Author: sin0928yano@gmail.com

I had just land IAD and was waiting for a ride to get hotel when I am writing this. I used to live in Virginia, I used IAD couple of times but this airport always reminds me of 2001 Space Odyssey since Dr. Floyd called his housekeeper to take care of his car at IAD from the Moon. This time for me, I am going to perform neutron scattering experiment at National Institute of Standard and Technology. I had passed tests to handle the experiment and I have onsite training, then we will do the experiment.

I don’t know whether or not I would like to write but the things I have been through recently poisoned me somehow. By reading the book from Richard Feynman, however, I realized that I was just not mature enough not even as a physicist but also as a human being. I just forgot what I should do in my life.

The thoughts I have now has changed a lot since I came to Australia. That is definitely different when I was in Japan or in the U.S.. Is that good thing? I don’t know. But obviously, I was whinging all the time.

Last three weeks were very hard. I could not have time to get any rest physically and mentally. I was working very hard for experiment while I am looking for room to rent while I was preparing for experiment in the U.S.  Finally, I caught a cold and fixed one day but my feeling was very bad. This experiment is going to be very hard so I needed to be prepared in mentally and I wasn’t sure for that. In addition, I would like to finish couple of writing, paper, proposal, and funding or so. I am writing one manuscript which is under very competitive situation.

I was talking to new friend over dinner but I was complaining the situation all the time about my situation in Australia. As far as working conditions are concerned, however, because I have now tenure, higher responsibility, and neutron scattering instrument. The things have been improved very much. Problem I was having was I think I was not seeing any challenges like I had in Japan and the U.S. and I was feeling like I am far behind of serious competition.

As a young physicist, I have a lot of thing I want to achieve but everything is, I have been feeling, getting behind. I just could not see what I have done. I realized now during flight that I am growing as a neutron inelastic scattering experimentalist far faster than anyone else in this world. By doing this, at least, in next few years, I will be able to be better than good. I should be. I should not be satisfied with situation. Compared to U.S, Japan, and Europe, the user community has to grow in Australia and Asia. These are partially my responsibility.

I will write little about this experiment, this work will be collaboration with Canadian and American, we will use highly aligned single crystal sample, apply magnetic field higher than 10T, cool the sample below 40mK, trying to find magnetic order with neutron scattering experiment. The success rate of this experiment should be very low, to reach each experiment condition is not so difficult while we need to succeed to reach these conditions at the same time within limited beam time here.

In addition to the experiment, I want to finish analyzing and writing up couple of papers which I believe very important scientific contribution. I stop writing again and again but I want to write more here to “think” which should’ve been my motivation here.

 

Firstly, I realized how easy to do international travel now. I can use my credit card issued by Australian bank as long as I can tell them where I am. I have real a US$20 but I haven’t used it for 3 days. Since the USD is very strong now I don’t want to see the bill now. But I will get per-diem by USD, it should be O.K. Since I found it is easy to travel to the U.S., if you want to travel for vacation, please let me know, I would love to join.

The goal of this trip is collecting data for local structure analysis. I can’t say the project but I am measuring one of Type-1 multiferroic and also frustrated magnetic materials by using so called Pair Density Function analysis techniques (PDF). The PDF analysis is kind of new techniques to structure of material. Originally, it was developed for disordered materials such as, gasses, amorphous, liquid, glasses, and so on to see the short range order of materials. I am applying it for crystallized materials which are long range. Actually by definition, the crystal orders infinite range. If you are familiar about scattering techniques on material science, you should know Rietveld analysis method. Basically, Rietveld analysis cares Bragg scattering which is, by definition, the intensity is coming from infinitive layers in crystal. However, PDF doesn’t care about Bragg scattering, we are basically analyzing the background. We can get information about structure by doing Fourier transform of background. To do that, we need high momentum transfer, basically we can only do it with spallation neutron source, such as SNS (U.S.A), J-PARC (JAPAN), ISIS (U.K). One of my advantage is I can use both analysis method, so I can get complete data set to know the structures of material very well.

I am planning to do experiment with the same material with different instrument in Australia, November 2015. I am doing elastic (not exactly elastic though) neutron scattering now, to know the structure of the material. And, I will do inelastic neutron scattering in Australia to know how the structure behave. We prepared 3 compositions of the sample should be same structure according to structural analysis for long range ordered. I believe short range order of this system is different what people currently know.

My original schedule was 9/18 Friday morning – 9/21 Monday morning. When I got there on Wednesday night, one of my friends told me that there was a problem on the instrument. On Thursday morning, I went to instrument I heard they had a problem on shutter wasn’t working. They fixed the problem until Friday night. We started experiment Friday night and stayed overnight. I was very impressed because the problem was not easy to be fixed. The shutter is between Hg target and detectors under the large Fe shield. They opened the Fe shield and fixed the problem just in two days. So I can start my experiment just 12 hours delay. They spent 6-7 engineer and 3-4 scientists to fix the problem. So, I believe I spent a lot of resources from American, only I can do is do my best science. Let’s publish the paper!!

I need to finish one more paper on my project which I used PDF technique and I will add more from this experiment. Currently, the instrument is working well. I will am leaving the U.S. tomorrow afternoon.

As I wrote in last post, Maestro is a good book I will keep reading. This book definitely changed my life.

“Fermat’s Last theorem” by Simon Singh: Sometime people say Math is the queen of science and Physics is the king of science. I will be able to something about this topic bot not today. The reason why I started reading book is I wanted to review about Math because I believe Math is my origin of curiosity. I loved Math so much when I was young. Even I was in college, I was reading about Math. I remember when I was student I just found this book I thought “somebody solve Fermat theorem” then I started reading. This book teaches us how mathematical concepts, such as “i”, were invented and the time line of development math while solving Fermat’s last theorem. I personally remember that Taniyama-Shimra conjecture and their story because Taniyama committed suicide. And that story keeps me thinking “why?”

“How to manage slaves” by Jerry Toner: I happened to find this book on the web. The title is shocking though, this book is talking about slaves in Roman Empire. The author from Cambridge University describes the culture of Roman Empire based on research. The book consists of two parts, Marcus Sidonius Falx talks how to buy, get the best from, punish, torture, set them free, and so on, slaves. And then the author explains later based on research. I like the part when Falx discussed his German friend. The German friend told him they don’t have slaves. He says “Imagine that? A society without slaves! Who has ever heard of such a things?” And we need to remember if we defined slave “who are forced to work against their will”, the world now has more than 27 million slaves which is much larger than Roman Empire had.

“Thought of Marcus Aurelius Antonius”: Sometime I feel I really am lucky enough to live this age. We can read this classic book for free on kindle. While, I feel humanity has not advanced much from the age Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (A.D 121 -180). I first read this book when I was student, I was very impressed and I am reading when I need. I like how the book starts, he started this book from what he had learned people around him. If I write some my thought in the future, I am sure I will write something like that. He was one of stoics also emperor. His thoughts are very practical, you should try. You would find some quote best for you.

I just started reading “The revenge of geography” by Robert D Kaplan. The author apparently writes this book against famous book “The world is flat” by Thomas L. Friedman. The author’s claim is that Geography still sometime is crucial to know how power in the world shift. I agree. I might review this book later. And, I just started listening to “On writing” Steven King. I like this book because he teaches me how much I should be serious for writing. I needed to write but I like writing now because of this book. I am reading this book because I need to write a lot in few months. I am afraid of but also looking forward to it. I think I have few more books I want to review but I’ll stop here because of limitation of words, like Fermat!! Maybe tomorrow

I am at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A now, I am writing experiences here now.

I started writing again because I am feeling I can’t still express my ideas in English very well in daily life. This is very frustrating.

I would say I can finally settle down Australia, Sydney. I have been experiencing a lot of things. This country of course is different either from Japan or the U.S.A. And, I am also working for Taiwan. To be honest, it is not easy to express my thoughts to anyone even I am using my native language. It is too complex because I need to be careful for four countries and its people. If I had lived only in Japan, I would have never thought about this. And, if I had lived only in Japan and U.S.A, I would have never thought about either. I am an experiment physicist working for Taiwan, in Australia, with sometime American, and as Japanese. (By the way, I am coming to the U.S. for experiment from Sep.16-21)

I haven’t written my thoughts down just because I couldn’t be honest. I could not write my thoughts with correct words, right logic, and appropriate politeness. I am a physicist, I would like to express my idea simply but not by thinking simply. The truths with simplicity have to be extracted carefully by my thinking based on my honest observation and comfortable amount of my research. However, my honest thoughts sometime hurt someone, might make someone angry. And also, I would like to be fair for everyone. So, I just couldn’t have written my thought here.

As I said to my friends, my purpose of life is to build the best character as possible throughout what I do in my life. Family is one of most important things but I am a single now so I don’t need to take so much time for them, I mean, my future family. But, the other thing is work. Working as a physicist gives me chances to contribute to the society and world. By being a physicist, what I am doing is expanding accessible future possibilities of human beings to strengthen probabilities of survival of this species. And, that is my definition of “intelligence”. That’s why I am challenging myself every single day.

As a scientist, I never forget this quote.

“Science is made by men, a self-evident fact that is far too often forgotten”
Werner Heisenberg

I need to start this. We do science not because we need, are needed, want, nor are wanted. Challenging new knowledge is not easy but sometimes we have fun. But we do this because we believe the nature could be understood by us rationally. Physicists do theory and experiment because we believe we can understand the nature. And, we believe understanding the nature contributes to human civilization. Knowledge, talents, and skills are not so important to be a scientist but the scientist has to have right motivation with their own philosophy. We do make mistake sometimes but we don’t deceit because that is totally against our fundamental belief which is “We can understand the nature by using capabilities we are given.”

It doesn’t matter how technology advanced, if the motivation is not right, there is no meaning of advancing science. That’s why this is important. The science is made by men. The system of science is perfect (This is also true for the system human made such as democracy, capitalism, and even communism, so on) but human sometimes makes the system bad because we are not perfect mentally and physically. If you want to know whether or not he/she is good scientist, you can know by knowing what he/she speak, how he/she behaves, and why he/she does so.

I will go on my scientific philosophy from I learned from experimental physics. I personally am focusing on problem solving skill because that we can do but A.I. can’t do in near future. I will also write book review. My reading pace now is like 15-20 books a month. It might be good idea to start short review what I read. Thank you for reading this.

The reason: Pondering what the leader is.

I am writing this writing project more than 20 people, now actually am seeing the elements which these visionaries have in common. Visionaries are not the persons who had the vision only. I believe they are also leaders. So naturally, I ask myself what the leader is. I guess I got one answer from Simon Sinek’s study of leadership and his TED talk.

• Leaders take risks

The leader is the person who takes risks. By doing this, they are force to think while they are challenging. Because they are taking risk in the head of group, they test his word by himself. In the end, their words become trustworthy and their actions become reliable. When I was thinking this, the first person in my mind is Elon Musk. As I described in Day1, he cofounded Paypal and then he sold it for his next challenge which is SpaceX. He is great because he put his fortune made by himself into his vision. Many people in the world might have the idea like him. However, none of them spent all their money for their dream. People will follow him because he took all his risks he could.

• The leader gives environment.

So, by taking risk, what does the leader accomplish? The leader is the just one person, what he can accomplish is small but the leader could lead the people to achieve the larger goal. I believe the leader gives the environment to the people to chance to achieve their goal and his goal. As far as I concerned, I thought that my future boss in Australia should be a great leader. I was chosen from many of candidates for this job. Since this job is the specific position which requires the specific experiences, sometimes we could guess who the other candidates are. I don’t know the truth though, I believe I was the youngest candidate. And also, I believe the achievement I have done was not the strongest among the candidates.  But, I was chosen. I know many of the other committee members must have been skeptical to hire me. But, I was chosen. So, I am willing to contribute to this job greater than anyone else because he took the risk by hiring me and gave me a chance to work.

• Leadership is the choice

Leaders are not the persons who are chosen. Leaders are not the persons whose voice is loudest. Leaders are not the persons who have talent. Leaders are not the persons who are smart. Leaders are the persons who make choices. I am scientist. I know there is no way to predict our future. We could estimate our future risk by making and using model. But, there are always risks and benefits even if which way we choose. So someone have to make decision under uncertainty with the data all he could get and his intuition. Many people in society or community can avoid making decision, but whether or not we make decision for the society or community is our choice.

• What will I do?

I am writing the visionaries to think how I can be like them.  I realized that I don’t need to be afraid of having no talent or smartness but I have to be afraid of not having enthusiasm. I have to keep my enthusiasm, and then have to have willing to take risks. I will give the people, colleagues, friends, and family opportunities to try something, and I will make decision for future achievement when I am required to do so.

The reason: The prediction of future intelligence rising against us.

What is intelligence? I believe that many people should have been asking this question. I am sure that many approaches have been made. I want to share one of recent approach by Alex Wissner-Gross showed his approach by using physics.

As I describe here at Day 2 for Garry Kasparov. The world strongest chess was beaten by the artificial intelligence Deep Blue in 1997. However, the story was continuing. People realized that “Go” is more challenging game and also human are going lose against machine for past 10 years. The best techniques for playing Go now is maximizing the future choice during the game.

Oh, wait. This sounds familiar to physicist. Physicists Alex got hints recent advances in field ranging from cosmology to computer science. Entropy are always maximizing in closed space. So, is there any relation between intelligence and entropy maximization? His answer was “Yes”

Alex has showed that the simple equation for describing intelligence which might be equivalent E=mc2 in the relative theory. The equation tells us the intelligence is force F, the act that maximize the future freedom of actions with reservoir temperature (some strength) T with the diversity the possible accessible future S up to some future time horizon tau.

F = T *divergence(S) at tau

This equation is simple enough to understand for every person. But basically, simply I would say, “The intelligence is the action which maximizes the future possibilities”

So, by looking back our cognitive behavior, such as tool use, walking upright, social networking, we could clearly see that this single equation can explain the system is driven to increase the future freedom of actions.

If his theory is right, the natural consequence our human civilization has to face is rising up the machine intelligence. The machine will overtake us because the machines would produce more actions of freedom in the future. So that the machine does not become intelligence, the general intelligence will allow the machine to overtake us to have more options of actions for the future.

But, anyway, we could learn from many things. So, the intelligence should be the action which increases future actions of freedom. We could do, form today, what you need to do is trying to create new possibility or opportunities for future that should be intelligence as well. For me, personally, I will produce papers a lot, understand physics better, learn English, and acquiring new skills for creating knowledge to have more opportunities for the future innovations. I don’t want to be overtaken by machine though, until then I guess I will have good time anyways.

Alex said “The intelligence is a physical process that resists the future confinement” in short.

I also realized that how strong the approach of physics is. The physics is the first principal of reasoning by looking at the fundamental truth and reasoning to understand. So, physics is not mathematics because the physics is evidence based science. And physics is not the science like Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, and so on. It is not framework for solving specific problem, more like attitude toward unknown truth which sometimes is even counter-intuitive.

The reason: The success law 2.0

Richard St. John gave his talk at TED in 2006. At the talk we cut 2 hours presentation down to 3 minutes and 30 seconds in excellent way. He summarized 8 key factors which can lead people to the success. By listening to this most of listeners might have thought the rules are simple enough to try. However, he spent 7 years to interview 500 successful people to find out these rules. And he is trying to pass them on to Kids now.

Looking back American history, there is the person also did the same thing by interviewing and analyzing 500 people. He found out why they were successful people and published the book “Think and Grow rich” in 1937. Actually, there was the strong influence of Andrew Carnegie who selected 500 people for Napoleon Hill.  So interestingly, both Richard St. John and Napoleon Hill study 500 people to find out the rules for success. I call it success law 1.0.

However, the speed of success now should be much faster than 77 years ago. However, the basic rules sound same. That reminds me that knowing is not enough so we must do. There is huge difference at that time of 80 years ago. We could learn much faster, do faster, travel wider, communication now is much easier, and finally TED is free as long as you have access to internet. So only the difference between success people and not success people is whether or not they actually do.  But anyway, I will review here these 8 key factors to success.

1. Passion

The most important key is this. “Passion” Successful people do their job with incredible passion. They even might pay to do the job. They do the job for love not for money. Interestingly money comes anyway when people do something with great passion.

2. Work

The successful people work hard any other person around them. But they also have fun to do that. So, reasonable suggestions are we might do the job which has something fun for us or we have to find fun things on our work. And then, we could do hard work on the job.

3. Focus

The successful people do something with great interest and focus their power to accomplish few things.

4. Persist

The successful people make persistence effort. Be persistence even when we are failure, even when we have to face with criticisms, rejections, assholes, and pressures.

5. Ideas

The successful people have good ideas. To have creativity to come up with ideas, there are simple things we can try which are “Listen”, “Observe”, “Be curious”, “Ask questions”, “solve questions”, and “make connection”.

6. Good

If people want to success, we have to be insanely good at so something. There is no secret to be good at something, just practice, practice, and practice.

7. Push

To be successful, people work hard and push themselves. Push ourselves from self-doubt (I am not good enough, I am not smart enough) and shyness. Pushing is sometime very hard so that God invented the mothers to push us.

8. Serve

The successful people are thinking that they are privilege to serve as a profession to the people. To be millionaires, we can’t serve ourselves. We need to serve the others something of values.

So now, it’s time to apply to our life.

The reason: One of best researchers of the science of happiness

The science of happiness might sound like fraud because it sounds like the problem philosophies have to answer or the problem people can never answer. But, thanks to Big data, many of great people in 20^th century, philosophy, and science. People finally go into this subject by using scientific method. So, scientist will firstly ask who are feeling happiness. I will summarize here what was made clear.

The 10 percent of long term happiness can be predicted by external fact. The 90 percent of long term happiness comes from the way of our brain processing the world.

The only 25 percent job success is predicted by IQ, the rest of 75 percent is predicted by our optimism level, social support, and the ability to see the stress as a challenge instead of a threat.  

The writing “3 Gratitudes” for 21 days in row change your brain pattern from negative to positive. “Jounarling”, “Excerise”, “Maditation” and “Random Ascot of kindness” have positive correlation with happiness.

These are facts from experiments. That is easy to start. But we have to firstly be careful about this.

As psychology graduate students are taught to repeat ad nauseam: “Correlation is not causation.” Achor, Shawn (2010-09-14). The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work (Kindle Locations 574-575). Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

 The biggest problem of Big data should be this. This is another story. But be careful, if we saw some correlation between two things, when we see some correlation but if we didn’t find out the causation, the problem is there from the scientific points of view. For example, we don’t know why plane can fly. We could make models and do tests, and get parameters. So we can know correlation the shape of plane and its ability to fly. But, we don’t know why. So, we can’t make plane from scratch.

The most enjoyable part of an activity is the anticipation. If you can’t take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out with friends, put something on the calendar— even if it’s a month or a year down the road. Then whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about it. Anticipating future rewards can actually light up the pleasure centers in your brain much as the actual reward will. Achor, Shawn (2010-09-14). The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work (Kindle Locations 742-746). Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

We are not enjoying the vacation itself. We are not enjoying status we have now. People feel happy nevertheless they are poor, in hard condition, or even being failure when the future is promising. So we have to find way to have promising future. And also the leader should give people good perspective for future instead of pointing out the problem we have now. The leaders have to lead people by running ahead of people with taking risk and challenging for the future by him, have to come up with the solution of problem.

Knowledge is only part of the battle. Without action, knowledge is often meaningless. As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently. Yet the action required to follow through on what we know is often the hardest part. That’s why even though doctors know better than anyone the importance of exercise and diet, 44 percent of them are overweight. Achor, Shawn (2010-09-14). The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work (Kindle Locations 2187-2190). Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The later part is like joke though, I totally agree with this. But I also know this is hard part. So that the question is how can I keep using knowledge instead of just consuming? That is my question, only thing I could come up with is taking actions. Take action to think. Basically, thanks to many 20^th century giants we have accumulated knowledge, in 21th century, humanity have to apply to make them work.

My empirical study of well-being among 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found a similar result— social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor, more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender, or race. In fact, the correlation between social support and happiness was 0.7. This may not sound like a big number, but for researchers it’s huge— most psychology findings are considered significant when they hit 0.3. The point is, the more social support you have, the happier you are. Achor, Shawn (2010-09-14). The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work (Kindle Locations 2648-2652). Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Social support is the greatest predictor of happiness. To invest to really important people who you care and you are cared.

The reason: As the leader of the third party of e-commerce market

I have rarely seen the books written by Japanese in the book store in the U.S. I was proud when I found this book on the shelf in the book store because I would like American to know there are quite a few great business people in Japan. They don’t talk or write themselves too much, especially in English. However, as for service business, they have best knowledge and ideas in the world, I believe. Now, I would like to bring up Hiroshi Mikitani who is CEO of Rakuten.

Rakuten is the third largest e-commerce market place company in the world. You know, the largest e-commerce market place is Alibaba and the second place is Amazon.  I don’t know much about Alibaba, so let me talk about the difference between Amazon and Rakuten. Amazon concentrates on direct selling to costumer but Rakuten seeks for co-prosperity of merchant and costumer. So Amazon is interested in sales but Rakuten is interested in distribution.

Alibaba is totally huge, the distribution of Alibaba is $250 Billon dollar, Amazon is $75 billion, Rakuten is just 17 billion.  Amazon is showing their own so that, but as you know Alibaba is exceptional. However, by looking at sales, we have different view. Alibaba’s sales first half of 2014 was 5.6 billion while that of Rakuten was 52 billion there is no such difference. This is because Alibaba is the company in developing country. Alibaba’s fee is small but gaining merchants a lot. So Alibaba is expanding a lot, so that Rakuten have to find the different way to survive. I guess I still it is important for them to seek for co-prosperity merchant and costumer to vitalize the economy the area they are serving.

This is famous story in Japan. He decided to ‘Englishnize (from the book)’ his company. He designated English as the official languages in his company. Almost all Japanese top company said he was ridiculous but he had done. I was very skeptical about this. However after Englishization, the diversity of human resource in Rakuten has vitalized, which is good for future of this company.

I was skeptical about this Englishnized the company because I thought this lead to the company lack of originality. Why the people spend so much time to learn English? But after their English skills are up, the people started recognize both as company and employer. Rakuten is now expanding in the U.S. But I would like to be still skeptical to the company. I want them to expand all direction in the world. I do not want them to forget it.

And his company quit Keidanren which is the strongest economic lobby in Japan. The member of Keidanren consists of top Japanese companies, like Toyota, Canon. They themselves think they need to change themselves, but only his company quit it to claim.

He also describes his policy about management. He has strong faith in ‘Kaizen’, but not as a manufacture, as a service business. He also emphases the importance of the speed of changes. I strong agree with him. While one of the best virtue of Japanese is perfectionism, but he asks his employee “Don’t think, then act, think to act”. He is business person so that he is actually not my role model but I respect him on my own way.