It is easy for an astrophysicist to gain inspiration in his work. He merely needs to step out and look at the night sky.


...until I stepped out tonight and got hit full on the face by the -20 Centigrade wind.

A news article I saw on the BBC today:

Inventor of instant noodles dies

The inventor of instant noodles, Momofuku Ando, has died in Japan, aged 96, of a heart attack.

Mr Ando was born in Taiwan in 1910 and moved to Japan in 1933, founding Nissin Food Products Co after WWII to provide cheap, quick food for the masses. His most famous product, Cup Noodle, was released in 1971.

Its taste and ease of preparation - adding hot water to dried noodles in a waterproof polystyrene container - have made it popular around the world. Mr Ando said the inspiration for his product came when he saw people lining up to buy bowls of hot ramen noodle soup at a black market stall during the food shortages after World War II.

Noodles in space

He developed his first instant noodles, Chicken Ramen, in 1958. The product came out as Japan recovered from the ravages of WWII and began a long period of economic expansion. It was the masterstroke of providing a waterproof polystyrene container for the noodles that made his Cup Noodle an instant success in 1971.

Nissin has led the global instant noodle industry since then, selling 85.7 billion servings every year, according to Agence France Presse. His firm also developed a version of Cup Noodle for Japanese astronauts to eat on the space shuttle Discovery in 2005.

In 1999, Mr Ando opened a museum in Osaka devoted to instant noodles. He retired as Nissin's chairman in 2005. Japanese newspapers and businesspeople have been paying tribute to Mr Ando. "He was a self-made man who developed an epoch-making instant noodle product and spread it to all corners of the world," Akio Nomura, chairman of the Osaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told Kyodo news agency.

Mr Ando remained active until just days before his death, giving a New Year's speech to Nissin employees and having a lunch of Chicken Ramen with company executives.

I salute you, sir, for bringing sustenance to impoverished university students worldwide.

Even though I've only left London for a few months after spending the past 4 years there, stopping by for 2 days on my way home for the Christmas break was a big shock from the sedate environs of Princeton.

Apart from the crowds in the West End, it was a change to hear the cacophony of different languages being spoken around me by the potpourri of nationalities. The graduate students in Princeton are a fairly diverse bunch, but the university as a whole is generally populated by rich young WASP undergrads, so it was invigorating to sit on the Tube with a Japanese couple to my left while to my right several Russians held an animated discussion.

I haven't noticed this before, but it seems that the white Englishman is increasingly becoming an endangered species in London. Staying with my friend Jia Hong in the East End, the area was crammed with dingy kebab joints and Pakistani grocery shops, and I'm certain that I did not see a single English person in the area while I was there. The only white people I saw were conversing in some East European language I didn't recognise.

Going back to UCL was a surreal experience. It seemed only like yesterday that I was trudging through the corridors, rushing from one lecture to the next, yet this time I was an outsider.

At a stairwell, I had the pleasant surprise of bumping into Prof. David Miller. My first encounter with him was through the UCL Chamber Music Club, as he was organising a chamber concert that I wanted to perform in back in my first year in UCL. That was my first public performance in London, and I also had the opportunity of hearing his fine baritone voice later in the concert. He later taught my 2nd year E&M class, and while teaching it he was the first lecturer to spot my potential, and the next couple of years he was the professor I went to for advice and encouragement.

In the middle of last year (2005), I agreed to accompany him on my guitar on some Dowland songs that he wanted to sing, but in September he got a stroke which damaged half of his brain functionality. I was very upset by this, more so when I saw how his ebullient and cheerful self had been changed by the stroke. However, I was in the chaos of my final year, and regrettably I didn't get in touch with him apart from a couple of emails and phone calls.

When I saw him this time round, he seemed to be in much better shape. He could smile and recall that I'm in Princeton, which was more than he could do before I left London. He isn't quite his old self yet, but definitely he's made a lot of progress. My only regret is that I never did manage to accompany him in the songs.

I'm listening to a fantastic recording by Xuefei Yang, a great guitarist whom I first met and listened to some 4 years ago in Singapore. She's based in London, so while I was there I had a couple more opportunities to see her play, and she also by chance happened to be an old housemate of my pianist friend Bobby Chen.

She's got a reputation as one of the best classical guitarists in the world today, and listening to her now I am reminded of what it means to be a true musician.

Many scientists and mathematicians are also musicians. Einstein himself was a violinist of no small talent. An anecdote has it that a music critic, unaware that Einstein's fame comes from being a physicist, wrote after hearing Einstein play: "While his playing is excellent, but he does not deserve world fame; there are many others who play just as well". When I was an undergraduate in UCL, I took part in the informal chamber music club run by faculty and students; I was constantly surprised how many of the performers were from the physics department, or were otherwise scientists. So much for the cold and prosaic nature of scientists.

Before I entered university, I had an argument with my parents because I wanted to go into music. In retrospect, it wasn't a good idea because my playing level then was nowhere as good as I imagined it (a little exposure can sometimes go a long way towards deflating one's ego), but my love for music didn't fade even though my parents squashed the idea of paying for me to study music. In the first two years of university, I was practising my guitar so much that I did little else apart from physics. My nights were spent in a caress with my guitar, as I pushed my uncooperative fingers to make music. My memory holds many different emotions from those days: frustration from being unable to create beauty, pain from making my fingers do things they weren't born to do, ecstasy from those few moments when everything came together and I was the alpha and omega of my personal world of music.

I was aware of the sacrifices I was making, and there were times when I questioned if it was worthwhile. Yet, despite the social exclusion and frustrations of making music, I kept going back to my guitar. Paradoxically, the more I played the more I discovered my limitations; at the same time, I was discovering my potential in physics and astronomy. I knew that my career ahead probably lies in science. My love of music did not diminish, but instead of playing myself I started to listen to more music, which was something I could do at the same time as my academic work. I never really stopped playing, but there were weeks at a time when I didn't touch my guitar, and my old repertoire started falling away faster than I could learn new music. This forced me to change my focus towards perfecting a few pieces, rather than try to memorise large amounts of music. This allowed me to continue growing as a musician, as I started to listen more to my own playing, and to control the music with my will instead of letting my limited technique dictate the direction of the music.

*To be continued*

Princeton is a great university, but there is one aspect of it I hate with a passion: it's official colour.

Orange. Ugh.

Astronomy images are generally stunning, but at a talk recently I saw a picture that completely took my breath away. At first glance I thought it was an impression by a particularly good artist, but it turns out that nature is more than poetic enough to provide this image.

This is a mosaic of some images taken by the Cassini spacecraft which is currently in orbit around Saturn. Cassini happened to pass right behind Saturn, which completely eclipsed the Sun at a distance of 2.2 million km from the spacecraft.

The sunlight spilling past the Saturn's disk has illuminated its rings beautifully in a glow of pastel colours, revealing faint inner and outer rings which are normally invisible. Most poetically, within the left side of the rings, one can glimpse the pale blue dot that we call our home, almost insignificant in the splendour of the cosmos.

I had a very interesting (not necessarily in a good way) experience with one of my homeworks, which was to construct a simple theoretical model for a red giant. First of all, it was due about 2 weeks ago, but Jeremy (the prof) is so smart that he won't have any trouble marking it at any time (most people try to mark homeworks all in one go to get into the mindset). In any case, the deadlines are only 'suggestions' because no one really cares very much about the grade so long as the students are learning.

The reason I'm 2 weeks overdue is that the problem set is difficult, and I'm not the only one to discover this. I've spent several whole days trying to figure out the problem and I had to disregard some of the conditions set out by the question in order to solve the problem.

Then today I found out the probable reason why I was having so much trouble. Jeremy himself apparently hasn't bothered working out the answer for the question himself yet.

I've realised that I dislike term breaks, like the 4 day-weekend we had over Thanksgiving last week. Before coming to Princeton I was expecting to become a workaholic and work non-stop to keep up, and in the first couple of months here that's precisely what I tried to do (albeit not very well).

However, I've just discovered an interesting fact: so long as I pass my courses in the first two years, and squeeze out at least one paper out of the 3 or 4 research projects in that time, I can't actually get kicked out, and hopefully I will be able to pass my General Exams in the end of the 2nd year.

Having realised this a couple of weeks ago, my first response was to...slack off. I spent the entire Thanksgiving sitting in my room watching the entire Black Adder series, and I now feel tremendously guilty about the wasted time.

I'm now taking part in the Princeton Men's Volleyball Club, and the level is just right for me so it's fun to play, and also I'm joining a meditation group. I'm also trying to remind myself that I used to play the guitar, and so I'm trying to squeeze some practice time into my week as well.

I'm probably not working as hard as I could be, but if that's the price for keeping sane, I'd gladly take it.

I was told before coming to Princeton that life wouldn't be easy for me. Apart from the work load, there would also be the psychological pressure from being in an elite institution, I was told. Even having this in mind, it was hard to go from being the cream of crop at UCL to being mediocre at best in Princeton.

It seemed as if everyone knew more about everything, and in greater depth than I could. It doesn't help when I sometimes realise that I should actually know what people are talking about because I've studied it before, but just can't remember for the life of me. I'm friendly with the physics grad students here, but I often feel reluctant to socialise too much with them, partly because they often 'shop talk' about things happening specifically within their department, and partly because they spend a lot of time talking about physics. The former would exclude anyone who's not within the physics department, and the latter makes me feel excluded because my knowledge of theoretical physics is very shallow compared to them. In particular, a couple of the physicists irritate me because of their self-assurance (and dare I say arrogance?) when casually talking about stuff I know nothing about. I'm OK when people talk about far-out stuff in a cautious and speculative tone, but when they talk about it as if it's the law and that they know everything, it's very off-putting.

In due course, I had learned to take the attitude that I'm privileged to be in the company of such brilliant people, and that I have much to learn from them. The likes of Richard Feynmann were once in their shoes, and it's likely that more geniuses would emerged from the ranks of the Princeton physics grad students. If I had gone to somewhere less demanding, I would have still been among the better students, but I wouldn't know how far I am from the very best. There's the saying the greatest fool is he who does not know he's a fool, so I guess I am less of a fool here in Princeton.

I seem to be losing hair more than usual. Oh joy.

Last week was probably the darkest time of my life. It was the fall break, which meant that most students had gone home. Although not that many of the grad students actually went home (mostly because 40% of the grad students are foreign), meals were not served in the week, so the focal point for social interaction was removed. So there weren't that many people visibly around the grad college.

I was already feeling extremely stressed due to the pressures at work, so I planned to commit myself to studying virtually full-time during the break, which wasn't something I felt like doing but I nevertheless felt I had to push myself to do. With the loneliness and my unhappiness thrown into the mix, something just snapped.

By Tuesday, I was feeling utterly weary of life, and would have welcomed eternal sleep. I just couldn't get up in the mornings, and when I did, I couldn't make myself leave me room, not even to buy food. I was spending hours upon hours sitting listlessly in front of my laptop, and now I can't even remember what I was doing in front of the computer. I was already undergoing counselling, but with my next session schedule for 2 weeks later, I felt there was nowhere to turn.

Eventually I did go to the health centre to request an urgent appointment, and spoke to a counselor. It felt much better to be able to let things out, and I immediately regretted some of the things I had done when I hit bottom. The next few days, I began to force myself to shut out my negative emotions and get something done, although it was still difficult to motivate myself to do anything.

Classes restarted today, and things felt so much better with everyone back. I wouldn't say that I'm happy at the moment, but I hope I never reach the depths of last week ever again.

I've realised that I have really bad long-term memory, even when dealing with physics concepts. If I'm not constantly working with a given field, e.g. electromagnetism, I'd rapidly lose my intuition for it. I'm struggling these days because my brain isn't in 'physics mode', and lately I've realised that even back in UCL my mind wasn't always working. In fact, it would only work after the month or two of solid cramming that precedes my finals, which is why I always do well in finals.

It looks like I'll need to carry the cramming ethic (i.e. about 8 hours of studying per day) over to my daily routine here....

In my general relativity class, there is this Russian girl, Tatianna, who is from the Anna Kournikova/Maria Sharapova mould of Russian chicks. Blondes aren't my type, but I hear that when the semester first started, the physics students (the GR class is in the physics department) were drooling over her, in part because she was one of only 4 girls out of the incoming class of 24 physics students.

Pretty soon, however, it turned out that this girl is married.

And has a baby boy.

It seems that her husband is also a Russian physics student in the 3rd or 4th year, and is working with Ed Witten, one of the top theoretical physicists in the world. I was in a conversation last week with a bunch of physics students, and one was saying to the other, 'We'd better make our mark and accomplish everything we want to do within 20 years, because once their kid grows up and gets his PhD, there's nothing left for us to do.'

I actually got to meet little Sergei last week when his mum came over to the grad college for Friday night drinks. He tried to eat my hand.

I've been playing volleyball for UCL in my years there, except in the final year. I've had a lot of fun in volleyball, however it is sometimes frustrating because I didn't seem to be able to play to the best of my ability during games, and going to practices didn't seem to be improving my playing. In the final year, I was playing so badly that I felt I was being more of a liability than a help to my team, and in addition I just didn't have much time to play anymore, so I stopped playing.

I've also considered volleyball to be the most 'disposable' part of my life, i.e. it was the hobby which I was the least passionate about, even though being the perfectionist I still did my best to be good at it. I had assumed that after starting my PhD, volleyball would go on the chopping block as my time became more and more limited.

So I am surprised that nowadays I am playing volleyball more than anything else outside of my studies. After the torrid form I had experienece last year, it was a pleasant surprise to find that my passing is back to my old level (which is still not good enough), and I have rediscovered the joy s of throwing myself around the court to retrieve lose balls no one else can reach.

Volleyball probably isn't as good exercise as simply going to the gym, and I'm not as good at it as I am to playing guitar, but at this point in my life I feel the need to interact with people to avoid being drowned by unhappiness and self-pity.

I am not adverse to hard work. I'm not quite a workaholic since I'm inherently lazy, but I can put in the hours to get things done if that's what I have do. But there's something very wrong if I'm sitting in front of a homework for 5 hours and still have no clue how to do it.

This has been the case for ALL my homework in the past week, and I just don't know what to do. I can ask my classmates for help, but it doesn't change the fact that I can't actually do the work on my own.

I've never felt so stupid in my life.

Astronomy is such a small world that it can be a little unsettling at times. In Princeton's astro department, there is a tradition where the grad students invite a professor or notable person to come for lunch on Thursdays, imaginatively known as 'thunch'. This stemmed from the Tuesday faculty lunch at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton, where following morning seminars the grad students are barred from joining the faculty members for lunch. In the 70s, some grad students here decided to introduce thunch, whereby only people without PhDs are allowed in apart from the guest.

Generally, the guests are distinguished visiting professors either at Princeton University or the IAS, but occasionally we get some famous names, like John Nash and Freeman Dyson.

In the past couple of weeks however, we have had the interesting experience of hosting thunch for guests who were ex-grad students here. Both of them, David Weinberg of Ohio State and Nick Gnedin of Fermilab, were students in the 80s and 90s, so they've had the same experience of attending thunch. I spoke to David Weinberg and told him briefly about my project on measuring the topology of cosmological reionisation. As I started to explain the method I'm using to measure the topology, he (politely) interrupted me and said, 'Yes, I know about that. I worked on that when I was a grad student'. I then realised that the main paper which described the methodology I'm using is Gott, Weinberg and Melott 1987. Rich Gott is still on the faculty here and I guessed prior to this that Weinberg must have been a grad student at the time, but I didn't really make the conscious connection between the student who had worked on the paper and the middle-aged professor at thunch until he told me.

Even more surreally, that paper which I'm using now was based on David Weinberg's very first semester in his first year as a grad student. It's funny how his first year project has spanned a couple of decades to become an integral part of MY first year project. I can only hope that my own semester projects will eventually have some longevity.

Life has been really difficult this past week. I'm taking two courses this term, 'Structure of Stars' and 'Introduction to Relativity', and there's a homework for each course every week. I seem to have to spend a day or two just reading through the material from the previous weeks' lectures before even starting on the homework, and then a few more days doing the homework. The problem with this is that I'm supposed to be doing research as well...it's Thursday evening and so far this week I've been doing nothing but homework, and THAT hasn't finished yet. I might be able to finish it if I work full-time this weekend.

I seem to be the slowest person in the department. A couple of my classmates are really smart and clever compared with me, which is fine with me apart from the fact that they don't seem to be as stuck with work as I am.

They have a phrase in Princeton, 'impostor syndrome', which is very apt to what I'm feeling right now. It's the feeling that somehow Princeton made a mistake in selecting me to come here, and that I've somehow managed to bluff my way to high grades in undergrad.

A warning from the manual of my new MacBook laptop:

"This computer is not intended for use in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, or air traffic control machines, or for any other uses where the failure of computer systems could lead to death, personal injury, or severe environmental damage."

It's the first week of my semester, and I already think this is one of the most stressful periods of my life. I have hardly any leisure time at all, although I'm getting enough sleep (if only because that when I get back to my room I'm so exhausted that I fall asleep easily.

I am taking two classes this semester, Structure of Stars and Introduction to Relativity, as well as my semester project. I am finding it difficult to adjust to the academic system here. Back in the UK I could just goof off for most of the year and then cram for a month before the exams, whereas now I have to keep on top of my weekly homeworks, which being in Princeton are quite difficult. I generally have a low attention span, so it's difficult to make the odd hour or two to be productive towards my homework, whereas in London I could take a couple of hours to get warmed up when while cramming, and then put in a few more hours at high productivity.

I was warned some time ago that Princeton would be a high-pressure environment for me, and I have already found this to be true. This isn't because there is anyone breathing down my neck, but simply because I am constantly getting the feeling that I am the dumbest person in the building, and I have to work like crazy just to keep pace. On the bright side, it's making very humble indeed and forcing me to focus on the joy of learning. On the other hand, I wish the joy of learning didn't have to involve working on Friday nights.

It's only the first week, so hopefully I'll be able to get settled down into the routine ....