the guy by the door …

Grays Hall, Old Yard

Pop quiz: “CLOSE THE TOWN STOP”

Night becomes you.

My apologies for the lack of honorifics, but I wanted to pay homage to that truly great TV sitcom, “Welcome Back, Cotter.” So long as you’re here, I have a question prompted by recent discussions with Lee Smolin. He classified string theory as a “background dependent” theory. I think I know what that is, and I think he’s prolly right about that. But he also said that string theory is ‘like general relativity in more dimensions’. That seems not quite right to me. For one thing it seems like a good thing to let the number of dimensions flap in the breeze. [Although, why we’re stuck on the integers is a bit cryptic what with fractals and all.] Anomaly cancellation seems like rather heavy machinery for fixing the dimension, but it does seem a lot better than a guess*. Writing the metric of the embedding space in the action does assume diffeomorphism invariance? But I don’t see y’all assuming the Equivalence Principle. If the Equivalence Principle becomes a theorem, then I’d have to say you’d really done something beyond GR. So what’s the story?

Maybe it’s a good thing you were on a plane when I put this up. It’s been too long since then young Dr. Sean [Now Professor Sean and inheritor of Feyman’s desk] taught me how to calculate spin connections. Google(assumptions of GR) -> inconclusive {so far}, but I’m thinking EP is assumed in ST. Not that that’s a bad thing. The big problem** with GR is that you can’t quantize it. If you take the assumptions of GR except allow dimension to float then fix it due to quantum mechanics, it IS conservative relative to other approaches, but often in science, that’s a good thing.*** It’s hard to make these judgements when the experimental air is thin. I feel dizzy.
*You could callthe choice of 3+1 dimensions the result of observation, but there are psychological experiments that cause me to question whether it is obvious.

**The assumption that the fundamental object of the theory has finite extension seems less important with the re-emegence of point particles in the form of D0 branes.
***I won’t bring Martha Stewart into this having already slightly abused Josh Lapan with my fractional wit.
——

Ed Witten, who some people regard as the smartest person in the world*, is one of the leading physicsts working in string theory. I ran into him yesterday in the basment of the Science Center. There is evidence that suggests that in one regard at least he is mortal. On the other hand, today when I gave him the score of The Game, I had to explain it.

Middle-aged Professor Sean, has wriiten the definitive review of “The Trouble with Physics.” I’m not the first to feel that the overall concerns of the book are wothy of attention, but the supporting examples are not the best. Loop Quantum Gravity is probably an especially poor choice. Also, Sean Pf. Diddy Cosmos** points out [though I suspect it was on the grapevine] that just because String Theory is “background dependent now” doesn’t mean it always will be. His recommendation? Worh a read with a critical eye.

*This assumes that “smarter than” is a transitive relation.

**Okay. It needs work.

Contrarians have always been important to science. Sometimes, like Continenetal Drift Guy, their ideas languish for years. But now we measure the movement of tectonic plates with laser ranging from the moon. Einstein was able to leap tall paradigms with a single bound. Then he tripped on quantum hurdle. But sometimes the contrarians just don’t pan out. Pons and Fleishman thought they had discovered cold fusion. It would have been wonderful. We could have avoided what Cockburn and Ridgeway called, “The Last Play”. Gene Malove got the job of a lifetime as CTO of KMS Fusion and nothing has been heard of it since. Looks like The Establishment was right.
…

Lee Smolin is visiting Richard Freeman’s

Economics 2888hf : Economics of Science and Engineering Workshop

to discuss his book, with the declarative title, “The Trouble with Physics”.

3:30 PM

53 Church St.

Lower Level Classroom.

A first for Harvard: My earlier post had the address wrong!*

Security will admit Havard ID holders on their own recognisance. Non Havard people need to come early so Jack Trumpbour can let you in.

*Havard makes mistakes all the time. The admitting it part seems to be hard

Wikipedia stand-off in search for online truth*

The British business newspaper Financial Times reports on the competition between “Jimbo” Wales , who cofounded and still leads Wikipedia, and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia cofounder, who is soon to launch Citizendium. The collectivist/anarchist discussion gets more overt near the end. The online and print editions are largely the same. There is one difference in ‘nuance’:

Print ediition:

Wales has also made changes to his own entry in the encyclopedia. Sanger also admits to having edited his own entry in Wikipedia “in the early days, along with a lot of other people”, though he adds he stopped when, “at a certain point, it became clear that it was against the policy of Wikipedia”.

Online:

Wales has also made changes to his own entry in the encyclopedia, even after a rule was adopted against this practice in 2002.

Sanger also admits …

Citizendium will not be the first such effort. Berkoblogger j points out that Scholarpedia is already online. It has yet another sociological/epistemological model, but it appears closer to Citizendium than Wikipedia. To justify their model, Scholarpedia links to pages by experts Benoit Mandelbrot, Lotfi Zadeh, Edward Lorenz, John Conway, Richard Karp. Unfortunately those pages are all ’stubs’**. However, there are quite a few pages that are complete. ‘Controlling Chaos‘ is fully developed, while the more general ‘Chaos’ page is a green link - it points to a “ballot” to elect a “curator” for the page.

*There were mulitple links to the article when I looked and the one above was free.
**in Wikiworld a ’stub’ is a placeholder for a future page - a Wiki I.O.U.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

Today the Harvard Undergraduate Research Symposium had a “poster session” in the Science Center. I blurred through on my break. I apologize to the folks. I was the drive-by interrogator. Perhaps, I will blog lights. I don’t want to call them highlights. I will call them “posters I had a clue about”. I didn’t know cell biologists could spell isotropy let alone use it. Perhaps I was a bit too flippant. My remark is not about the young folks. It’s ’bout me - being so old; having accomplished so little. I don’t envy them. Well not much. I celebrate them. Bunji Sakita was a rather modest man. When he said, “You did rather well,” it meant something. Folks, you did rather well.

Sadly, I couldn’t stay and talk to more of the folks. There may be other people who couldn’t make it or didn’t know about it. Can we scan the posters and put them online? As long as you have an e-mail account with the Harvard Computer Society, why not talk to them about blogs/wikis?

Havard undergraduates presenting their research in the Science Center. In the lower left is one of the early almost electronic* computers built by Havard’s Howard Aiken.

*It was electromechanical rather than electronic, but it was a ’stored program’ machine unlike previous calculating machines.

Can i get back to you on that?

Thanks Viriato! You helped me collect my thoughts!

We met at the Harvest Coop Cafe. We talked about cycles of history.

It’s OK for non-historians to talk about cycles of history. Historians, on the other hand, seem not to understand the complexity of what they are looking at. It is as if Avogadro’s number doesn’t even exist. At least, think in 3 (2+1) dimensions and talk about a helix.* But I’ll grant the historians that physicists have their sins too. The idea that time can be made to look like a spatial dimensional and reduced to visual metaphor certainly does some damage. Fortunately, Professor Lisa is trying to do something about that.

Anyway, one distressing repetition of the past that surely will continue into the future is the debate about what “The American People” actually voted for [or against]. Did they vote against the Iraq war? Or are they, as Scott Ritter claims, “opposed to losing in Iraq”? If the Rumsfeld ‘plan’ had worked, would they vote differently. Here’s the thing. What “would have been” is very hard to measure.

* If you run around in a circle and end up in the same place only later, your world line is a helix.

… you can’t eat it, but it does.

She is promoting Harvard’s production of “A Chorus Line.” - the final four performances.

I don’t know if I will go. I’m committed to the Cheap Art Manifesto, originated by the Bread and Puppet Theater. I first saw them in the basement of the Washington Square Methodist Church [NYC] during Our War. It was not lighthearted entertainment. It was deadly serious.
*I am referring to an undergraduate woman as a ‘girl’. I claim artistic license in this instance.