Operator Scrambling
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OPERATOR SCRAMBLING*
‘Acknowledging that some of the Surrealist movement’s absurd objectives, such as causing panic and confusion, had been “achieved much better by the Nazi idiots than by us”, Magritte invented a completely new mode of Surrealism that skirted censorship while also testing his theory that “bad painting” might result in social good. “I live in a very unpleasant world,” he commented in 1947. “That’s why my painting is a battle, or rather a counteroffensive.”
Deliberately mixing signals, [his paintings] manufacture a cloying and sometimes sinister cheerfulness that obscures any stable meaning.’
Magritte at SF MoMA
For the past few years, every spring my research advisor has taught a class on the intersection of physics and art. It is a peculiar class, mostly driven by students’ ideas, almost fully project-based and at times bordering on chaotic. It is the kind of class in which students are expected to create instead of learning about creating and the creative process is inherently hard to break down into classroom appropriate activities and neatly scored assignments. However, it is also a very successful class with students’ projects often culminating in elaborate productions and lectures dissolving into interesting discussions. Arguing for physics and the arts being similar in general, or having significant overlap, is the first challenge the course presents to both students with background in physics and those that have devoted their undergraduate (and at times even graduate) careers to the arts. This is not surprising – to see commonalities one has to have some amount of expertise in both and most have not been lucky enough to have the time for that sort of dual training. Inevitably these early conversations, before any specific concepts are introduced, turn towards the easily accessible connections such as films depicting science in space, plays centered on historical scientific figures and other mainly straightforward depictions of science-related content in visual arts and music. As a more complicated example, the work of Salvador Dali occasionally comes up since his ‘melting’ clocks can serve as a good springboard for a discussion of time. At some point my advisor included them on an introductory slide show. There is something like fetishization that happens when non-scientists only learn about time from popular science books so Dali’s work is not fully inappropriate as a way to lean into the topic; where a scientists used to just incorporating the time coordinate into a four-dimensional tensor sees a warped clock an artist may see a much more powerful metaphor for how hard it is to define what is now and how nontrivial mentally moving backwards in time might be. Neither is incorrect, and the paintings are inoffensive enough to not suggest otherwise. Ultimately, a warped clock is easily accessible imagery and it has been incorporated into popular culture enough to not confuse too much.
On a recent trip to San Francisco, while my boyfriend was attending a conference, I had a chance to see an exhibit dedicated to another Surrealist **– Rene Magritte – whose work has been widely used in pop culture and coopted not just into works of art but even ad campaigns. My first exposure to Magritte was a similar exhibit my mother and I had visited on her first big trip to Chicago, and I had always been taken by the deceptive simplicity of his work. I still have a few of his framed prints I got at that exhibit lying around my bedroom. Magritte is less gaudy than Dali and his work is less ostentatious despite typically depicting the kind of paradoxes and puzzles that Surrealism was all about. Where Dali leads us to discussions of science and the nature of reality through imagery that cannot possibly be a part of that reality, Magritte plays with some of the same notions in a more subdued way through visual puns and puzzles. Magritte’s most famous paintings have a clean, almost geometrical quality to them and when I learned that he wanted to depict what he was thinking rather than what he was feeling, that notion paired aptly with this simplicity and the clear intentionality of his layouts. The famous pipe that is not a pipe is a good example as it looks more like a visual punchline than a display of skill or technical mastery.
Magritte’s thinking about the pipe in particular, about it being a depiction rather than the thing itself and about the limits of such depictions, is oddly in line with some of the more philosophical quandaries underlying the kind of physics we employ at small scales and low temperatures. Setting aside the aspect of time (which again seems inevitable) and the fact that there is always a delay between observation and the information taken in through that observation being processed, the notion that there is a limit on the power of the framework we use to make sense of observations is at the core of modern physics. One of the revolutionary aspects of quantum theory is exactly that it is a theory that can be fuzzy around the edges, a theory that has a hard-coded quality of reminding us that measurements are always bound to be uncertain to some extent and that eventually language will fail us when tasked with describing certain phenomena. In the mid-1920s, when academic physics left more space for philosophical debates and sacrificed less time to grant writing, the great physicists of the nascent quantum era discussed the idea of complementarity – if an answer to a question depends on how we ask the question, or the nature of the measurement on the kind of machine we use to make it, then the multiple possible answers don’t necessarily exclude one another but have to be considered as some variety of a whole instead. Of course, the mathematical formalism is much clearer than words can be, but equations tend to be less satisfying than metaphors. A lot of Magritte’s work capitalizes on this preference for metaphor over more dry albeit more clear means of expression. His pipe is a metaphor distilled and could almost be a logo for this interpretation of quantum mechanics (were the pipe only microscopic).
The exhibit I saw at the San Francisco MoMA was crowded and not only did I have to pay extra to enter it, but I had to wait in line as well. In the gift shop one could buy Magritte calendars, notebooks, clocks, pajamas, umbrellas, mandatory bowler hats and even a few remarkably pricey skateboards adorned with the typical faceless man, apple and hat motifs. Everyone was trying to take a picture with the painting depicting another painting; layers of meaning Instagram well when they are flattened into something two-dimensional. Regardless, the works on display didn’t fall flat and I was particularly interested in learning that being exposed to war and fascism had shaped some of Magritte’s thinking about Surrealism and art that is disruptive, scandalizing or shocking. The question of what it means for art to be subversive when those in power have subverted the social mores in ways that are harmful is one that has aged well and without an easily accessible answer. What is a painting of a pipe that is not a pipe in a world where whether actual pipes can be called pipes is up for debate depending on one’s party affiliation?
There are two types of uncertainty being contrasted here. First, the one we deal with in the realm of taking apart physical phenomena, is unavoidable and we find the fact that we cannot eradicate it (do just a little better, be just a little more precise) to be disconcerting. The other, the one introduced by how willing we are to bend facts in communications with others when there is a tangible benefit to it, is more of a choice and could likely be reduced much more readily. It is remarkable to think that years ago Magritte could paint a knife, label it as a bird and have it be displayed as an engaging, provocative piece of art, as a part of a larger project of art that intentionally bends the rules of truth, and today people with remarkable amounts of power play the same game but call it governance instead of performance art. And while science is more and more easily dismissed for admitting to the kind of fuzziness that is in so many ways a feature that drives its improvement, what we see in the news reflects an embrace of a lack of stable meaning (sometimes with the sinister cheerfulness shining through). The Magritte exhibit, crowded and selfie-ed and all, resonated with me much more than previous discussion of equally famous surrealists those of us with limited art knowledge can still access not only because the troubles with language his work deals with are an ever-present issue in scientific work, but also because instead of being solved abstractly they have been embraced as a mode of communication in so many ways. Magritte’s work often centers on common objects that have been put in unusual places, arranged in unusual ways or given unusual proportions. The rearrangement, the scramble, the confusion of something that is so close to making sense or being real, is too similar to fake news, to alternative facts, to lies packaged into a limited number of characters and retroactively spun into a more palatable form. Assigning meaning to words in science has to be done with nuance and care if we want to use language in the same way we have been able to use mathematics in the past. In the news, all the meanings have been assigned but we also seemed to have decided that that is irrelevant. It is a little like stepping into a Magritte painting, the pipe is definitely not a pipe whenever someone tries to claim it is. (Appropriately, in going through Magritte’s biography one even learns that he had dabbled in art forgeries.)
When I transferred to a high school in the United States years ago, I was confronted with an arts requirement that would get me to actually dirty my hands. I ended up in a ceramics class, doing so quite literally. On the first day, I put on a mostly genuine ‘I am not an artist, but I will try’ act and braced myself. The instructor, later a mentor and a friend, assured me that I must have some penchant for the visual simply based on the care with which I dressed, then proceeded to hand me a challenging assignment. Each student in the course was given a word or a concept to construct a piece around and my word was ‘fun’. Not being perceived as fun or interested in fun had been a staple of my teenage years, ranging from older friends calling me out on looking unamused during summertime beach parties to my parents trying to make me participate in holiday festivities. Somewhere between my black clothes and an unfortunately stern resting face, I have never looked like someone who has fun or wants to do so. The harshness of my Eastern European accent probably did not help much either. Years later, a roommate will call me ‘scary girl’ until we actually start living together – I have always been scary or serious in people’s minds, like some sort of a Spice Girl gone wrong. Having rejected the notion that I needed to be fun or look like I am having fun for someone else’s sake, and being a gloomy teenager far away from home, I would have never chosen to make a piece of art centered around the concept. In other words, the teacher was correct to assign it to me. The challenge was not technical, although there are quite a few moving parts to finishing a ceramics piece, but one meant to trigger introspection. I constructed a piece consisting of two spheres stacked on top of each other in a seemingly unstable configuration. I chose for them to be yellow to try and signal that they represented something sunshine-y and bright and not just a dangerous moment before something slips and breaks. It is not terribly profound to realize that activities (and people) commonly perceived as fun can feel unstable and dangerous, that there is vulnerability to letting go, at age seventeen, but this somewhat cliché outcome meant the assignment had worked. I had been forced into a process that was engaging and challenging and produced much more than just a somewhat aesthetically pleasing object. I have always believed that art should be this way – that it should push paradigms in the same way scientific discoveries do and challenge our worldviews in the same way new experimental observations can challenge our theories.
It is always humbling to be reminded how many times scientists in the past had thought physics was over and fully solved. The fact that these claims had been wrong every time and that we have been able to, as a community of scientists, discover and explain so much more further serves as less of a grandiose testament to human intellect and more as a warning that we cannot get complacent. Nature is so rich and so intricate that if we disengage from our studies of it so much can go unnoticed. Maybe encountering art from a different era that had been a response to, and a way to process, the geopolitical troubles of that time can be a similar reminder that if we let our guard down and disengage from thinking about what words means and what happens when they stop to mean what we think they should, there is so much that can warp around us and plunge us into a world of the kind of uncertainty that is not just frustrating (like it might be in an experiment) but fear-worthy. Art is something like a lie almost by default and most of science is realistically always stuck being just an extremely good approximation for reality, but governance should be neither. Maybe we should all be doing our part to call a pipe a pipe again, or at least give our confidence to the people who do.
Best,
Karmela
* Operator scrambling refers to certain features related to the evolution of operators in quantum chaotic systems. In quantum mechanics, every measurement one may wish to make in a physical system corresponds to calculating some property of a mathematical operator. If the system evolves in time, then possible measurement outcomes can also change with time and we have to consider operators that match those measurements also changing in time. Operator scrambling then refers to very complicated ways in which operators can evolve and be highly correlated and entangled with the theory still being meaningful. It is a hallmark of a chaotic system that it ‘does not forget’ so that an operator may be affected by some initial value at a much later time in its evolution. This can lead to notions of operators being ‘scrambled’ – the information it originally carries can be delocalized across the evolving system. (I’ve written about chaos and some similar ideas in a previous letter here).
** I know some of my readers have been formally trained in art or art history and to those readers I am sorry for any possible inaccuracies in my impressions of the artists mentioned here. As always, I am mostly just thinking out loud in these essays and should not be considered to have any particular expertise.
***
ABOUT ME LATELY:
LEARNING: In the past week or so, my research work has been proceeding as usual: some days it is very slow, some days the conversations I have with collaborators are very exciting and some days I am simply scrambling to find time for it in-between my teaching obligations. Sometime last spring we stumbled upon a visually striking way to represent some mildly mysterious, hard to compute, wavefunctions and we have been trying to push that representation further ever since. In a lot of ways, pretty pictures can be really deceiving and this project has in part been an exercise in thinking of ways to double and triple-check results. We have spent a lot of time on critically assessing every piece of information we have been able to obtain by going to some very constrained set of parameters whenever the most general case proved not amenable to pen-and-paper approaches (which is most of the time). This is not the most satisfactory way to work on a theoretical project, but it is one that keeps me engaged and percolates in the back of my mind often; on Monday morning I came in determined to work on something else then ended up sacrificing hours to algebra I thought would help us make progress with this particular conundrum. Academic research is really all about perseverance and that sentiment has to be really strong, especially when you are trying to tackle more than one problem (like I currently am). Maybe these updates would be more exciting if I had something flashy to say about my other project – the one about spinning ultracold bubbles in space – but I am back to being more than knee deep in literature on that front.
I saw two talks last week, one about twisted bi-layer graphene and one about constraints on dark matter searches and physics beyond the Standard Model. These were very different talks, in topic and scope, but I came away from both feeling like I had learned something new. More importantly, both presented some great examples of theoretical and experimental work coming together. It is always inspiring to see that not only can seemingly abstractly driven predictions be tested and proven, but also that there are still experiments out there that are not laser focused on one particular possibility and hence require a hefty amount of theoretical work to make sense of their results.
I have also been spending a large portion of my time teaching an introductory modern physics course for various engineering majors and dealing with all the logistics that surround that. Unfortunately, I am as disappointed as always by how out of touch faculty members that run some of these large courses can be. In such instances much of the ‘on the ground’ work with students falls on teaching assistants that typically have such varied backgrounds that any level of uniformity across various sections of the course is nearly impossible to achieve. I was particularly irked this week when I was reading through some of the postings on an online forum the course is using and noticed that not only do some students use a tone of voice and style of writing that is bordering on disrespectful and inappropriate, but that some of the older members of the teaching team i.e. faculty members are uninterested in engaging with such issues of politeness and, in fact, often write rudely or tersely themselves. It is quite frustrating to stress to teaching assistants that we have to be approachable and understanding and then go on to offer short, dismissive answers that don’t help the student at all. I am always reminded of how much we complain about physics as a discipline having a bad reputation and being seen as so hard that only barely-human geniuses can tackle it and yet poor communication that only perpetuates this perception somehow always goes unnoticed. I have picked (small) fights with faculty members that behaved in this way in the past and I really dislike being put into a situation where I feel like I should do so again.
In yoga class, I am trying to think more of how to distribute weight on my wrists and be more firm in balances where spreading the fingers provides more stability. Writing this down feels odd because the notion of working on something like wrists and fingers is a new one to me but I have always felt very weak in my upper body (probably ever since I was graded on the number of push-ups I could do in middle school) and working on a Wheel or a Crow seems like a nice way to address that without resorting to dumbbells every night.
LISTENING: I am not sure how I came across a band writing very long albums about a gastropod deity and other space snail related issues, but I have been listening to Slugdge a fair amount recently and I continue to be impressed by how good they are. For all purposes, this reads as a band with a gimmick (with track titles like EyeHateSalt and The Dark Side of the Shroom) but the music behind the gimmick is of such high quality that I would honestly never even suspect they are gastropods obsessed had I not looked at the track listing and the album art. This is not even the kind of sludgy, stoner-adjacent doom that I often recommend, it is fairly complex, fairly fast and energetic metal closer to quality progressive death metal than anything else. Slug worship has never sounded so good.
While I had started writing this letter a few weeks ago while the San Francisco trip was still fresh in my mind, last week’s episode of Supercontext on Orson Wells’ Touch of Evil nicely coincided with my deciding to finally try and finish it. In this episode, the hosts discuss a film situated on the Mexican border and rife with racial tensions. The notion of art and media that reflect contemporary societal fears and anxieties emerges as one of the themes of the episode and one can’t help but think of the movies we have seen make a splash this summer as similar tensions are very much in the zeitgeist again. From Sorry to Bother You, BlacKKKlansman and Blindspotting to even something like the Sicario sequel or Miseducation of Cameron Post (which I just saw and would probably think of slightly differently were the current vice president someone else) it is hard to pretend that movies have not caught up with the current political climate and they have done so without much subtlety. On the more science-related side of podcasting, this recent episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind on how non-obvious so many things we would be quick to call obvious without the context of a specific experience are is really interesting. Even though it is presented mostly in the framework of psychological studies, the more practical and socially relevant implications of the fact that nothing is actually obvious are quite poignant (for instance, there is some discussion of observers not noticing an act of violence when tasked with something else that requires lots of focus). Finally, on a somewhat more lighthearted note, in this most recent season Karina Longworth’s incredible exploration of Hollywood’s first century You Must Remember This has been centered on dismantling rumors and gossip reporting stemming from a book full of ‘fake news’ in the 1960s. As all of Longworth’s work on this show, this season has been fascinating, captivating and produced with the sort of attitude and biting commentary that Longworth perpetually excels at. (I was quite sad to hear that Panoply, the network this show is a part of, folded recently and really hope incredible creators like Longworth will find a way to keep their shows going.)
WATCHING: Last Saturday, I marched in the Pride parade for my small college town (small enough and college-y enough to host a parade a few months later than the national Pride events in order to accommodate students’ schedules) with the graduate employee union then went to see The Miseducation of Cameron Post with two (straight) friends from the physics department. Directed by a queer woman, Cameron Post is something of a sobering yet beautiful counterpart to nostalgia-heavy yet somewhat sanitized depictions of teenage adventures like Stranger Things. Taking place in the 90s, Cameron Post has all of the hallmarks of a period piece bringing out warm memories, that one song by 4 Non Blondes included, but it also contains an overwhelming amount of homophobia, emotional abuse, religion gone awry and overall discomfort that surpasses the average teenage experience. The title character, played by Chloe Grace Moretz who is fairly one note in her performance but at least that one note is almost always on-point, is a teenage girl caught having sex with another girl after a very 90s, very teenage movie, prom and shipped off to an evangelical conversion camp by an aunt she lives with. The camp is as campy as it can be and many of the scenes in the first half of the movie are so ridiculous that they have to be hilarious. People in the theater were laughing out loud; first because some scenes were funny then out of the same instinct that compels one to laugh in horror movies. There is not much that is shockingly gruesome or cruel in a physical way in Cameron Post, but it is hard to laugh once one remembers conversion therapy is still legal in some states and that what is playing on the screen is not an elaborate SNL skit but could be someone’s lived reality. As the people running the camp try to dismantle the identities of Cameron and her new friends and things inevitable take a few fairly dark turns, the long shots previously playing up nostalgia and the slightly bucolic quality of the camp itself become more and more dread-inducing. Even at the very end, when something of an abrupt but potentially happy (although I doubt it) stop is put to the story, the longer the camera lingers on the faces of the young people forced into an identity crisis before they have even decided who they are the more desperate the situation feels, regardless of some trappings of a happy ending surrounding them. Given the rise of conservatism and the roll-back of protection for people like those depicted in this movie, it feels timely and its seamless inclusion of a diverse cast (a disabled woman and a Native American non-binary person) makes it much more believable than attempts at queer representation that are overly whitewashed or full of tokenizing. The ending (which I don’t quite want to spoil) however, is something I could not quite make up my mind about and the friends I had seen this movie with couldn’t quite agree on what the punchline was supposed to be either. The whole production could pack slightly more of a punch, pick up the story a little faster, endear us to the characters by giving them just a little more energy but overall but I appreciated it anyway. Thinking about it a few days later I even wonder whether the low, at times almost sleepy, energy and the long shots of Moretz’s confusedly parted pouty lips were all deliberate, just to further emphasize that the world can be paralyzingly scary for young people who are forced to decide to be (or become) someone they are fundamentally not. This is not an amazing movie but its central themes are without a doubt important.
EATING: It’s definitely fall season at the farmer’s market but it is also definitely still very warm in Ilinois so my cooking has been somewhat confused. I bought a pumpkin and a butternut squash and I made a fresh corn soup but then felt silly eating all of them while in shorts and a tank top and absolutely not in need of food that would warm me up or make me feel cozy. However, the soup turned out really well, the butternut squash was a welcome addition to some grain bowls and packed lunches and the pumpkin became the curried stew I am sharing below. It uses coconut milk for creaminess, curry powder and tomato paste in addition to aromatics for a fuller flavor, and while chunks of pumpkin and sweet potato provide something to bite on, the cannellini beans I threw in for protein make it more thick and more rich. This is a somewhat typical meal for me and one that I am happy to eat on repeat, typically with something fresh green and crunchy and a bit of brown rice here and there. It is fairly easily customizable and if the weather ever returns to a normal schedule I’ll consider this stew to be one of my fall cooking staples. (On a completely unrelated note I also made over sixty curried tofu and cabbage potstickers last weekend and while my pleating skills are lacking, I am so happy to have a nice amount of them still in the freezer for any future cravings or dumpling emergencies).
For 4-6 servings you will need:
2/3 of a red onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon fresh ginger, minced
3-4 tablespoons tomato paste
1 15 oz can coconut milk (can be light but full fat is preferred)
1 tablespoon coconut oil (or olive or vegetable oil)
1 small winter pumpkin, peeled and cut into bite-sized pieces
1/2 of a large or 1 small sweet potato, peeled and cut into bite-sized pieces
2 cups cooked cannellini beans (or navy or butter beans or chickpeas)
2 tablespoons curry powder (or more)
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground coriander
Salt and pepper to taste
Heat the coconut oil on medium heat in a large pot then sauté the onions until they are soft and translucent then add garlic and ginger and sauté for another minute or two until they are fragrant (all while stirring often so they don’t burn and become bitter).
Add spices, tomato paste and a tablespoon or so of water and sauté another minute, until something like a rough paste forms
Add the sweet potato and pumpkin chunks and mix well then continue sautéing for another two minutes, stirring often
Add coconut milk, mix well and add more water if necessary – the vegetables should be just submerged. Bring to a boil.
Taste to adjust seasonings then cover, lower the heat and simmer for about eight minutes or until the pumpkin and the sweet potato are fork tender.
Mix in the cooked beans and simmer for a few more minutes to allow for flavors to meld
Serve over brown rice with a side of cucumber slices or roasted vegetables or however else you might like
Tips:
Omit oil and sweat the onions without it, deglazing with water when necessary, to make this oil free.
To make this with lentils instead of beans, mix in about 1/2 to 2/3 cups red lentils with the pumpkin and the sweet potato and add slightly more water as the lentils will soak it up and expand. They should cook in the ten minutes of the covered simmer but check for doneness anyway and let the stew simmer until they are soft and almost mushy.
Mix in two cups of fresh or frozen spinach when adding the beans to sneak in some leafy greens. You could also add some frozen broccoli, zucchini noodles or peas at that step. Switch out the sweet potatoes for regular potatoes or more pumpkin or winter squash depending on what is available. If using acorn or carnival squash, you do not need to peel it and if squash does not sound appetizing overall, try using cauliflower instead.