the world has turned and left me here

lattice quantum chromodynamics

Just took a nap and followed that up with a very pleasurable shower. I was pretty dirty after Amsterdam, having bathed only once over a span of four days. Was noticing that if I rubbed my face of neck I could scrape off a thin film of gray grime.

Sat through a lecture on Lattice Quantumchromodynamics (LQCD) this morning with Eric. Quantum is a bunch of needless complexity, and the results aren't really that satisfying anyway. For the most part, you can't eat quantum. Only nonsense exists on the scale of nanometers, "information dressed with gluon dirt," to use the lecturer's own words against him.

Or at least that's how I feel about it. I guess there are some people who are really into it, but I'm certainly not one of them, and Eric doesn't seem to be either, even though he has a deeper understanding of it than I.

A little background: Eric is working for the DESY project in Zeuthen, a suburb of Berlin, on some electron beam detection hardware. It's a self-contained little physics community complete with housing and a cafeteria. In theory, you'd never have to leave.