The interactions.org web-site has a new useful feature, Interactions Blog Watch, which aggregates links to recent physics-related blog entries. One of the older such aggregators I know of is Mixed States, but it seems to have stopped on March 15. There’s also Jacques Distler’s Planet Musings, where he continues his efforts to pretend “Not Even Wrong” doesn’t exist.
Vanity Fair seems to think that the right person to review a book about Isaac Newton is Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens devotes much of the piece to condemning Newton as “a crank and a recluse and a religious bigot” who “spent much of his time dwelling in a self-generated fog of superstition and crankery.” He feels the same way about most scientists before the modern era, noting that:
It may not be until we get to Albert Einstein that we find a true scientist who is also a sane and lucid person with a genial humanism as part of his world outlook—and even Einstein was soft on Stalin and the Soviet Union.
He ends the piece by accusing Newton of doing everything he could to keep people from understanding the universe, and claiming that this was typical of physicists until recently, when physics began to become indistinguishable from the humanities:
Newton was a friend of all mysticism and a lover of the occult who desired at all costs to keep the secrets of the temple and to prevent the universe from becoming a known quantity. For all that, he did generate a great deal more light than he had intended, and the day is not far off when we will be able to contemplate physics as another department—perhaps the most dynamic department—of the humanities. I would never have believed this when I first despairingly tried to lap the water of Cambridge, but that was before Carl Sagan and Lawrence Krauss and Steven Weinberg and Stephen Hawking fused language and science (and humor) and clambered up to stand, as Newton himself once phrased it, “on the shoulders of giants.”
Hitchens doesn’t mention Michio Kaku, who has a new book out The Physics of the Impossible, which is on the New York Times bestseller list with the blurb:
A theoretical physicist who is one of the founders of string theory discusses the possibility of phenomena like force fields, teleportation and time travel.
The notion that Kaku is a “founder of string theory” seems to be becoming very widespread in the media.
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll and various of his anonymous commenters are upset that Lee Smolin made it onto a list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals, with some suggesting that Kaku deserves to be there instead.
Finally, the latest Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society has the second part of an interview with Alain Connes, who has many interesting things to say:
they [theoretical physicists] work in huge groups and the amount of time they spend on a given topic is quite short. At a given time t, most of them are going to be working on the same problem, and the preprints which will appear on the web are going to have more or less the same introduction. There is a given theme, and a large number of articles are variations on that theme, but it does not last long…
The sociology of science was deeply traumatized by the disappearance of the Soviet Union and of the scientific counterweight that it created with respect to the overwhelming power of the US. What I have observed during the last two decades since the fall of the USSR and the emigration of their scientific elite to the States is that there is no longer a counterweight. At this point, if you take young physicists in the US, they know that, at some point, they will need a recommendation written by one of the big shots in the country, and this means that if one of them wants to work outside string theory he (or she) won’t find a job. In this way there is just one dominant theory and it attracts all the best students.
I heard some string theorists say: “if some other theory works we will call it string theory”, which shows they have won the sociological war. The ridiculous recent episode of the “exceptionally simple theory of everything” has shown that there is no credibility in the opponents of string theory in the US. Earlier with the Soviet Union, there was resistance. If Europe were stronger, it could resist. Unfortunately there is a latent herd instinct of Europeans, particularly in theoretical physics. Many European universities, at least in France or England, instead of developing original domains as opposed to those dominant in the United States, simply want to follow and call the big shots in the US to decide whom to hire…
I don’t think that we see similar things in mathematics, so there is a fundamental sociological difference between mathematics and physics. Mathematicians seem very resistant to losing their identity and following fashion…
In physics I adore reading; I spent about fifteen years studying the book of Schwinger, Selected Papers on Quantum Electrodynamics. He collected all the crucial articles, by Dirac, Feynman, Schwinger himself, Bethe, Lamb, Fermi, all the fundamental papers on quantum field theory, those of Heisenberg too, of course. This has been my bedside book for years and years. Because I have always been fascinated by the subject and I wanted to understand it. And that took a very long time to understand.
Vanity Fair seems to think that the right person to review a book about Isaac Newton is Christopher Hitchens.
Exactly who at Vanity Fair do you think is the right person, Peter? The people profiling Miley Cyrus?
In any case, I read Hitchens’ article, and I think the passages you quote are somewhat unfairly taken out of context.
Bee, you said, in response to my comment: “But since you bring it up, you are trying to excuse behaviour by saying others do the same. ”
No, I’m not, I only pointed out that other people do the same as Sean Carroll. I didn’t make any comment one way or the other about the acceptability of this style of comment moderation.
You also wrote:
“I’m not the insult-police of the blogosphere and I actually don’t read Peter’s blog very closely (or any other blog for that matter, not even my own)””
To which I have to say: couldn’t Sean Carroll say _exactly_ the same thing in his own defense? So why criticize him?
Anonymous, I do read the comments at my blog, in case that’s what you mean, and either I or my husband deletes the inappropriate ones (though there aren’t many, I guess people get the message). I occasionally admittedly don’t very closely read Stefan’s posts (since he usually only writes when I am really busy anyhow), but hey, I’m married to that guy so I trust him to not publish anything outright offensive while I’m not looking. My remark was a reply to yours “you are annoyed that Sean Carroll lets anonymous commenters insult people … well, so does Peter Woit, as you’ll notice by reading the comments about”, which I interpreted as: “you either are annoyed by both, or by none”, to which my reply is, what I don’t read doesn’t annoy me, and I still don’t know why it is relevant whether I might not have noticed what happend in Peter’s comment section in the year 10 BC or whatever. Besides this, it isn’t hard to figure out that it annoys me far more if insults go against people I know, and who I know don’t deserve being insulted. Either way, this exchange is basically content free. I’ve said what I had to say. Best,
B.
«In any case, I read Hitchens’ article, and I think the passages you quote are somewhat unfairly taken out of context.»
Maybe you can explain us how writting
« the day is not far off when we will be able to contemplate physics as another department—perhaps the most dynamic department—of the humanities.»
can be placed in a context where it doesn’t sound like an insulting piece of pseudo-intelectual trash.
« the day is not far off when we will be able to contemplate physics as another department—perhaps the most dynamic department—of the humanities.»
Obviously, Hitchens thinks that the future of physics is entirely string theory.
CV, if you deigned to pull your head out of the sand, you would realize that Hitchens has the utmost respect for science, and is expressing the hope that it will come to be more widely appreciated by people in the humanities.
There’s nothing wrong with that sentence (which, by the way, begins with “For all that, he did generate a great deal more light than he had intended”, praising Newton’s achievement). Do you mean to tell me that it’s “insulting” to contemplate the prospect of a rapprochement between the so-called humanities and the sciences? I think it’s badly needed.
Your interpretation is completely off the mark.
By writing “For all that, he did generate a great deal more light than he had intended” he is for all effects stating that Newton did his work by chance and that his main objective was keeping people ignorant.
As for : Do you mean to tell me that it’s “insulting” to contemplate the prospect of a rapprochement between the so-called humanities and the sciences?
In the way Hitchens is implying yes I do. It’s extremely insulting.
Rapprochement like that if it occurs should come from the humanities resembling proper sciences and not by making physics into a pseudo-intellectual endeavour where the only metric is the capacity to impress other people by gluing words with no final meaning.
Hitchens showed with this piece that he has no idea what science is about and thus can’t have any respect for it.
Cormac O’ Raifeartaigh wrote:
>
> Re annonymity, I think Bee is absolutely right.
>
> Just today I had the rather unpleasant experience
> of discovering an enitre thread on a politics blog
That site http://www.politics.ie/ is a forum rather than a blog, the difference being that discussions in a blog can be started only by its “owners” (possibly, in fact usually, one individual) whereas any registered user can start a forum thread as well as replying.
Forums can be bear gardens, even where moderators are vigilant (don’t get me started on spam-ridden unmoderated usenet groups!). So one must get used to that.
I was shocked that a self-proclaimed *physicist* of all people in that discussion you referred to agreed with the unfathomable decision of the Irish Government not to join CERN for such a modest fee.
Doesn’t this muppet realise how diverse and speculative today’s leading-edge physics theories are, and the importance of the LHC in whittling down the contenders and perhaps providing vital clues and new insights (which will quite likely refine low-energy physics too in due course).
Also, you only have to look at the Atlas detector to realize what a massive boost the whole thing must be to high-tech manufacturing industries, which God knows the West needs when practically everything is made in third-world countries these days.
Speaking of that “ridiculous recent episode of the ‘exceptionally simple theory of everything'” (Connes’ words), the May issue of Outside Magazine has a rather long profile of Garrett Lisi. Needless to say, one won’t learn much about his research from the article, although Glashow and Wilczek are quoted.