Equality

Is equality the same thing as consistency?

In my country of residence, the powers that be are deciding if same sex marriage should be legal. At the moment, both homosexual and heterosexual couples can have civil unions, which legally amount to same thing as marriage, but with a different name. Proponents of the new bill are calling it "marriage equality", indicating that changing the law will allow same sex couples equal rights to those of heterosexual couples. Those opposing the bill do so typically on religious grounds. There is broad support for it, however, so it looks like it's going to pass.

It's very important that the law treats people in a fair and consistent manner. If heterosexual couples can get married, then homosexual couples should be able to do the same thing, in the name of consistency! Either that, or get rid of marriage altogether, since civil unions provide the same legal benefits (and pitfalls). This would, of course, be widely unpopular, but illustrates how gay couples probably feel about not being allowed to get married like their heterosexual friends.

Let's go beyond marriage equality. This sort of thing pops up all the time. Most democratic countries purport to have equal rights for all of their citizens. This is certainly not true in many cases. For example, children cannot vote, people don't all pay the same amount of taxes, two criminals who commit identical crimes often don't get the same sentences if they are from very different backgrounds, etc. There are very good reasons for some of these things, but others seem glaringly unfair, and two people will not necessarily agree on which it is!

Sometimes, you have to treat people unequally to level the playing field. Income tax rates are an excellent example of this. A certain amount of tax revenue is required to maintain various services (roads, the health care system, education, etc.). People in the lowest income bracket typically pay a smaller percentage of their income as tax compared to high earners. "But that's not fair!" Clearly things are not consistent here, but by allowing the lowest earners to pay less tax, the playing field is slightly evened out, making the situation more equal. It's counter-intuitive, but that's how it goes! Same goes for offering more scholarships to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. The goal is a more equal society, but the path to getting there requires sometimes treating people unequally. It's basically a feedback loop! Also an endless source of arguments.

2312: A Book Review of Sorts

How would you live your life if you had 10 years to live? What about 200? What about a thousand?

The year is 2312, and humans have spread throughout the entire solar system during the Accelerando, a period of major technological advancement of humanity. Mars has been terraformed, terraforming of Venus is in progress, and various domed cities exist on several Jovian and Saturnian moons. The main character, Swan, is from a city on Mercury called Terminator, which is a domed city of around half a million people that sits on tracks, forever staying just out of reach of the Sun. In addition, many asteroids have been hollowed out, given a bit of spin, and inhabited. These are called terraria.

People in space ("spacers") enjoy extended lives thanks to longevity treatments. Some are living beyond 200 years in relatively youthful condition. Medical research is progressing, though, and maybe they can extend it to a thousand. The economic system functions as a series of cooperatives divided mostly into planets, with the economy (distribution of resources) being run almost entirely by computers. While it is certainly not a utopia, people's needs are generally provided for.

Hybrid quantum and classical computers are becoming more common. They call them qubes: 30 qubit quantum computers paired with very fast conventional computers. Of course, they are small - you can have one on a wrist pad or even embedded on your person*. And most of them come with their own AIs, which people tend to name. They basically run the show: economy, space flight, construction, you name it. You can give your qube a verbal instruction, such as "make our security system better", and it will go ahead and communicate with other qubes and get the job done in some way, though perhaps not the way you may have intended...

Earth then is like Earth now. It's a mess. There are 11 billion people, a high sea level thanks to global warming, widespread poverty, but also many places with very good conditions. Again, like now. Not everyone gets longevity treatments, and there is a lot of resentment of spacers. Many animals are extinct, and the kind of wrecked climate makes growing food hard. In fact, a lot of terraria are used to grow food for Earth, as well as acting as wildlife reserves, preserving animals extinct on Earth.

I won't go into much more detail. The book is a spiritual successor of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, which I would recommend to anyone. 2312 fits somewhere between the Mars Trilogy and Galileo's Dream** chronologically, and the universes are similar, though I think not intended to be the same. Mars has a different history in 2312, for example, but Terminator existed in the Mars Trilogy.

What I love about Robinson's writing is that it's so plausible. His ideas aren't totally fantastic like a lot of science fiction. Everything is very well thought through and researched. There isn't silly stuff like faster than light travel and made up science (there are obviously postulations of future science and technology, but that is what makes it sci-fi). If you want to get somewhere in the solar system, it's going to take you a few weeks!

Back to my opening questions. I thought of them throughout reading the book. Our lives now are dreadfully short. A ten year time frame is not long; it's such that you would want to throw everything into it and experience as much of life as possible. I am 28. If things go well, I can expect 20 or 30 years of life without health problems bogging me down and keeping me from being active, maybe a few more if I'm lucky. That's not long at all! It's short enough that I have to make choices. This or that? Children or no? Am I in the right career? Probably, but there are so many other things I want to try that I have no time for!

Two hundred years, however, is a lot more reasonable. I wouldn't worry about choosing this or that. I could take my time with stuff. It would be fine to take a few years off to have kids, because it's a much smaller percentage of my life. There wouldn't be a constant rush to cram as much in as possible.

A thousand years changes everything. Assuming that everyone else also lives as long, it would be a very different world. I think people would value life much more than they do now. There is a lot more to lose.

"You could live for a thousand years ... But so, you... you should take care."




* And the present quantum computing research community lets out a collective LOL.
** There is a character that appears both in the Mars Trilogy and Galileo's Dream.

So what do you do?

It's fair to say that most of my friends are not physicists or even scientists. When you do a PhD in something, usually what you are working on is so specialised that it's pretty difficult to explain it to someone who isn't in your field, or even subfield! For example, even though I have done a physics degree and now PhD, I only have superficial knowledge of topics like astrophysics, particle physics, string theory, etc. I even balk at the thought of having to do any serious theoretical calculations in my own field! However, I can (and have) built an experimental setup to cool things to nearly absolute zero. Give me some lasers and atoms, and maybe I can do something interesting with them! PhD Comics sums up the PHD conundrum nicely:

When you are in my situation, it's quite difficult to explain to people what it is you actually do. I can say I "play with lasers" and "study very cold gases", but sometimes I wonder if that makes people think of things like cats chasing laser pointers in a freezer. So, bit by bit, I'm going to talk about what my project was all about and explain the topics in layman terms. Stay tuned!

It Is Done

It still hasn't sunk in. More than two weeks ago, I finished writing my PhD thesis, and a bit more than a week after that (printing, soft binding), it was handed in. Finishing it feels something like this:

My life in the near future isn't changing enormously. I am still going to be working in the same lab as a research assistant and eventually a post-doc (when my thesis has been officially marked, hopefully not more than three months from now). Same work, much higher pay! By staying where I am, I can delay making life-changing decisions for a little while yet. It's not a total cop-out, because I'll hopefully be doing some nice experiments and get some more papers under my belt.

Maybe I will be a scientist when I grow up! I've already done grown-up scientist things like give a talk at my old university. And thinking about most industry jobs makes my insides shrivel up with boredom. Things are looking dodgy at best around the world, so a job offer is nothing to sneeze at.

While I sit around waiting for my files to back up to an external hard drive in preparation for a long-neglected OS upgrade, I'll reflect on my thesis writing process that may or may not be useful to others in the future. Arguably, this is the only part of my PhD that took more or less how long I thought it would. Anyway, here is some of what I did. Keep in mind that this is most relevant to science (physics?) theses, since most people spend all their time doing lab or computer work and only do the write-up at the end.

• Do your introduction and background theory last. If you've already done some kind of big literature review, then maybe not. In my case, I didn't. By starting with experimental design and results, I knew what I needed to include in the background chapter and didn't include too much irrelevant information on topics that have been discussed to death in review papers and textbooks.
• This is probably obvious, but write an outline of each chapter and sections, including what sort of figures you want to include.
• Use LaTeX. Seriously. Even all you biology people. LaTeX + Bibtex (for the bibliography) will make your life much easier and you will avoid having some kind of Word behemoth to deal with. If you can use html tags, you can use LaTeX. Even if you don't, it's very straightforward, and there are many online resources, including PhD templates (your university might even have a template). It is also completely free.
• As tempting as it may be, don't work all the time. Leave some time for exercise and entertainment every day, even if it's just a short run and a TV show episode. Also, eat healthy and sleep! You'll be more refreshed when you are actually working, and you'll avoid the dreaded Thesis Gut. I planned out what I wanted finished in a given time, and stuck roughly to it. If I finished a section in time, I purposely didn't work in the evening. Everything fell apart in the last 3 weeks and I was working all sorts of hours (and felt like crap), but I kept it up most of the time and it made thesis writing a relatively pleasant experience.
• Mix up writing and making figures. I found this useful to prevent getting bored of doing just one thing all the time. Also, I spent most of my office time writing and most home time making figures, since it was a bit easier to concentrate like that. In fact, I would usually assign myself a very specific task to work on at home, such as "make a diagram of blah".
• Back up your thesis to multiple locations. I backed up to dropbox twice or three times a day, and to an external hard drive every couple of days. Nothing ever happened, but better safe than sorry!
• Try to have all your data when you start writing. I had to go back to the lab for a few things, and it was bothersome and interrupted my writing flow.
• Have someone not in your group who is knowledgeable about your thesis topic read your thesis in addition to your supervisor/coworkers and local grammar nazi. Their feedback will be particularly useful, because people already familiar with your work will easily understand what's going on, whereas someone unfamiliar with the project may not find things obvious that you and your group members think are obvious.
• Build up a good figure-making work flow. Sketching out figures on paper before drawing them on the computer is helpful. I got much faster with making figures as time went on. I used Inkscape for making diagrams and Matlab for data plotting. laprint is quite useful for making Matlab plots look nice in LaTeX, but can be bad for figures with subplots. For those (except 3D plots, due to poor performance), I used plot2svg and tweaked fonts and stuff in Inkscape.

That's all I can think of for now. Does anyone else have any thesis writing tips?

Prometheus

If you have yet to see Prometheus and don't want any spoilers, then maybe read this another time.

There were aspects of the movie that I greatly enjoyed. I liked the overall composition of it and the atmosphere. I enjoy the whole Alien franchise (except for the dreadful Alien vs. Predator movies), and it's nice how Prometheus ties some things together. I really liked the start of the movie, when David was on his own. Other people have drawn parallels to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I can see the connection. I appreciated the little HAL-9000 tribute. The computer sounded so much like HAL, and it was cute when he called David by his name.

So what's the problem? The science and the characters! There was so much stupid, I don't know where to begin. I'll start with the trip itself. So they think the creators are on this moon and want to fly up and meet them. It's in some distant solar system that may or may not be in our galaxy (!), and everyone has to be in stasis for 2 years, the duration of the trip. When they get there, they seem surprised that the place isn't bustling with civilisation. Okay, forgetting the unrealistic space travel scenario there, isn't it standard practice to send some probes first? Like what we do now? It takes only two years to get to this place. It's not at all unreasonable to send a little probe, have it take some pictures and beam them back, drop some of those flying probe scanners in, or even make a return trip. That's sort of the sensible thing to do. Weyland can wait at home in stasis if he wants to make the trip himself.

This is a bad planet.

I guess I can give them the benefit of the doubt. They discovered the location of an alien planet and a big company is paying for the trip! I suppose I would also be pretty excited and impatient, but it would be stupid to get carried away and go in blind like that. The behaviour when they got there, however, is inexcusable.

These people are supposed to be scientists (and some "muscle"). As soon as they land, they go all Leeeerooooy Jeeenkins on the place, against the suggestion of the captain (one of the more sensible characters). They just run in and start touching stuff, opening doors, etc. Their way of exploring the place was something you would do in a computer game, not really a methodical, scientific approach. Certainly not something I would expect from an archeologist. In the end, the whole exploration turned into a big mess of their own doing. Fools!

The whole exogenesis idea as described in the movie is silly. I think they could have been slightly more realistic and said that humans and engineers have a common ancestor of sorts rather than having exactly the same DNA.

I've seen enough hentai to know where this is going...

The motivations of the engineers is unclear to me (and to everyone else, it seems). They "create" humans and then wish to destroy them. There are some things about the engineers that I'm trying to piece together. In the opening scene, one of the engineers drinks the black goo. Why? Suicide? Or deliberate poisoning of the surroundings and spreading of the bio-agent by throwing himself into the waterfall? I'm not sure.

I have another big question about the engineers. Did they really want to destroy humans again? Everything we know about their intentions comes from David, who clearly has his own agenda. He read the glyphs and learned the language. He is the one who talks to the revived engineer before he goes on his rampage. For all we know, he could have threatened him in some way, and carefully engineered the situation such that the others would die (except Shaw, who he seems to like). All we know about the engineers is what David tells us.

I still enjoyed the movie overall, I just wish it wasn't so stupid.

Transit of Venus

Unlike most of the rest of the country, we had a rather clear day today and were able to observe the transit of Venus. Furthermore, the transit occurred during the reasonable hours of 10:15 am to 4:30 pm. Very convenient!

The guys in the lab down the hall set up a little projector system with an ancient looking telescope, some polystyrene to block the light, and some paper taped to a board to project the image on, like so:

Venus was clearly visible in the projected image as a little dot slowly traveling across the sun:

 

We also had some neat filters that let you look at the sun directly through them. I tried to take a photo with my phone, but the image was saturated around the sun, so no good. Silly me, leaving my proper camera with adjustable exposure time at home!

Next time it will happen will be in 2117. None of us are likely to be alive then, unless life expectancy goes up drastically or we get robot bodies.

Forging Ahead

I've been writing up my PhD thesis. That's right, I'm in that boat now. With any luck, I'll have it done at the end of this month. A lot of people hate the write-up phase of their PhD, but I've been really enjoying it. Part of it is that it's been a long time coming, and I'm happy to have reached that stage. The other is that I actually enjoy writing to some degree. I hated writing essays in high school, but I really like science writing. None of this arguing your point of view on something; if you have a point to make, show it with data!

So what next for me? For a few months at least, I'm sticking around in the lab trying to get some nice data and publish papers. I could potentially stick around for another two years, but I've been living in this town for seven years now and feel like a change! On the other hand, there are some reasons to stay a little longer too.

So what sort of jobs can a person with a physics PhD get anyway? Let's see...

• Academia. Do a post-doc or two, try to find a position as a lecturer and run your own lab. Hard to get there, and the job itself is much more than 9-5 and the pay is low relative to industry. However, it is a very rewarding career, since you get to work on whatever you want, provided you get funding for it, and you get to stay in the nice bubble of academia. You are a scientist. I would consider this option.
• The big bad finance industry. There is something called a "quantitative analyst". You need to have a physics, math or similar PhD to get the job, and good programming skills (Matlab counts). It's ideal for theorists who have spent their PhDs running simulations, but rumour is that you don't need to be a programming expert and that the sort of things they are doing are not really difficult for physicists, so maybe even an experimentalist like me could do it. Entry level salary: approximately $200,000 HOLY CRAP WHAT! But they take your soul, you see...
• Working for a journal. You often need some experience as a researcher (post-doc or even more) to get to be something like an editor. Could be interesting.
• A wide variety of industry jobs. I am told these exist and that they like people with physics PhDs. Apparently we are better at thinking outside the box than engineers, who are good at making things cheaper and more efficient and within specified parameters. You could be making washing machines or rockets. Who knows! I don't want to make washing machines, but I could potentially be interested in the right project, such as rockets.
• An astronaut! Did you know that you need a PhD (physics being a desirable subject) to be one? Going into space is basically my ultimate dream. However, to get into the training program in the US, you need to be a citizen there. Oops. In fact, most national space programs require you to be a citizen of the respective country. I have citizenship of two countries, neither of which has a space program to speak of. One of them might get into the EU in a decade or so. Then I'm in, but otherwise, it looks bleak. Oh, you can also be an "astronaut" if you are very rich and can pay the Russians to get you up. Perhaps the finance industry is a way to get in on that route.
• Civilian space industry. Companies like SpaceX. I would be keen on something like that. SpaceX takes their employees on zero G flights for company outings. That sounds great, and they hire all kinds of people and don't seem to be restricted by the same things as government organisations. I would strongly consider this. New Zealand has a private space company, but I haven't heard much about them.
• A wide variety of jobs that don't require PhDs. There are many of those. Teaching, medical physics (working with radiation therapy equipment and such), patent offices, power companies, insurance (risk analysis), consulting, government ministries, and more. There are a lot of those kinds of things out there, and I don't really find them captivating.
• Something completely different. Start a company? Become a reclusive genius? Evil mastermind? Costumed vigilante? Hitwoman or assassin (I do martial arts, I could be Beatrix from Kill Bill)? Spy? Freeloader? I could learn to use the ways of the force and be a Jedi, like my father.

I could totally do this.

 A lot to think about. Life changing decisions to be made soon!

The Blob in real life

I have been a terrible, terrible person and have not been updating my blog. I have been busy! I will try to fit more in...

Anyway, us physicists like to have fun occasionally, and one of our number decided it would be fun to make a non-Newtonian fluid at lunch last week.

What is a non-Newtonian fluid, anyway? Firstly, what is a Newtonian fluid? Newtonian fluids are kind of your every day fluids, such as water. No matter how fast you stir it or what forces you apply to it, the viscosity stays the same. Water doesn't suddenly feel like molasses if you try to mix it quickly, for example. Non-Newtonian fluids do not behave like this. They vary in viscosity depending on what forces are applied, and can have even weirder behaviours.

If you ever want to experiment with a non-Newtonian fluid, it's very easy. All you need is cornflour and water. You mix them together, and viola! You have a non-Newtonian fluid. I learned tonight that this particular mixture is called "Oobleck". There are many other common fluids that are non-Newtonian in different ways. Have a look at the Wikipedia page linked above!

Anyway, we made some and played with it.

Sisters are doing it for themselves

There was an interesting article that came out in Science last week. The question of why some fields or careers, as well as high ranking positions in companies and government, are devoid of women is pertinent. In most first world countries, there is nothing stopping either gender from entering a particular career path (yes, there is still inequality, discrimination, glass ceilings and so on, and a few jobs with obvious physical limitations). For example, when I started my undergraduate degree, my first year physics course was populated by predominantly engineering students. I would say the class was 10% female. So it's not that women attempt to study engineering and are rejected, there are just not many who aspire to be engineers in the first place. Why?

The paper in Science is entitled Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls: A Policy Experiment in India. Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read more than just the abstract, but I will give a summary.

In the early 90s, India experimented with having village council leadership positions restricted to women only for one or two consecutive terms in randomly selected villages. This is a really great thing for statisticians. There were three groups: the control (no female leadership), female leader for a single term, and female leader for 2 terms (allowing a measure of dosage). Now, all the kids who were born around that time are young adolescents, so the researchers interviewed them as well as parents. They interviewed several thousand people in all!

What they found was that in villages with female leaders, suddenly more girls had life aspirations beyond being housewives. They used a bunch of metrics, including whether they wanted to wait until the age of 18 to get married, whether they wanted a job that required tertiary education, etc. The effect also transferred to parents, who now had a wider range of career aspirations for their daughters. The other positive effect was that people had overall a better opinion of female leaders. Throughout all this, the aspirations of boys were never negatively impacted, so it was a win all around.

The authors concluded that the changes of aspirations of girls was the positive effect of having female role models. Rather than a role model being someone you want to emulate, I think of role models as someone you look at and think "I can do that too". Growing up, I never had an inkling of a doubt that as a female I couldn't do any kind of job. I had male and female teachers, my mom is a scientist, my grandma was an architect, I did karate as a kid and there were both boys and girls in the class. However, there are still countries and careers where women don't have the same life ambitions as men and are even viewed as being inferior for a job.

So here is my take home message: if you are a minority in your workplace, field, or hobby (be it gender, race, or anything else), keep at it! Even if things are difficult, remember that you are a positive role model for the next generation! Change happens slowly, but it does happen.

Smash!

Let's talk about collisions. Pretty much all physics experiments can be broken down into two categories: scattering (for example, particle accelerators) and interference (for example, Young's double slit experiment).

Example of a scattering experiment. I have been trying to convince the guys in the lab next door (who are actually working on an interference experiment) that they need to buff up and dress like this in the lab. Incidentally, the laser safety glasses that he is wearing are correct for the wavelength of light being emitted in the tube, if I compare them to a similar model from Thorlabs.

In certain regimes, the line between the two kinds of experiments gets kind of hazy. You see, there is this thing called wave-particle duality. Sometimes, matter acts like a particle (like little balls smashing into each other), and other times the same matter can act like a wave (like ripples in water overlapping with other ripples, making an interference pattern). This is true even for some large molecules. It is most definitely true for cold atoms, like the ones I am working on.

In our lab, we are doing scattering experiments. We take two clouds of very cold atoms (less than a microkelvin!) and smash them against each other. However, they are so cold that they no longer behave like particles, as your everyday gas would. They instead act like waves and interfere with each other! The way they behave when they collide is nothing like what would happen to a particle. It looks like this:

These are two clouds of atoms trapped in some laser beams. They are about 400 nK and there are half a million atoms in each cloud. We accelerate one cloud towards the other and then release them from their trap so they can expand after the collision. The expanding halo is made up of scattered atoms.

These atoms are moving at pedestrian speeds. If we increase the collision energy a little bit more, the pattern of scattered atoms will look a bit different and develops lobes in funny places. It's one of the things next on the agenda, so watch this space!

I will add a final note about particle accelerator experiments. To do interesting physics and make a name for yourself, it's all about going for extremes. For example, the LHC was made to do higher energy collisions than any other existing accelerator. The other, often forgotten, end of the spectrum is the super slow collision regime. That's where we're at! We're doing the slowest, lowest possible energy collisions! That's pretty extreme.

2011 in Review

It has been 5 months since my last post. That's quite a long time! I have some good reasons for this. In fact, the one new year's resolution I have this year is to write more regularly!

At the end of every year (or start of the next one), I like to review the year and see how things have come along. This time, in particular, perhaps you can see why I haven't really had time for posting much. Also, this year I had two major (only) activities: physics and Taekwon-Do.


2011 In Review

Overall, the year can be summed up in one word: intense.

Let's break it down. 2011 was welcomed at a beach in Napier, after having driven for 12 hours around the East Cape of New Zealand. The next few days were spent traveling around the South Island with one of my close friends and my newly acquired husband. It was a nice trip, but made me realise that I don't really like road trip vacations. Sure, you see a lot, but it's tiring, and I would much rather go somewhere new and spend a few days getting to know the place instead of always being on the move.

Some time in 2010, I decided that 2011 would be the year that I go for my 2nd degree (dan) black belt in Taekwon-Do. Black belt gradings are pretty tough and require a lot of preparation and 100% commitment. I was mentally prepared to start training at the beginning of 2011, and a grading was scheduled for April. I began training 5 or 6 days a week and was generally enjoying myself with it. In March, the ITF Taekwon-Do World Championships were held in Wellington, and at the last minute I got flights to go watch. I'm glad I went, because I found it quite inspirational in regard to my own training.

During these few months, my new supervisor and I were trying to improve our experimental setup and figure out why we couldn't make Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). We pulled things apart, put them back together, replaced electronics, optimised parameters, etc, but no luck. Even though we were making improvements, BEC still eluded us. It was good to go to training at the end of the day because I could physically vent all my mental frustration and not bring it home with me!

As I'm sure everyone knows, on February 22nd, an earthquake hit Christchurch. We felt it here in Dunedin, which is around 4.5 hours drive away. It was an aftershock of a quake in September, but that earthquake only caused some damage. This time, people died. Friends' homes were destroyed. The whole central city was closed down due to damage and unstable buildings. You hear about disasters around the world all the time and see the damage on TV. Somehow I always felt disconnected from them. This time, it was in my own back yard and my own friends that were affected. It was heartwarming to see all the volunteer initiatives to help Christchurch residents, and it definitely restored some of my faith in humanity! Unfortunately, they are still being shaken by earthquakes and jerked around by politics and insurance companies. I really hope they get a break soon!

Around the end of March, our grading got postponed until July due to lack of numbers. I felt a little bummed, but was glad to have more time to train. I should add at this stage that not only do I practice Taekwon-Do, but I am the instructor of my university Taekwon-Do club, so my own personal training (usually at other clubs) is in addition to the two classes a week that I teach during the semester (though I have some very nice assistants!). By coincidence, around this time, a person I knew who is higher ranked than me who had quit Taekwon-Do a year before suddenly had plenty of time that needed occupying due to a change of personal circumstances. So I asked him to train me, initially just for fitness, and slowly (but unintentionally!) got him back into Taekwon-Do and he eventually joined my club and we became friends.

In May, we had our regional tournament. In the past, I was never a strong competitor, but the training payed off and I got a couple of medals! Our club also got 2nd place overall. My TKD returnee made a very good coach and helped all of us improve our sparring. Unfortunately, around this time, the July grading was canceled due to lack of numbers, so I had to wait until December to grade in the North Island (where there are many more people doing TKD, so the gradings are a lot more regular). A setback, but in the meantime, we would concentrate on the national tournament in August.

Back to the lab: we were dredging the bottom of the barrel. I pored over PhD theses and all kinds of stuff looking for problems other people had that prevented them from getting BEC. The game is to cool a cloud of atoms to almost absolute zero and still have enough atoms in your sample to do interesting experiments. We could get our atoms to less than a microkelvin, but then something would heat them up again, preventing us from reaching the density and temperature needed to form a condensate. In July, on an unusually cold weekend, we finally cracked it. This was an immense relief. The end of my PhD was finally in sight!

From that point on, things moved quickly. We moved into testing out our ultracold atom collider (I will do a post on this later). Just imagine a montage of happy physicists running experiments, collecting data, plotting graphs, writing papers, etc. Fun times! And for me, the evenings were filled with punching, kicking, breaking boards, running, sparring, etc. Personal social life: nil.

For once, our club had a decent contingent going to nationals. We trained together on Sunday mornings, doing 1.5 hours of some sort of sadistic running exercise devised by our coach (the returnee), followed by 1.5 hours of sparring training. The tournament went well. We didn't do spectacularly in terms of placings, but everyone did well. I was certainly very proud of everyone and myself!

Things in the lab plodded along for the rest of the year. We had a setback or two, but nothing dramatic. We submitted a paper on the collider recently. My first paper!

By November, I was starting to feel tired. Training 6 days a week and spending the rest of the time in the lab was getting exhausting! I felt ready, and just wanted to get the grading over with! I should note, at this point, that the first time I went for my black belt, I didn't pass. There were a number of reasons for it, but mainly I was just not that well prepared. 6 months later, I re-tested and I did pass, but the whole thing left me feeling like I just wasn't very good at Taekwon-Do. I became an instructor straight after getting my black belt, not because this was a personal aspiration, but out of necessity, because the previous instructor had finished his studies at university and was moving overseas, and I was the next most qualified person. At the time, I felt like I just barely made it to black belt and that I wasn't cut out for much more.

This year taught me that I am cut out for more. I passed my 2nd dan grading, and I got an A. I certainly didn't do it on my own. Everyone has people helping them for gradings, and I am very thankful for the people who helped me (other more senior instructors and also my personal coach). I now have more aspirations for competing and look forward to this year's tournaments and training some of my students for their black belt grading.

In the lab, perseverance has paid off. Every year, I wish for success in the lab. In 2011, it actually happened and that makes me very happy! The next few months will see the final push to finishing my PhD, which I look forward to very much!

2011 was an intense year. It was a year of sadness and stress for many of my friends. It was also a year of happy events for friends as well (five couples I am friends with got married, one of them expecting their first child any day now). It was a year of frustration in some areas, and ultimately a year of overcoming obstacles and learning that I can be better at whatever I want to be as long as I put in the effort.