CapitalistImperialistPig

Lubos Motl has a very interesting post on a new ArXiv paper (0807.4556) by Jan de Boer, Sheer El-Showk, Ilies Messamah, Dieter Van den Bleeken. Because I don’t understand the technical details, let me just quote Lumo on what seem to me the most interesting parts: What is the general lesson? The general lesson is that in quantum gravity, the number of degrees of freedom is often much lower than what you would need to realize all of your fantasies based on classical physics. The entropy bounds and the holographic principle were the old moral examples why it is so. The new Benelux paper gives you a new and, in some optics, more concrete picture why not all of your classical fantasies are allowed. Why is it so? Simply because you often don't have enough quantum phase space (not even one Planck volume, up to powers of (2 pi), necessary for one quantum microstate) to realize them. A priori, this comment could sound crazy to you. If you have large objects, the corresponding phase spaces...

A slightly famous mathematician once said to me: “I think Hawking is the most overrated physicist.” This took me aback, and I spent quite a while explaining to him that Hawking had important results in addition to his appearances on Star Trek and The Simpsons. Most important was his discovery of black hole radiance, and the revolution in black hole statistical mechanics it energized, which in turn is the most important result of quantum gravity. I suppose it would be more precise to say that black hole radiance and black hole thermodynamics is the nearest thing to a result in quantum gravity, since there are no experimentally confirmed predictions in quantum gravity. Nonetheless, all roads in quantum gravity appear to lead to black hole thermodynamics, and it would be hard to find a yet unobserved phenomenon in which physicists believe more firmly. Steven Carlip gives an overview of those many paths leading there in his new paper Black Hole Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics (...

Jodi Kantor, writing in The New York Times has a long article on Obama's years as a law professor at the University of Chicago. It's hardly a hostile piece - Obama is portrayed as a superb teacher who was eagerly recruited for a tenured position, but turned it down. Obama was a listener who led a socratic dialog, forcing students to think things through rather than mere absorb received wisdom. Obama was a rare but hardly confrontational liberal in one of the most conservative law schools in the country. Nonetheless, there is a thinly sourced undercurrent in the story promoting the idea that Obama was already plotting a course for high office and planning his career accordingly. If true, it's hardly damning - this is supposed to be a country where anyone can grow up dreaming to be president, but I'm skeptical anyway. John K. Wilson, one of Obama's former students takes strong exception to that element of the story in this Huffpost article . A bit of his commentary: ...

It's a profoundly uncomfortable fact for thoughtful American Jews that the Iraq war was promoted and (mis)managed by mostly Jewish neoc a on Israel lobbyists (Kristol, Feith, Wolfowitiz, Perle) in alliance with oil interests (Cheney, Rice, Bush) and war profiteering crony capitalists. The same group now bangs the drum for war with Iran. Joe Klein is brave and crazy enough to speak this uncomfortable truth http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/07/when_extremists_attack.html : I have now been called antisemitic and intellectually unstable and a whole bunch of other silly things by the folks over at the Commentary blog. They want Time Magazine to fire or silence me. This is happening because I said something that is palpably true, but unspoken in polite society: There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to...

John Pomfret asks (rhetorically) whether China is the next superpower. He knows China well, certainly far better than I, and concludes that the answer is no. But is China really going to be another superpower? I doubt it. It's not that I'm a China-basher, like those who predict its collapse because they despise its system and assume that it will go the way of the Soviet Union. I first went to China in 1980 as a student, and I've followed its remarkable transformation over the past 28 years. I met my wife there and call it a second home. I'm hardly expecting China to implode. But its dream of dominating the century isn't going to become a reality anytime soon. Too many constraints are built into the country's social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons -- dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn't travel well -- China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the internatio...

This is a seriously bad silly movie, despite fine actors (Meryl Streep, Julie Walters), famous actors (Pierce Brosnan), fantastic Greek island scenery, and one of the world's great assemblages of 80's Europop. There are some fine singers on hand too, but unfortunately there isn't any story for the actors to act in and way too many of the songs were sung by actors whose talents weren't up to the job. Super Trooper and SOS ought to be show stoppers, but tended to hurt my ears until the backup singers drowned out the leads. Meryl Streep is not a terrible singer, but she doesn't have the voice for "The Winner takes it All." If you see Pierce Brosnan opening his mouth to sing, drop into a fetal position, cover your ears, and moan loudly enough to drown out the pain. Of course I liked it anyway, because I am a seriously damaged ABBA fan.

Lumo is doing a little more selective reading of Feynman, in particular, of Feynman's Cargo Cult Science lecture. As usual, he is pretty good at finding the parts that agree with his point of view but displays his patented obliviousness about those that don't fit: Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can -- if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong -- to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. My emphasis. Gee, what popular scie...