to re-adjust the bumped component back into alignment. If you only have two irises and one of them is bumped out of alignment, you can re-align it to the beam as long as the beam is still aligned. If the two go out of alignment at once, well...


Third, try to keep the angle of the mirrors from getting too large and keep the beam in more or less the center of them. Even though increasing the inter-mirror distance makes the convergence faster, it is sometimes better to not get too ridiculous with this, since at vast inter-mirror distances even the slightest adjustment of M1 will deflect the beam off of M2. If the angle of the mirrors is very large, it is almost impossible to avoid clipping part of the beam. 


In a complicated assembly, you will want to define the optical axis in at least a couple places. The reason for this is that, if 3000 knobs control the position of your focus at the end of a long chain of optics, any one knob can and will make that position wrong. If you have an optical axis which is defined at multiple points throughout the sequence, you can check approximately which knob you need to correct based on where you see your optical axis and the beam diverging (i.e., where the first iris that the beam is misaligned on is).