And I Thought My Office Was Bad…

Posted on September 24, 2005 by woit

Via For God, for Country and for Your Name Here, it seems that Alan Guth had the winning entry in a Boston contest for the messiest office. He won an office make-over, check out the before and after photographs.

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11 Responses to And I Thought My Office Was Bad…

  1. Chris Oakley says:
    September 24, 2005 at 2:48 pm

    It looks like the “before” office was an ingenious attempt to model the early universe – before galaxies started to form.

  2. Steve says:
    September 24, 2005 at 4:16 pm

    The very early office probably started out in a low-entropy ordered state with just a little disorder, eventually undergoing about 64 efoldings in clutter.

  3. Chris Oakley says:
    September 24, 2005 at 4:44 pm

    There also seems to be an information loss issue, as Janet of Go Simple made him donate his Physical Review collection to the MIT library. Maybe Hawking’s original view of Black Holes, as applied to the initial singularity, was correct after all.

  4. Mark Trodden says:
    September 24, 2005 at 6:27 pm

    Fantastic! I’ve been in that office many times and it is by far the messiest one I’ve ever seen. As a postdoc Ionged for this day.

  5. Brett says:
    September 24, 2005 at 8:18 pm

    Keep in mind, that’s Guth’s NEW office. The old one, as I recall, worse.

  6. Kellstrom says:
    September 24, 2005 at 9:24 pm

    I give him 4-6 weeks, the office will return to its previous messy state. In other words, it will return to equilibrium, as is the eventual and inevitable fate of all perturbed systems.

  7. fantomas says:
    September 25, 2005 at 1:49 am

    Theoretical physics is so passé. These days, it’s all about Feng Shui.

    But wait a second, is Feng Shui even falsifiable ? Cause we all know the answer for inflation.

  8. Quantoken says:
    September 25, 2005 at 2:27 am

    Kellystrom said:

    “I give him 4-6 weeks, the office will return to its previous messy state. In other words, it will return to equilibrium, as is the eventual and inevitable fate of all perturbed systems. ”

    No it’s not equilibrium. How do you go from zero entropy to a huge amount of entropy in virtually no time? Inflation theory is the answer 🙂 You bet inflation will happen in Guth’s new office, which would quickly grow into a bubble universe 🙂

    His old office is really impressive. My guess is the amount of entropy probably has broken the Beckenstein Entropy Bound of blackholes.

    Quantoken

  9. Quantum_Ranger says:
    September 25, 2005 at 2:42 am

    Guth would have noticed that, in his previous office he could tolerate things being moved to about 15 decimal places, things could be moved around his office freely, at least fifteen times before he could no longer retrieve any of his things, and would have to re-calculate where he last remembered where he seen what he was looking for!

    I calculate, in his new office he would have to fine-tune his sloppy filing nature down to about 1 decimal place, due to the fact that his office space is more restrictive, and thus moving any object from A to B would be a near improbable event!

  10. Chris Oakley says:
    September 25, 2005 at 4:39 am

    Theoretical physics is so passé. These days, it’s all about Feng Shui.

    Are you suggesting that if Alan Guth had a north-facing office behind a mountain, and no knives in his drawer (or whatever), then his office would not have got so messy? Or would that just be the condition for people to take inflation theory more seriously?

  11. fantomas says:
    September 25, 2005 at 10:08 pm

    Since inflation was about free lunch, I guess everything is possible.

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