My suitcase has returned to my desk. I took down my name on the doorplate and stored it in the inner layer of the case of my tablet. Everything is just like the evening when I arrived last month.
My visit to Perimeter was short, so short that the only environmental change I noticed was the gradual blooming of some sword lilies in Uptown Waterloo in my evening walks. Still, it was long enough. Enough to mark an inflection point on my attitude and approaches — if there’s still time to recover.
The use of words like “sanctum of physics” is not productive: it adds an artificial sense of detachment. The “sanctum” has blackboards, dining halls, reception rooms, communication rooms, and restrooms. It is built for humans, thinking. The people here also work through calculations line by line.
In the past year, my research progress has been slow, stagnant is euphemism, and it has brought about a restless and flirtatious mindset. I think this place and the people here have been excellent mirrors for me: since I have chosen a distant goal of science, there is no room for wishful thinking, that I can cheat out of challenges and endurance — that there’s anything worthy other than to put my pen to paper and work,
My first visit to Perimeter Institute is nearing its end.
While an appreciable amount of physics and related academic thinking is to be uploaded here in the near future, I wish to start with photos of the building itself.
Pool TableUntitled InteriorExteriorUntitled InteriorGeeseAlice RoomSky RoomFavourite StaircaseFoosballPolyhedral WallsView from OfficeUntitled Interior ViewSunsetUntitled Interior ViewAfternoon TeaLevel 4 Corridor
These images are intentionally empty and liminal. It’s the people and their ideas that inhabit this place that make it truly special, of course. I will work hard to join — more optimistically, stay in — their number.
Bonus: My Favourite Crying Spots
Secret door to Alice Room (Library Level 3)Level 4, behind this plantStair 11, Level 2Prof. L.S.’s zen cornerThis chairOf course Sunken garden – beware of the acoustic amplification
Late at night, waiting for a hyped-up rocket launch, I stumbled upon an old attempt to calculate the entropy of my simulated dark matter ensemble while idly scrolling my old code from my first year of PhD. It wasn’t used in any published result, other than confirming that my simulation indeed had the correct arrow of time. Still, now, years later, I decided to take a leap of faith, don the dusty eyeglass of Boltzmann et al. and paint a picture of galaxies through the language of thermodynamics.
For a long time, galaxies were viewed as glittering groups of stars orbiting one another, but modern cosmology has revealed a much more profound picture. Galaxies — the glowing bits — are lively participants in a complex environment shaped by the presence of dark matter halos, and stars themselves are the result of complex physics concerning the motion and evolution of interstellar medium. The evaluation of a galaxy’s entropy is a complicated task, requiring an understanding of all relevant physical processes. I think a rigorous computation takes a PhD project, maybe several.
In this mini-series, I aim to provide an undergraduate-friendly overview of the basic thermodynamic description of gravitationally bound particle ensembles, as well as the isothermal sphere model, and some astrophysics concerning the possible life histories of elliptical galaxies. While the topic may seem daunting, I believe it is fascinating to explore the relationship between entropy and the complexity of galactic structures.
Join me as I dive into this exciting field, drawing parallels between coffee-mixing and dark matter’s role in the cosmos.
Are you tired of the internet jumping between light and dark modes all the time? With FWPhys Just Right (™ Pending), all content will be rendered in pleasant 0x808080 (HTML Grey) on a 0x808080 (HTML Grey) canvas, the perfect blend between black and white.
Rolling out across all FWPhys.com content and Frank Wang’s doctoral thesis.
I am writing this brief essay as a witness to history. As of the publication of this blog post, I have not personally sought access to GPT4, and so recognise that this essay contributes little to the worldwide technical discussion.
Nonetheless I felt compelled to voice my emotions over the recent developments. If not near the end of all, be this the beginning of a beginning.
In Series … THE APERIODICALS Local (personal, potentially shallow, and subject to change) outlooks on science, technology, growth, and occasionally culture and history. The goal is to write something every week, but whether it can make its way to FWPhys is random. Hence the series title.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.
“Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”, Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953)
“Matching Humans” was an expression that saw salient usage in my lifetime so far in describing computer programs.
From my earliest memories reading about chess bots and IBM Watson, to later algorithms defeating professional players at go and World of Warcraft. I still remember, in grade 9, writing about genetic algorithms and the weird-looking NASA antenna with mild amusement. As well-versed in tech trivia as I am, it is hard to say I could have foreseen a time so soon that humans are “matched” in increasingly substantial aspects of life.
OpenAI, at the helm of many such changes, is an interesting company to me, one which hardly mentions other company’s competing products in their keynotes and documentations. They are that far ahead; their expensive gamble in stacking up system sizes paid off; they deserve the current competitive edge, and the right to commercialise their research products.
On the other hand, one can’t help but feel that they are less “Open” than previous years, to the point that people sometimes joke how GPT5 will be hand-tuned by GPT4, leaving it thoroughly, by purpose and by nature, a black box with little means of assuring its reliability and safety.
This thread warrants a discussion for another day.
As I have implied in the opening, this essay is more of an emotional address to being “matched”, and an existentially incentivised exploration of where we are going next.
World of Goo is a casual puzzle game from ex-EA engineer Kyle Gabler. It is surprising – but fair and long overdue – to note how much this work influenced me as a scientist and (unfortunately now) technical artist. The game’s aesthetics and narrative rather powerfully shaped the ways I think of computer systems in the real world, goggly eyes UI notwithstanding.
In the chapter “Information Superhighway”, you look for “MOM”, a retired AI-powered search engine / ad bot abandoned by users and buried in the depths of an outdated GPU farm. There you traverse through a personification of the history of computing. From bits and bytes, to networks and server farms. It ends with you blowing up a company with all the spam emails that people asked MOM to compose over the years. It was a chapter delivered with the game’s signature creative crispness, but also an above-average dosage of sorrowful solitude — of the boom times past, but also of existence itself.
I possess no technically informed opinion on whether big language models can reason or experience, and there isn’t much I can do about it either way. My notion of solitude here is more rooted in basic (as opposed to emergent) physics — one might even describe my sorrow as “how sorrowful it is that our bots can’t be sorrowful!”
Human conscience and science emerged out of some serendipitous evolutionary pressures that otherwise required little, and yet we persisted and flourished. In this self-guided process we organised ourselves, sent the occasional crews away from the planet, and dream of more bold and brilliant futures for all. On this grand scale, AI, whether it joins, augments, or supersedes us, is a natural process and respectful utilisation of everything we have learned and fear forgetting.
It may be an optimistic sentiment, possibly shared by many 2010s / 2020s physicists, that we have sufficient data to answer questions not yet asked, and they will be the actual big ones. Maybe nurturing a bot using the collective wisdom of humanity is a good way of getting another perspective at ourselves, of looking at places that we have grown used to glance past.
GPT4 is offered in the chat bot format from the start, unlike its numbered predecessors. This might just be due to engineering reasons like not needing to reinvent the framework (also because it now takes image inputs). Still, I also feel this is an implicit recognition that ChatGPT has established the basic form via which a human-interfacing AI should appear.
I’ve rambled a lot…
Where next?
As an AI language model, I do not have desires or feelings, and I do not have physical form. I exist solely as a program running on servers. Whether I will be given a body or not is a decision that depends on the creators and developers of AI technology.
Currently, there are no plans to give language models like me a physical body, as our primary function is to process and generate text. However, as technology advances, who knows what the future may hold.
Quickly gather starlight in a basket, and press the Pause button of the Universe! So, in endless stillness, await the next “instant.”
No one sings in praise of time; one merely sings in it.
— and now hold me still, like a stack of film. you can freely smudge between frames.
— and now hold me still. in the next instant, try to unravel my soul. weave countless threads of thought, known readily as life itself.
— and now hold me still, this might remind me: even threads of doubt, and hesitation, Castles of sand upon the passage of time, Are places afar that no one returns to, and priceless treasures.
some historical cover art variants of this thingy.
Yourong Frank Wang 