Life, the Universe and Everything

Life changes. So do we.

 

Almost two years ago I started my second tentative to write a blog. My first tentative was a little miscalculated: I started three blogs with different themes. Needless to say, it took me very little time to realise that I would never be able to update regularly all three. But my initial idea, which was sharing with anyone who would care all interesting things which I would find, was kept deep inside my mind and didn’t leave me. After thinking about the matter a lot, I came out with Skepsisfera. I was at least a little more focused now. It was meant to be mainly a science blog. I could say that I succeeded. Skepsisfera, although not a ‘hit’, has today some flow of people from every part of the world. But my mind changed in these almost two years.

 

One of the best science blogs I know is John Baez’s This Week Findings. It is just a collection of html files, with almost no picture and no graphic design at all. However, it has a superb content. Also, during the time I was writing Skepsisfera, a number of science blogs started to flourish. Of course, those which caught my attention were about Physics and Mathematics. High quality sites appeared and, among them, high quality technical sites. I could cite, particularly, Christine Dantas’ Background Independence. Christine is a Brazilian physicist like me, but infinitely more inspired. She stopped writing it sometime ago, but I believe she couldn’t resist the blogging calling and came back with Theorema Egregium. Others also made a big impact on me: Cosmic Variance and Not Even Wrong are notable examples. You can find a lot of them in Mixed States, an honorable attempt to gather all this wonderful blogs of physics and math together. I read them and I was inspired by them. I decided I would like to have a blog like them. So, I tried to make Skepsisfera a little more technical, but that blog is not like that. It already had a personality of its own and I could not change it. Well, then I decided to change. Although I like Skepsisfera, I doubt I can update both blogs, but I will still leave it alive for a while. It will continue to be my sandbox.

 

Skepsisfera moto was “Learning is breaking a symmetry.” Never explained there, it was inspired by my Ph.D. thesis about Machine Learning. In there, my programs started to learn from a completely symmetric state and when that symmetry was broken, they generalised, which technically means, they learned. I learned with Skepsisfera. Symmetry breaking is a powerful concept in theoretical physics, and a beautiful one. It is a powerful tool of Nature. Without it we probably would not be here. There would be just some homogeneous stuff all around, whatever ‘all around’ would mean in that case. It is present everywhere: in the freezing of the lake, in the creation of the forces and in the decisions of the brain. Symmetry probably would not be so beautiful if it would never be broken.

 

When a symmetry is broken, it usually means the onset of some deep change in the system. It is the precursor of a new phase. Like the drops that break the homogeneity of the gas phase in its transition to the liquid or, more fashionably, when the ferromagnetic order gives way to a glassy phase.

 

This site is meant to be a collection of my thoughts about physics and math. It will be a technical blog most of the time, for I probably will not be able to be technical all the time. Although it is just about physics, physics is large enough to touch a little of everything, from questions about the complexity of life to the search for the origin of the universe. And so it goes.