'Waddya mean ya noo already!' I have confessed on these pages before the sad fact that after five years in senior school I failed my maths, physics and chemistry exams. I never saw my actual marks but my guess is that they were atrocious! I would like to blame my teachers but the fact is that it was my inability to concentrate for more than 5 nano-seconds at a time. Even so, it is curious that long after I had left school, I suddenly became utterly fixated on quantum physics. I read - or, to be honest, tried to read - as many books as I could get on the weird and wonderful world that (sort of) exists at the sub-atomic level and even volunteered to attend lectures on the subject.
Of course, eventually I let the subject drop because it began to seem like reading Shakespeare in Chinese! In the end, we all have to admit our limitations. However, this afternoon the ashes of my previous fascination were rekindled by a superb essay at The Times Literary Supplement by Samuel Graydon - and 'no', me neither! Whoever he is, I can tell you that he is a superb writer on what is, not very arguably, the most hideously difficult subject in the world! Suddenly, all those names I sort of 'hero-worshipped' back in the day as I struggled to make sense of their phenomanally complex theories, came back to me. What can I say except, 'Sorry, chaps, but I did try'. Sometimes, just for a split micro-second I would understand and be truly amazed but then - bingo! - it would go, sometimes at the speed of light.
Even so, I urge y'all to give Mr. Graydon's essay a read and just see if 'it presses your buttons', too!
Thanks for the link, David. If it turns out the universe can be described as a relationship between "nads", which is slang we Yanks use for "gonads", possibly Freud was right and everything has to do with sex.
Posted by: Bob | Friday, 03 January 2020 at 20:53
I doubt, Bob, that Freud was right about anything very much!
Posted by: David Duff | Friday, 03 January 2020 at 21:47
Smolin is on to something. It cannot be merely coincidence the universe resembles a never-ending clusterf**k.
Posted by: Bob | Saturday, 04 January 2020 at 00:14
Gaffer, you are the irrepressible time waster of my life - THANK YOU!!!
That gets SoD's "Link of the Millennium" award thus far, only 80 years to go to on the podium!
So much to say it would be more than all the words I've ever written in D&N comments boxes (Oh noooooo! ... Ed).
My quick takes ...
Jim Holt's "When Einstein Walked with Godel" by the title alone sounds like a no brainer for me. Need to research it a bit but if it throws the bridge between the conceptual discoveries of Godel and the perceptual discoveries of Einstein in some proposed coherent way, or even incoherent will do, it will be a gem. Subject to research it'll be on its way from Amazon to thee and I in due course.
"Gribben's 6" is the most beautifully concise distillation of "Bob's clusterfk", aka the world as we now "know" it, I have ever seen! What a corker!
Interesting that "relationality" is growing as as "glue view" of the world to somehow bind the materialists / mechanists with the conceptualists. Seems a bit old hat, I was taught relationality back in Bristol days it was about the only thing I paid attention to because it was easy! Mind you, still managed to make a career out of it in "the land of the blind where the one IT'd man is king"! Would be remarkable if that old roll your sleeves up view of the world turned out to be the one ring to bind them all. I'm sure Holt's book might have something to say about that.
And the author slotted in Stoppard into the bargain! Wow, gold on the podium is yours - for now!
SoD
Posted by: Loz | Saturday, 04 January 2020 at 10:49
"the land of the blind where the one IT'd man is king"!
SoD, I hereby forgive all y our frequent bad language! That line is a corker!
Posted by: David Duff | Saturday, 04 January 2020 at 12:41
Goodness, Duffers, I had just published a post of my own not half an hour ago about the weirdness of QM, and then realized I hadn't dropped by your place in a couple of days.... and: lo and behold! (I actually had written the thing yesterday, just as you seem to have been writing yours. I think that the boffins would call that "phase entanglement" or something.)
That looks like an excellent essay, and I will give it a careful read. Thank you!
Posted by: Malcolm Pollack | Sunday, 05 January 2020 at 01:46