Some weeks ago a friend emailed me to say he was shocked – shocked! – to hear I had lost my job. This sudden unemployment was news to me, but not as big a surprise as you may think. I was indeed unemployed for two months last year, not because I said rude things about other people’s theories, but simply because someone forgot to renew my contract. Or maybe I forgot to ask that it be renewed. Or both.

In any case, this happened a few times before, and while my younger self wouldn’t normally let such a brilliant opportunity for outrage go to waste, I now like to pretend that I am old and wise and breathe out bullshit.

After some breathing, I learned that this time my sudden unemployment originated not in a forgotten signature, but on Wikipedia. I missed the ensuing kerfuffle about my occupation, but later someone sent me a glorious photoshopped screenshot (see above) which shows me with a painted-on mustache and informs us that Sabine Hossenfelder is known for “a horrible blog on which she makes fun of other people’s theories.”

The truly horrible thing about this blog, however, is that I’m not making fun. String theorists are happily studying universes that don’t exist, particle physicists are busy inventing particles that no one ever measures, and theorists mass-produce “solutions” to the black hole information loss problem that no one will ever be able to test. All these people get paid well for their remarkable contributions to human knowledge. If that makes you laugh, it’s the absurdity of the situation, not my blog, that’s funny.

Be that as it may, I have given a lot of interviews in the past months and noticed people are somewhat confused about what I actually work on. I didn’t write about my current research in my book because inevitably the physicists I criticize would have complained I wrote the book merely to advertise my own work. So now they just complain that I wrote the book, period. Or they complain I’m a horrible person. Which is probably correct because, you see, all that bullshit I’ve been breathing out now sticks to them.

Horrible person that I am, I don’t even work in the foundations of physics any more. I now work on quantum simulations or, more specifically, on using weakly coupled condensed-matter-systems to obtain information about a different, strongly coupled condensed matter system.

The relation between the two systems stems from a combination of analogue gravity with the gauge-gravity duality. The neat thing about this is that – in contrast to either the gauge-gravity duality or analogue gravity alone – we are dealing with two systems that can (at least in principle) be prepared in the laboratory. It’s about the real world!

This opens the possibility to experimentally test the validity of the gauge-gravity duality, or its applicability to certain systems, respectively. Current experiments (like Jeff Steinhauer’s) aren’t precise enough to actually do this, but the technology in this area is rapidly improving, so I’m hopeful that maybe in a decade or so it’ll be doable.

If that was too much terminology, I’m developing new methods to describe how large numbers of atoms interact at very low temperature.

Today, Tobias Zingg and I have a new paper on the arXiv that sums up our recent results. And that’s what I’ll be working on until my contract runs out for real, in November next year. And then what? I don’t know, but stay tuned and we’ll find out.

This is me with John Horgan, yesterday. This photo is only here so the share widgets work properly.

One of the most frequent critical remarks I have gotten on my book is that I seem confident. I was supposed, it seems, to begin each paragraph with “I’m sorry, but.”

But I am not sorry. I mean what I say. Yes, in the foundations of physics we are financing some 15,000 or so theorists who keep producing useless scientific articles because they believe the laws of nature must be beautiful. That’s exactly what I am saying.

Let us leave aside for a moment that you have to skip half the book to not notice I question myself on every other page. Heck, if you ask me to sign the book, I’m afraid I’ll misspell my own name. I’m a walking-talking bag of self-doubt. Indeed that was the reason I ended up writing this book.

See, I don’t understand what’s going on with this community. Everyone knows there’s no reason that a scientific explanation must appeal to the human sense of beauty. Right? Doesn’t everyone know this? Science is about explaining observations, regardless of whether we like these explanations.

But if it’s clear that putting forward new hypotheses just because they are beautiful doesn’t mean they’re likely to be right, then why do theorists in these fields focus so much on beauty? Worse, why do they continue to focus on the same type of beauty, even though that method has demonstrably not worked for 40 years?

At first I considered there might be a mathematical basis to their arguments which I was missing. That there is a solid reason why a theory must be natural, or that the fundamental forces must be unified, or that the mathematics of a theory must be “fruitful” and “have deep connections” and be “rigid” – to quote some expressions people in the foundations of physics commonly use. But there is no mathematical basis. Arguments from beauty are additional assumptions, and they are unnecessary to make a theory work.

Indeed, some philosophers have suggested I speak of “metaphysical assumptions” rather than “aesthetic arguments”, but I think the latter captures the historical origin better. These arguments trace back to tales about God’s beautiful creations. Also, if I’d call it metaphysics no one would know what I am talking about.

I then considered that using criteria from beauty is justified because it has historically been successful. This would leave open the question why that would be so – I cannot think of a reason such a connection should exist. But in any case, history speaks against it. Relying on beauty has sometimes worked, and sometimes not. It’s just that many theoretical physicists prefer to recall only the cases where arguments from beauty did work. And in hindsight they then reason that the wrong ideas were not all that beautiful. Needless to say, that’s not a good way to evaluate evidence.

Finally, the use of criteria from beauty in the foundations of physics is, as a matter of fact, not working. Beautiful theories have been ruled out in the hundreds, theories about unified forces and new particles and additional symmetries and other universes. All these theories were wrong, wrong, wrong. Relying on beauty is clearly not a successful strategy.

So I have historical evidence, math, and data. In my book I lay out these points and tell the reader what conclusion I have drawn: Beauty is not a good guide to theory-development.

I then explain that this widespread use of scientifically questionable but productive methodology is symptomatic to the current organization of academic research, and a problem that’s not confined to physics.

Now, look, just because I cannot find a reason that beautiful theories are more promising than ugly ones doesn’t mean that relying on beauty cannot work. It may work, if we get lucky. Neither, for that matter, do I think that if we find a new law of nature it must be ugly. Chances are we will come to find a successful new idea beautiful simply because it works. But our sense of beauty changes and adapts, and therefore I do not think that using criteria of beauty from the past is a promising route to future progress.

Needless to say, making a case against a community of some thousands of the biggest brains on the planet has not been conducive to my self-confidence. But I have tried to find a scientific reason for the methods which my colleagues use in theory-development and could not. I wrote the book because I think it’s my responsibility as scientist to say clearly that I have come to the conclusion what goes on the foundations of physics is a waste of money, and that the public is being misinformed about the promise of this work.

I do not think that this will change the mind of people in the field. They have nothing to worry about because the way that academia is currently organized there is safety in numbers.

So, yes, I doubt myself. But I have written a whole book in which I explain why I have arrived at my conclusion. Rather than asking me, you should ask the people who work in these fields what makes them so certain that beautiful ideas are promising descriptions of nature.

Lara.

I had just returned from my trip to Dublin when the door rang and the UPS man dumped two big boxes on our doorstep. My husband has a habit of ordering books by the dozens, so my first thought was that this time he’d really outdone himself. Alas, the UPS guy pointed out, the boxes were addressed to me.

I signed, feeling guilty for having forgotten I ordered something from Lebanon, that being the origin of the parcels. But when I cut the tape and opened the boxes I found – drumrolls please – 25 copies “Lost in Math”. Turns out my publisher has their books printed in Lebanon.

I hadn’t gotten neither galleys nor review copies, so that was the first time I actually saw The-Damned-Book, as it’s been referred to in our household for the past three years. And The-Damned-Book is finally, FINALLY, a real book!

The cover looks much better in print than it does in the digital version because it has some glossy and some matte parts and, well, at least two seven-year-old girls agree that it’s a pretty book and also mommy’s name is on the cover and a mommy photo in the back, and that’s about as far as their interest went.

Gloria.

I’m so glad this is done. When I signed the contract in 2015, I had no idea how nerve-wrecking it would be to wait for the publication. In hindsight, it was a totally nutty idea to base the whole premise of The-Damned-Book on the absence of progress in the foundations of physics when such progress could happen literally any day. For three years now I’ve been holding my breath every time there was a statistical fluctuation in the data.

But now – with little more than a week to go until publication – it seems exceedingly unlikely anything will change about the story I am telling: Fact is, theorists in the foundations of physics have been spectacularly unsuccessful with their predictions for more than 30 years now. (The neutrino-anomaly I recently wrote about wasn’t a prediction, so even if it holds up it’s not something you could credit theorists with.)

The story here isn’t that theorists have been unsuccessful per se, but that they’ve been unsuccessful and yet don’t change their methods. That’s especially perplexing if you know that these methods rely on arguments from beauty even though everyone agrees that beauty isn’t a scientific criterion. Parallels to the continued use of flawed statistical methods in psychology and the life sciences are obvious. There too, everyone kept using bad methods that were known to be bad, just because it was the state of the art. And that’s the real story here: Scientists get stuck on unsuccessful methods.

Some people have voiced their disapproval that I went and argued with some prominent people in the field without them knowing they’d end up in my book. First, I recommend you read the book before you disapprove of what you believe it contains. I think I have treated everyone politely and respectfully.

Second, it should go without saying but apparently doesn’t, that everyone who I interviewed signed an interview waiver, transferring all rights for everything they told me to my publisher in all translations and all formats, globally and for all eternity, Amen. They knew what they were being interviewed for. I’m not an undercover agent, and my opinions about arguments from beauty are no secret.

Furthermore, everyone I interviewed got to see and approved a transcript with the exact wording that appears in the book. Though I later removed some parts entirely because it was just too much material. (And no, I cannot reuse it elsewhere because that was indeed not what they agreed on.) I had to replace a few technical terms here or there that most readers wouldn’t have understood, but these instances are marked in the text.

So, I think I did my best to accurately represent their opinions, and if anyone comes off looking like an idiot it should be me.

Most importantly though, the very purpose of these interviews is to offer the reader a variety of viewpoints rather than merely my own. So of course I disagree with the people I spoke with here and there – because who’d read a dialogue in which two people constantly agree with each other?

In any case, everything’s been said and done and now I can only wait and hope. This isn’t a problem that physicists can solve themselves. The whole organization of academic research today acts against major changes in methodology because that would result in a sudden and drastic decrease of publishing activity. The only way I can see change come about is public pressure. We have had enough talk about elegant universes and beautiful theories.

If you still haven’t made up your mind whether to buy the book, we now have a website which contains a table of contents and links to reviews and such, and Amazon offers you can “Look Inside” the book. Two video trailers will be coming next week. Silicon Republic writes about the book here and Dan Falk has a piece at NBC titled “Why some scientists say physics has gone off the rails.”

We wish you all happy holidays! Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, we hope you have a peaceful time to relax and, if necessary, recover.

I want to use the opportunity to thank all of you for reading along, for giving me feedback, and for simply being interested in science in a time when that doesn’t seem to be normal anymore. A special “Thank you" to those who have sent donations. It is reassuring to know that you value this blog. It encourages me to keep my writing available here for free.

I’ll be tied up with family business during the coming week – besides the usual holiday festivities, the twins’ 7th birthday is coming up – so blogging will be sparse for some while.

I'm traveling next week and will be offline for some days. Blogging may be insubstantial, if existent, and comments may be stuck in the queue longer than usual. But I'm sure you'll survive without me ;)

And since you haven't seen the girls for a while, here is a recent photo. They'll be starting school this year in the fall and are very excited about it.

I have a trip upcoming to Helsinki. After this I'll be tied up in family business, and then my husband goes on a business trip and I have the kids alone. Then Kindergarten will be closed for a day (forgot why, I'm sure they must have some reason), I have to deal with an ant-infection in our apartment, and more family business follows. In summary: busy times.

I have a book review to appear on this blog later today, but after this you won't hear much from me for a week or two. Keep in mind that since I have comment moderation on, it might take some while for your comment to appear when I am traveling. With thanks for your understanding, here's a random cute pic of Gloria :)

Last year I got a strange email, from a person entirely unknown to me, letting me know that one of their acquaintances seemed to pretend an ultrasound image from my twin pregnancy was their own. They sent along the following screen capture that shows a collection of ultrasound images. It springs to the eye that these images were not taken with the same device as they differ in contrast and color scheme. It seems exceedingly unlikely you would get this selection of ultrasound image from one screening.

In comparison, here is my ultrasound image at 14 weeks pregnancy, taken in July 2010:



You can immediately see that the top right image from the stranger is my ultrasound image, easily recognizable by the structure in the middle that looks like an upside-down V. The header containing my name is cropped. I don’t know where the other images came from, but I’d put my bets on Google.

I didn’t really know what to make of this. Why would some strange woman pretend my ultrasound images are theirs? Did she fake being pregnant? Was she indeed pregnant but didn’t have ultrasound images? Did she just not like their own images?

My ultrasound images were tiny, glossy printouts, and to get them online I first had to take a high resolution photo of the image, straighten it, remove reflections, turn up contrast and twiddle some other software knobs. I’m not exactly an award-winning photoshopper, but from the images that Google brings up, mine is one with the highest resolution.

So maybe somebody just wanted to save time, thinking ultrasound images all look alike anyway. Well, they don’t. Truth be said, to me reading an ultrasound is somewhat like reading tea leaves, and I’m a coffee drinker. But the days in which ultrasound images all looked alike are long gone. If you do an inverse image search, it identifies my ultrasound flawlessly. And then there’s the upside-down V that my doctor said was the cord, which might or might not be correct.

The babies are not a boy and a girl, as is claimed in the caption of the screenshot; they are two girls with separate placentas. In the case with two placentas the twins might be fraternal – stemming from two different eggs – or identical – stemming from the same egg that divided early on. We didn’t know they were two girls though until 20 weeks, at which age you should be able to see the dangling part of the genitals, if there is one.

If I upload an image to my blog, I do not mind it being used by other people. What irked me wasn’t somebody used my image, but that they implicitly claimed my experience was theirs.

In any case, I forgot all about this bizarre story until last week I got another note from a person I don’t know, alerting me that somebody else is going about pretending to carry my children. Excuse me if I might not have made too much effort in blurring out the picture of the supposedly pregnant woman


This case is even more bizarre as I’ve been told the woman apparently had her uterus removed and is claiming the embryos have attached to other organs. Now, it is indeed possible that a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus and the embryo continues to grow, sometimes for several months. The abdomen for example has a good blood circulation that can support a pregnancy for quite some while. Sooner or later though the supply of nutrients and oxygen will become insufficient, and the embryo dies, triggering a miscarriage. That’s a major problem because if the pregnancy isn’t in the uterus the embryo has no exit through which to leave. Such out-of-place pregnancies are medical emergencies and, if not discovered early on, normally end fatally for the mother: Even if the dead embryo can be surgically removed, the placenta has grown into the abdomen and cannot detach the way it can cleanly separate from the rather special lining of the uterus, resulting in heavy inner bleeding and, often, death.

Be that as it may, if you’ve had your uterus removed you can’t get pregnant because the semen has no way to fertilize an egg.

I do not have the faintest clue why somebody would want to fake a twin pregnancy. But then the internet seems to proliferate what I want to call, in absence of a better word, “experience theft”. Some people pretend to suffer from an illness they don’t have, travel to places they’ve never been, or having grown up as members of a minority when they didn’t. Maybe pretending to be pregnant with twins is just the newest trend.

Well, ladies, so let me tell you what to expect, so you will get it right. At 20 weeks you’ll start getting preterm contractions, several hours a day, repeating stoically every 10 minutes. They’ll turn out to be what is called “not labor active”, pushing inwards but not downwards, still damned painful. Doctors warn that you’ll have a preterm delivery and issue a red flag: No sex, no travel, no exercise for the rest of the pregnancy.

At 6 months your bump will have reached the size of a full-term single pregnancy, but you still have 3 months to go. People start making cheerful remarks that you must be almost due! Your cervix length has started to shorten and it is highly recommended you stay in bed with your hips elevated and so you’ll go on sick leave following the doctor’s advice. The allegedly so awesome Swedish health insurance will later refuse to cover for this and you’ll lose two months worth of salary.

By 7 month your cervix length has shortened to 1 cm and the doctors get increasingly nervous. By 8 months it’s dilated 1 cm. You’re now supposed to visit your doctor every day. Every day they record your contractions, which still come, “not labor active”, in 10 minute intervals. They still do when you’ve reached full term, at which point you’ll start developing a nasty kidney problem accompanied by substantial water retention. And so, after warning you of a preterm delivery for 4 months, the doctors now insist that you have labor induced.

Once in the hospital they put you on Cytotec, which after 36 hours hasn’t had any effect other than making you even more miserable. But since the doctors expect that you will need a Cesarean section eventually, they don’t want you to eat. After 48 hours mostly lying in bed, not being allowed to eat more than cookies – while being 9 month pregnant with twins! –  your blood pressure will give in and one of the babies’ heartbeats will drop from a steady 140 to 90. And then it’s entirely gone. An electronic device starts beeping widely, a nurse pushes a red button, and suddenly you will find yourself with an oxygen mask on your face and an Epinephrine shot in your vein. You use the situation to yell at a doctor to stop the Cytotec nonsense and put you on Pitocin, which they promise to do the next morning.

The next morning you finally get your PDA and the Pitocin does its work. Within an hour you’ll go from 1 cm to 8 cm dilation. Your waters will never break – a midwife will break them for you. Both. The doctor insists on shaving off your hair “down there”, because he still expects you’ll need a Cesarean. These days, you don’t deliver twins naturally any more, is the message you get. Eventually, after eternity has come and gone, somebody will ask you to push. And push you will, 5 times for two babies.

I have no scars and I have no stretch marks. The doctor never got to use his knife. I’m living proof you don’t need a Cesarean to give birth to twins. The children whose ultrasound image you’ve used are called Lara Lily and Gloria Sophie. At birth, they had a low weight, but full Apgar score. They are now 4 years old, beat me at memory, and their favorite food is meatballs.

The twins are now 4 years old.

If there are two cases that have been brought to my attention that involve my images, how many of these cases are there in total?

Update: Read comments for some more information about the first case.

I have a post about "The rising star of science" over at Starts with a Bang. It collects some of my thoughts on science and religion, fear and wonder. I will not repost this here next month, so if you're interested check it out over there. According to medium it's a 6 minutes read. You can get a 3 minutes summary in my recent video:


We wish you all happy holidays :)


From left to right: Inga the elephant, Lara the noisy one, me, Gloria the nosy one, and Bo the moose. Stefan is fine and says hi too, he isn't in the photo because his wife couldn't find the setting for the self-timer.

So here I am on an island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean that's working on its next volcano eruption.


In case you missed yesterday's Google Hangout, FQXi just announced the winner's of this year's essay contest and - awesomeliness alert! - my essay "How to save the world in five simple steps" made it first prize!

I'm happy of course about the money, but what touches me much more is that this is vivid documentation I'm not the only one who thinks the topics I addressed in my essay are relevant. If you've been following this blog for some while then you know of course that I've been thinking back and forth about the problem of emerging social dynamics, in the scientific communities as well as in society by large, and our inability to foresee and react to the consequences of our actions.

Ten years ago I started out thinking the problem is the modeling of these systems, but over the years, as more and more research and data on these trends became available, I've become convinced the problem isn't understanding the system dynamics to begin with, but that nobody is paying attention to what we've learned.

I see this every time I sit in a committee meeting and try to tell them something about research dedicated to intelligent decision making in groups, cognitive biases, or the sociology of science. They'll not listen. They might be polite and let me finish, but it's not information they will take into account in their decision making. And the reason is basically that it takes them too much time and too much effort. They'll just continue the way it's always been done; they'll continue making the same mistakes over again. There's no feedback in this system, and no learning by trial and error.

The briefest of brief summaries of my essay is that we'll only be able to meet the challenges mankind is facing if our social systems are organized so that we can react to complex and emerging problems caused by our own interaction and that with our environment. That will only be possible if we have the relevant information and use it. And we'll only use this information if it's cheap, in the sense of it being simple, fast, and intuitive to use.

Most attempts to solve the problems that we are facing are based on an unrealistic and utopian image of the average human, the well-educated, intellectual and concerned citizen who will process all available information and come to smart decisions. That is never going to happen, and that's the issue I'm taking on in my essay.

I'll be happy to answer questions about my essay. I would prefer to do this here rather than at the FQXi forum. Note though that I'll be stuck in transit for the next day. If that volcano lets me off this island that is.

Lara

I'll be traveling the next three weeks, so please be prepared for little or unsubstantial action on this blog. Next week I'm in Reykjavik for a network meeting on "Holographic Methods and Applications". August 27-29 I'm running the Science Writers Workshop in Stockholm together with George, this year on the topic "Quantum Theory." The first week of September then I'm in Trieste for the 2014 conference on Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity, where I'll be speaking about space-time defects.

Unfortunately, this traveling happens just during the time when our Kindergarten is closed, and so it's quite some stress-test for my dear husband. Since you last heard from Lara and Gloria, they have learned to count, use the swing, and are finally potty trained. They can dress themselves, have given up requesting being carried up the stairs, and we mostly get around without taking along the stroller. Yes, life has become much easier. Gloria however still gets motion sick in the car, so we either have to drug her or pull over every 5 minutes. By and large we try to avoid long road trips.

The girls have now more of a social life than me, and we basically can't leave the house without meeting other children that they know and that they have to discuss with whether Friday comes before or after Wednesday. That Lara and Gloria are twins apparently contributes greatly to their popularity. Every once in a while, when I drop off the kids at Kindergarten, some four foot dwarf will request to know if it's really true that they were together in mommy's tummy and inspect me with a skeptic view. The older children tell me that the sisters are so cute, and then try to pad Gloria's head, which she hates.

Gloria

Gloria is still a little ahead of Lara when it comes to developing new skills. She learned to speak a little earlier, to count a little earlier, was potty trained a little earlier and learned to dress herself a little earlier. Then she goes on to explain Lara what to do. She also "reads" books to Lara, basically by memorizing the stories.

Lara on the other hand is still a little ahead in her physical development. She is still a bit taller and more often than not, when I come to pick them up at Kindergarten, Lara will be kicking or throwing some ball while Gloria plays in the sandbox - and afterwards Gloria will insist on taking off her shoes, pouring out the sand and cleaning her socks before she gets into the car. Lara takes off the shoes in the car and pours the sand into the seat pocket. Lara uses her physical advantage over Gloria greatly to take away toys. Gloria takes revenge by telling everybody what Lara did wrong again, like putting her shoe on the wrong foot.

The best recent development is that the girls have finally, after a quite difficult phase, stopped kicking and hitting me and telling me to go away. They now call me "my little mommy" and want me to bake cookies for them. Yes, my popularity has greatly increased with them figuring out that I'm not too bad with cakes and cookies. They don't particularly like my cooking but that's okay, because I don't like it either.

On an entirely different note, as some of you have noticed already, I agreed to write for Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang. So far there's two pieces from me over there: How the experiment that claimed to detect dark matter fooled itself and The Smallest Possible Scale in the Universe. The deal is that I can repost what gets published there on this blog after 30 days, which I will do. So if you're only interested in my writing, you're well off here, but check out his site because it's full with interesting physics writing.

I’ll be traveling for the rest of the week, so be warned of a period of silence.

Wednesday I’m giving a seminar in Nottingham, and after that I’m attending a workshop in Oxford. The workshop topic is “The Structure of Gravity and Space-time” and it’s part of the project “Establishing the Philosophy of Cosmology”. Sound more ominous than it is: They’ll have a session on the question whether there exists a “fundamental length”, which is what brought me on their invitation list. There will also be sessions on bi-metric gravity, massive gravity and strings and space-time structure, which sounds very promising to me. We’ll see how much philosophy infiltrates the physics. A preliminary program is here.

The girls are doing well, now attending Kindergarten. Our pediatrician didn’t raise any concerns at the 3-year checkup, except for Lara’s vision problems. She’ll get new glasses next week. The ones she has now always slip down and hang on the very tip of her nose, so we hope that the new ones will stay put better.

Lara and Gloria can open and remove all our children safety locks now and I’ve put away the door keys because I’m afraid they’ll lock themselves in. They also picked up lots of swear words since they attend Kindergarten. They don’t really know how to use them properly, which is often unwillingly funny. We’ve made a little progress with the potty training, but unfortunately the kids declare plainly they’re “too lazy” to go without diaper. It is similarly unfortunate that several older children at the Kindergarten still use binkies. Gloria told me the other day she will learn to use the toilet when she can “reach the ceiling”. She also declared that since Gloria came out of mommy’s belly, Lara must have come out of daddy’s belly. Everything far away is “Stockholm” and that’s a magical place where mommy goes and brings back gifts. They’re getting more entertaining by the day.

I finally replaced my old digital camera because some of the buttons were broken, and now have a Canon DSLR (EOS 1100D) which I am so far very happy with, though the learning curve is steep. I used to have a SLR Camera 15 years ago. You know, one of these things were you had to wind back the film and carry it to some store and wait a week just to see how badly you did. Remember that? The DSLR looks and feels quite different from that, as with all the menus that I keep getting lost in. Maybe reading the manual would help. In any case, I spent some weeks hunting after the kids. Below are some of my favorite photos.

I wish you all happy holidays and a peaceful Christmas time! The next days will be a slow time on the blog as we're working our way through the holidays, the kid's 3rd birthday, and new year, with all the family and friend's visits that come with it. Back to business next year - enjoy the silence :)

Last month I gave a seminar in Bielefeld on models with a minimal length scale. This seminar was part of a series organized within the framework of the new research training group "Models of Quantum Gravity". The initiative is funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG), and several universities in Northern Germany take part in it. I find this a very interesting development. The Germans seem to finally have recognized the need to support research in quantum gravity generally, rather than singling out specific approaches, and this initiative looks promising to me. Let's hope it is fruitful.

My trip to Bielefeld was interesting also in another aspect. When I was about to get on the way back to Heidelberg, the car wouldn't start. After some cursing and fruitless attempts to decode the erratic blinking of the panel lights, I called the closest Renault dealer. (Actually, I first called my husband to yell at him, just because that was the first thing that came to my mind.) The Renault guy said, Guten Tag and tough luck, we'll have to tow the car, but it's five to five now so please call back tomorrow morning.

So I unexpectedly had to spend the night out of town, which I took as an excuse to buy really expensive underwear. They towed the car the next morning, figured out that the battery had died in a short-circuit that blew up some wiring, and I made it back home with 24 hours delay. The irony in this was that I had taken Stefan's car because I was afraid mine would break down and I'd get stranded in Bielefeld.

Tomorrow I'm giving a seminar in Aachen and I hope that this time the car won't break down... Later this month I will try to listen in at a black hole conference in Frankfurt. Unfortunately, this happens to be during the week when our daycare place has summer break, so the logistics is nontrivial. In September I'll be in Helsinki for another seminar. In October I'm on a conference in Vienna. In November I'm attending a workshop in the UK, which for all I can tell doesn't have a webpage and I'm not entirely sure what it is about either.

There's been some discussion in the blogosphere lately about the difficulty of combining the necessary travel to seminars and conferences with family demands. And yeah, what do you expect, it's not easy and it's not fun.

Sometime when I'm writing these Internas about work-family issues, I feel like a case study in the making.

The girls are doing fine and have adjusted well to the new daycare place. So far, we're very happy with it. It's a nice and fairly large place with a playground and much space to run around. They're very well organized and it's not exceedingly costly either.

Some weeks ago the kids were ill, and I called in at the daycare place to say we're not coming. When somebody picked up the phone and I heard a male voice, my first thought was that I must have dialed a wrong number. Needless to say, I then felt bad for my own stereotyping, and that I was apparently surprised the childcare business is not exclusively run by women. If you Google for the job description "Kindererzieher" in German, auto-complete gives you as first hit the female ending of the word.

To be fair to myself though, the guy hadn't been there previously. He was only there as a temporary replacement, and normally a woman called Stephanie would answer the phone. In any case, I later had an interesting conversation with him about gender imbalance in education. His explanation for why there are so few men in his profession was simply that it's badly paid. "You can't feed a family from this." I'm not sure that really explains much though.

Lara and Gloria's vocabulary has exponentially grown in the last month. No day passes without them trying out new words. At this point we actually have to be careful what we tell them because they'll go around and tell everybody who'll listen that the mommycar is broken and will shamelessly repeat my complaints that the neighbors don't separate their garbage. They have meanwhile pretty much taken over the whole apartment. There doesn't seem to be any place that's not occupied with toys or other child paraphernalia. And I, I spend a considerable amount of time collecting building blocks and lego pieces, a genuinely sisyphean activity.

In summary, life is busy.

Bedtime!

Lara, putting on her shoes.

May 1st is a national holiday both in Sweden and in Germany. A good opportunity, I thought, to update you on our attempts at normal family life.

Lara and Gloria are now talking basically non-stop. Half of the time we have no idea what they are trying to say, the other half are refusals. Gloria literally wakes up in the morning yelling "Nein-nein-nein". Saying it's difficult to get her dressed, fed, and to daycare makes quantizing gravity sound like an easy task. Yesterday she insisted on going in her pajamas. Good mother that I am, I thought that was a brilliant idea.

Gloria is proud of her new hat.

Lara isn't quite as difficult as Gloria, but she is very easily distracted. If I ask her to get into the stroller, she'll first spend five minutes inspecting the stones by the road or take off her shoes and put them back on, just because.Time clearly flows very differently when you're two years old than when you're forty. I try to use the occasions to check my email. Time flows through my iPhone, I'm sure it does.

We finally made progress on our daycare issue, which is presently only half a solution. A new daycare place opened in the area, and due to my time spent on the phone last year, asking people to please write down my name and call me back if the situation unexpectedly changes, somebody indeed recalled my name and we made it top of the list for the new place. So there'll be another adaption phase at another place, but this time it's a full-day care that will indeed cover our working hours. It is also, I should add, considerably less expensive than the present solution with a self-employed nanny. This, I hope, will make my commuting easier for Stefan to cope with.

I'm really excited about the workshop for science writers that I'm organizing with George. We now have an (almost) complete schedule, I've ordered food and drinks and sorted out the lab visit, and I'm very much looking forward to the meeting. Directly after this workshop, I'll attend another workshop in Munich, "Quantum Gravity in Perspective", where I'll be speaking about the phenomenology of quantum gravity. I have some more trips upcoming this summer, to Bielefeld and Aachen and, in fall, to Vienna to speak at a conference on "Emergent Quantum Mechanics."

I was invited to take part in this KITP workshop on black hole firewalls but I eventually decided not to go. Partly because I'm trying to keep my travels limited to not burden Stefan too much with the childcare. But primarily because I don't believe that anything insightful will come out of this debate. It seems to me there are more fruitful research topics to explore, and this discussion is a waste of time. I also never liked SoCal in late summer; too dry for my central-European genes.

Lara and Gloria, eating cookies at a visit to the zoo.

We'll be away for the next couple of days because Stefan's brother is getting married. This means a several-hours long road trip with two toddlers who don't want to sit still for a minute; we're all looking forward to it...

Lara with her new glasses.

When you last heard from Lara and Gloria, they could utter a few single words. Within a couple of weeks, they have transitioned to speaking full sentences, answer to questions with "yes" and "no", and are very clear in expressing themselves. "Jacke an, Bagger gucke" (Jacket on, watch digger), they might say when they want to go for a walk. They still refer to each other as Gaakie and Gookie though. And they are struggling with German grammar, especially finding the right articles.

Lara now has glasses that are meant to help correct her squinting. She wears them without complaint. It probably helps for her acceptance that I too wear glasses.

The half-day daycare solution is working reasonably well, except that it's prohibitively expensive. The nanny has taught the kids to drink from a cup, to wash their hands, to paint and to jump. I'm sure our downstairs neighbors are as excited about the jumping as the kids. My commuting to Stockholm is not working quite so well. It leaves all of us terribly exhausted and is a huge waste of time, not to mention money. The time that I gain by having the kids in daycare is mostly spent on catching up on life's overhead, paperwork, the household, piles of unread papers and unanswered emails that wait for me upon return.

That having been said, I have a bunch of trips coming up. March 15 I'm in Bergen giving a seminar, apparently on the topic "Siste nytt om kvantegravitasjon". On April 12 I'm in Reykjavik. I haven't been able to find anything resembling a seminar schedule on the department website, but it's the same seminar as in Bergen. In May George and I are running the previously mentioned Workshop for Science Writers in Stockholm, and at the end of May I'll be attending a workshop on "Quantum Gravity in Perspective" in Munich. I have some more trips coming up, but plans haven't proceeded further than that. If you're located in any of these places and feel like  meeting up, send me a note.

Besides this, I've been told that the current issue of the Finnish magazine Tähdet ja avaruus ("Stars and Space") has an article by Laura Koponen about quantum gravity, featuring Renate Loll, Robert Brandenberger, and me. It's in Finnish so I have no clue what it says, but the photos look nice. Though... something about the photo of me didn't feel quite right, and after some forehead frowning it occurred to me that the NorthFace logo on my shirt fell victim to Finnish photoshopping. I actually like it better this way; I prefer my clothes without logos if possible. In any case, should you by any chance speak Finnish and have read the article, let me know what you think.

January has been busy, as you can probably tell from the frequency of my posts. Lara and Gloria are now in half-daycare for 4 hours weekdays. The transition went fairly well, and I think they like it there. The nanny clearly has more time and patience to play with the kids than I, and the place is also better suited than our apartment where computers, books, pens, and other stuff that you don't want in your toddlers' hands, are lying in every corner. The nanny is from Spain and so the kids learn some Spanish along the way. They seem to understand a few words, but don't yet speak any.

We now replaced the baby cribs with larger beds that the kids can get in and out on their own. This took some getting used to. They wake up in the night now considerably more often than previously, and sometimes wander around, so recently we haven't been getting as much sleep as we would like to. That explains half of my silence. The other big change this month was that, now that the kids are two years old and we have to pay for their flight tickets, we've given up commuting to Stockholm together, and this is the first month of me trying to commute alone. Stefan has support from the babysitter and the grandparents while I'm away, but we're still trying to find the best way to arrange things. It's proved difficult to find a good solution for our issues with non-locality.

I have a case of recurring sinus infection which puts me in a generally grumpy mood, and the kids have a permanently runny nose, for which I partly blame myself and partly the daycare. Besides this, I am in the process of writing a proposal for what the European Research Council calls the "Consolidator Grant" and it's taking up a lot of time I'd rather spend on something else. My review on the minimal length scale got now published in Living Reviews in Relativity. I have been very impressed by how smoothly and well-organized their review and publication process went. Needless to say, now every time I see a paper on the arXiv on a topic covered by the review, I'm dreading the day I have to update this thing.

The girls are finally beginning to actually convey information with what they say. They ask for things they are looking for, they say "mit" (with) to tell us what we should take along, they complain if they're hungry and have learned the all-important word "put" (kaputt, broken). We haven't made much progress with the potty training though, unless naming the diaper content counts.

Gloria trying out my running shoes.

Fall has come to Germany and with it a bunch of bad news. The grant application that I had written in spring didn't go through, and the Swedes want EUR 1,500 additional taxes for the calendar year 2011. My last grandparent died, so now another generation of my family is on the cemetery "watching radish from below" as the Germans say so aptly. Also our landlord died, unexpectedly, last month. Now his wife owns the building but she isn't up to dealing with the details and handed over responsibility to an apartment management company. We're awaiting the changes this might bring, and I for once am glad I insisted on writing down every little detail into the lease, thinking to myself: what if he dies and his wife can't recall what we agreed upon.

We're also fighting again with the German "Familenkasse" for our child benefits. They had informed us at the beginning of the year (after a full year of struggle with them) that Stefan would finally get the usual monthly rate, and that retroactive back to the girls' birth. Alas, after a few months they stopped paying and he never saw a cent for the first year. They didn't give any reason for this.

After we waited for some while to see if any information would trickle down our direction, I finally lost patience and spent an hour or so trying to get somebody on the phone. Amazingly enough, they have no waiting loop, but just disconnect you if all lines are busy. Yes, that's right, I actually had to call their number over and over again. And then all I got was a call-center where they evidently had no information in Stefan's files about what was going on. So much about German efficiency.

Upon my question if they could maybe connect me to the local office that was actually responsible for this nonsense they said, no they can't connect me and there's no way to reach them by phone, I can only appear there in person if I really want. Or my husband, respectively, as it's actually his application.

As much as I like my iPhone, it's a serious disadvantage that you can't slam down the receiver.

By coincidence I then came across a website of the European Union where they offer a service called SOLVIT whose sole purpose seems to be to help with this type of communication problem between national institutions of the European Union. So now I submitted our case. I heard from them within 24 hours and they promised they'll take on the problem. I'm curious if they'll manage to sort this out, stay tuned.

The kids meanwhile are having fun taking apart the furniture and pushing all buttons that they can get their hands on. Everything that beeps is particularly interesting, for example the microwave and the babyphone. To help align Lara's gaze she now has to wear an eye patch a few hours a day. We were expecting protest, but she doesn't seem to mind. The biggest problem is that it hurts when torn off. Needless to say, Gloria will cry and scream until she also gets an eye patch, which we put on her cheek. Stefan and I also sometimes wear one. Lara probably meanwhile thinks it's a strange kind of fashion.

Our November program on "Perspectives of Fundamental Cosmology" is starting on Monday, and the next weeks will be very busy for us. After that I hope things slow down towards the end of the year.

Lara with her eye patch.

Seems I've been too busy to even give you the family update last month, so here's to catch up.

Lara and Gloria can meanwhile climb up and down chairs quite well, which makes life easier for me, except that they often attempt to climb upwards from there. They can now reach the light switches, and last week they learned to open doors so it's difficult now to keep them in a room. Their favorite pastime is presently hitting me with empty plastic bottles, which seems to be infinitely entertaining. They also have developed the unfortunate habit of throwing their toys in direction of my laptop screen.

The girls have increased their vocabulary with various nouns and can identify images in their picture books. They still haven't learned a single verb, though Stefan insists "cookie" means "look."

Gloria is inseparable from her plush moose, Bo. She takes him everywhere and sleeps with him. Since I'd really like to wash it on occasion, I've now bought a second one and we're doing our best to avoid she sees both at once. (We also have to maneuver carefully around the Arlanda Duty Free shop, where there sits a whole pile of them.) Gloria has developed a bad case of motion sickness in which she'll be sick after ten minutes on the road. We now got some medication from our pediatrician that seems to help, so our mobility radius has expanded again. Lara meanwhile is squinting and we'll have to do something about this.

Right now, they're sitting behind me with their Swedish-English picture book. I am often amazed how well they understand what we say, especially because Stefan and I don't speak the same accent and we both mumble one way or the other. I guess it's because I judge their progress by my lack of progress in learning Swedish. Last week I took a taxi in Stockholm, and this was the first time I had a taxi driver who was actually Swedish. Ironically I noticed that because he spoke British English that was at least to my ears basically accent free. He didn't even try to address me in Swedish. When I asked him about it he said, well, there's so few people on the planet for whom Swedish is useful that they don't expect others to speak it. The Swedes are just so damned nice to immigrants.

We were lucky to get two daycare places starting in January. It's a half-day place, but this will be quite a change for all of us.

The organization of the PI conference on Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity is going very well, thanks to Astrid Eichhorn who has done a great job. We now have a schedule that should appear on the website within the next days. We'll probably have most of the talks recorded, so it's something for all of you. The organization of the November program on Perspectives of Fundamental Cosmology is running a little behind, but it seems everything is slowly falling into place there too.

Besides this, I have been trying to convince my colleagues at Nordita to engage more in public outreach, as I think we're behind in making use of the communication channels the online world has to offer. I'm happy to report that we did get some funding approved by the board last week. Part of this will go into a few videos, another part will go to a workshop for science writers - an idea that goes back to a discussion I had with George Musser earlier this year. I'll let you know how this goes, and I'm open to suggestions for what else we could do. I think I don't have to explain you my motivation for doing this - I'd be preaching to the choir. So let me instead say that it can be difficult to get scientists to make a time commitment to anything that's not research, so the biggest constraint on the matter is personnel.

The past month has been very busy for us, and it will unfortunately remain that way for some more weeks, after which I hope time pressure will ease off.

Our two lovely ladies are still not willing to speak to us. They have however developed other communication channels, or maybe I've just become good at guessing what they want. They now both have four molars and Gloria finally gets her missing front teeth (the outer ones on the bottom, nicely visible in the photo to the right).

The developing brain of the human infant is a mystery as well as a miracle, and one of the least well understood properties of this development is childhood amnesia, the fact that adults' earliest memories normally dates back to the age of 2-4 years, but not before that. We do learn many things before that age of course which remain with us, but they do not come in the form of episodic memory, in which we realize our self being in a certain situation. What exactly is the reason for childhood amnesia, and what are the functions necessary for the formation of episodic memory, nobody really knows. It is generally believed that it is connected to self-awareness and also language development, which comes with the ability to conceive of and understand narratives.

There is, interestingly, some research showing that the onset of memories differs between cultures and also between genders, see eg this pdf (women tend to recall more details). There is a line of research in which it has been suggested that early autobiographical memory formation depends on of the way in which parents talk about the past and encourage their children to do the same. It is also well known that emotionally intense events can be recalled back to very early age. Generally, high emotional impact is conductive to memory formation.

My earliest memory, I believe, is being bitten by a hamster. (I also recall having been told repeatedly to not stick my fingers into the cage, but, well.) I must have been roughly 3 years or so at that time. I also recall falling down the stairs, but that must have been later. I have a bunch of memories of my younger brother when he was old enough to walk, but not old enough to talk, which also dates me at about 3 years. Interestingly enough, I have absolutely no memory of my parents till past the age of 4. Which fits well with my perception that the girls do not so much take note of me as a person, but as a freely available service that's just around, like the air to breathe, but nothing that really requires attention.

Needless to say, I am wondering what one day will be Lara and Gloria's earliest memory.

You might or might not have noticed that some time during the last year I cut off my hair, getting tired of the babies pulling on it. A year later or so I finally went to get a proper hair-do. The first time since, ohm, 1989? Or so.

I don't like strangers with scissors near my ears. This haircut was particularly traumatic because the woman took of my glasses, washed my hair, and when I looked into the mirror I saw - my brother! I mean, when I was a kid people frequently mistook me for my younger brother, but I guess I didn't believe them we look "soo similar" till yesterday.

In any case, he has a beard now, and is a foot or so taller than me. So here's my haircut.

 

I've then also finally updated my profile pictures to short hair. Well, at least some of them. Google+'s ingenious software had the following to say about my new profile picture: "Are you sure people will recognize you in this photo? It doesn't seem to have a face in it. Upload a different photo. Dismiss." Okay, dismiss. So I don't seem to have a face. Or rather, my brother doesn't have a face.

Luckily I find the photo looks sufficiently alike the one in the blog header to justify not updating the latter. If the haircut doesn't look like much of a haircut, that's why I usually don't bother paying money for it and cut it myself. My hair is fundamentally messy, and the exact way it's cut doesn't make much of a difference.

Either way, I'm posting this photo so you'll recognize me should we meet! Because I'm always interested to get to know some of our readers. So should our paths cross some day, don't hesitate to say hello.