If It’s December, This Must Be Sedaris

In years past, I’ve circulated among my email friends and acquaintances—or rather, re-circulated—one of my favorite holiday essays, David Sedaris’s “Six to Eight Black Men,” which was originally written for Esquire Magazine. Last year I posted it here.

This year I found that someone made a YouTube video of it, sort of. The soundtrack is Sedaris doing a live reading of the story (slightly updated from the print version, which is interesting for editor-types like me who like to see how essays can be improved with a little judicious snipping or amplification or the change of a single word here or there), while the video is a compilation of rather interesting stills and film snippets that quite nicely illustrate Sedaris’s narrative.

It was broken into three parts to satisfy YouTube’s length requirements, so there are are a few seconds of overlap between the three sections, but I think you can forgive its flaws. It’s that much fun.

BOOM!

Last night I put Mom to bed, and went off to my office to watch the season finale of Torchwood, a sci-fi TV series I’ve been following. Essentially, Torchwood is about a pseudo-governmental agency dealing with an interstellar rift or wormhole, one end of which is in Cardiff Bay, Wales, while the other end floats freely through timespace and attracts all sorts of unsavory creatures and items. It’s rather like the Hellmouth idea in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In this rather silly episode, the rift has been fully opened, and a gigantic demonic creature has emerged and is wreaking havoc on the populace, as gigantic demonic creatures are wont to do, so the series hero decides to sacrifice himself by zapping the monster with bioelectric energy. The energy is building and building, the hero is getting weaker and weaker, the monster is screaming and flailing, and just as the electricity reaches its peak—

BOOM! The house shakes, the windows rattle, the lights go out, the smoke detectors go off, the computer’s UPS starts beeping, and Mom’s oxygen concentrator starts sounding its high-pitched alarm to indicate a loss of power. Something has exploded outside, very close by.

Clearly all that electrical zapping on television had rather far-reaching effects.

I gather my wits and go looking for a candle and matches, and go in to tend to Mom. First priority is to hook up her portable oxygen tank. Second is to check on the neighborhood. The street lights are on outside, and houses across the street have power, but I don’t see any lights next door (then again, everyone could be asleep; it was after midnight, after all). I figure a utility pole transformer has exploded. I’ve heard it before a few times, usually during thunderstorms when one gets hit by lightning, but never quite so nearby, and never on an otherwise placid night.

So I phoned Florida Power and Light and went through their endless automated system for reporting outages, then chatted with Mom and bemoaned the fact that we now had no air conditioning or fans — despite it being autumn, it was warm and still outside, and the air was very close (though not quite stifling) inside. I went off to bed; there was really nothing else to do.

About fifty minutes later, blinding lights and air brakes heralded the arrival of a large utility truck, and soon two workers were tramping around in the darkness behind the house with the sort of flashlight that can be seen for six miles. I quickly dressed and padded out into the wet grass to talk with them, and found that they had already identified the transformer in question, the one on the utility pole behind my next-door neighbor’s house.

“I’m guessing some kind of critter got into it,” the man with the light said. “A raccoon, probably.”

“You think it fried him?”

“Oh yeah.”

I explained about Mom needing electricity for her oxygen machine, and they said it wouldn’t take too much longer. Our home backs onto a canal (much of the town has a network of canals to accommodate the rainwater runoff, and it has the added benefit of creating some distance between neighbors), so they asked about the access point to bring their truck onto the easement along the canal. I went back into the house, listened to the truck’s crane going up and down, chatted a bit more with Mom (neither of us could sleep at that point), wondered if they discovered any fried raccoon remains, and waited.

About an hour and a half after the Big Boom, the house suddenly exploded back into life, and I ran around blowing out candles and turning off lights, then rejiggered Mom’s oxygen, kissed her good night (or good morning), watched the end of the Torchwood episode, such as it was, and went off to bed under the restored a/c and fans.

Of course, the soundtrack to the new Sweeney Todd film was playing over and over in my head while I slept: my own personal earwig. Nothing like a murderous Johnny Depp singing in your ear all night to ensure particularly vivid dreams of critters getting zapped — some of them cute and furry, others gigantic and monstrously evil — and all going bump (or boom) in the night.

Surfer Dude Stuns Physicists with Theory of Everything

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.

by Roger Highfield, Science Editor The Daily Telegraph (UK)

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. “Being poor sucks,” Lisi says. “It’s hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you’re trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month.”

The E8 pattern (click to enlarge), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle), and out of the water (right)

Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.

Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi’s work as “fabulous”. “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” he says.

“Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years,” Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.

“Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi’s theory,” adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. “This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound.”

The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything” by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a “radical new explanation” for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.

The reason for the excitement is that Lisi’s model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.

But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: “The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in.”

And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: “Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I’d love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot.”

Lisi’s inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 — a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says “I think our universe is this beautiful shape.”

What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.

Lisi’s breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8’s structure matched his own. “My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing,” he tells New Scientist. “I thought: ‘Holy crap, that’s it!'”

What Lisi had realized was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8’s 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.

Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. “How cool is that?” he says.

The crucial test of Lisi’s work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.

“The theory is very young, and still in development,” he told the Telegraph. “Right now, I’d assign a low (but not tiny) likelihood to this prediction.

“For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online.”