Symmetry Magazine

15 Responses to Symmetry Magazine

1. sol says:

   October 28, 2004 at 2:52 pm

   A layman pondering apple pie

   The Nature of Quantum Mechanics by Gread’t Hooft

   But below we have some guiding principals to live by?

   Question:In conventional QM and QFT unitarity is the consequence of the time translation symmetry of the dynamics. In GR there isn’t, in general, an analogous notion of time translation symmetry

   A lot of people (in fact, most people) argue that this is not a problem. They are wrong. It is very closely related to locality. How can you have locality in a theory where there is no a priori notion of distance? This is really a serious difficulty, and it had made some deep thinkers (read: ‘t Hooft) so desperate that they are even willing to abandon quantum mechanics. In the beginning of the talk at(above links in my postings) , ‘t Hooft explains that he simply believes in locality, and that this is why he explores these weird ideas about hidden variables. It is interesting that the inventor of holography has such a strong belief in locality.

   It all sounds spooky to me. How do you identify the smell of apple pie? It tastes like…..?:) From one island to the next????
2. sol says:

   October 28, 2004 at 2:26 pm

   Mathematics is always a continuum, linked to its history, the past – nothing comes out of zero Atiyah

   How soon I forget sometimes:)

   I have a story about two monkey’s on a island that I thought funny, but hey, we can work with “shit for brains”, like mom’s apple pie wafting through the neighborhood.:)
3. RT says:

   October 28, 2004 at 12:49 pm

   It’s the trivial things in life that make the difference. The re-sizable/scrolling window is indeed a boon. Its former immutable form was almost as distressing as the recent (let’s not mince words) ‘shit for brains’ interlude. Thanks
4. D R Lunsford says:

   October 28, 2004 at 12:32 pm

   Thanks! That worked beautifully.

   -drl
5. Peter says:

   October 28, 2004 at 12:17 pm

   Hi Danny,

   I made the change suggested on the link you posted, resizable comment windows seem to work now.

   About Atiyah’s work:

   He’s actually one of the clearest writers of any mathematician, so one piece of advice is to just get ahold of the five volume set of his collected works, and try reading, starting with the expository pieces he has written, of which there are quite a few. Unfortunately I don’t know of many more readable expositions of Atiyah’s work than his own. For certain specific things that have made their way into physics (such as the basic index theorem for the Dirac operator), there is some physics literature.
6. D R Lunsford says:

   October 28, 2004 at 11:11 am

   Peter,

   What would a set of books for “Atiyah 101” look like? I want to understand this business with the index theorem, at least as far as is necessary for physics.

   -drl
7. D R Lunsford says:

   October 27, 2004 at 9:46 pm

   OT – Peter – try this:

   http://www.ericsiegmund.com/fireant/archivesmt/000342.html
8. Anonymous says:

   October 27, 2004 at 9:40 pm

   This nothing point(?) sure comes up a lot.:)

   If you asssumed a false vacuum, and that a true vacuum could emerge, there really wasn’t nothing at all?

   In fact, our universe could once have been so symmetrical that it amounted to nothing at all. “Nothing” is as perfect a symmetry as you can imagine, since there’s nothing you can do to it that makes a difference. This nothing would have been unstable, however—like a pencil balanced perfectly (which is to say, symmetrically) on its tip. And that means—as Frank Wilczek has put it—the answer to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” would simply be that “nothing” is unstable.
9. Peter says:

   October 27, 2004 at 9:04 pm

   Hi Danny,
   If someone can point me to a source of information that explains how to do this, I’ll look into. In general I don’t want to invest much time in messing with Movable Type. As far as I can tell the thing to do is to migrate this at some point to Word Press, a project that will have to wait for some mythical point at which I have some free time.
10. D R Lunsford says:

    October 27, 2004 at 8:49 pm

    OT – Peter, is there anything you can do to MT so that IE popup windows are not fixed in size and menuless? It works fine on Linux but not on Windows (go figure).

    (In case I was not clear, the posting window cannot be maximized or resized at all, in fact.)

    -drl
11. D R Lunsford says:

    October 27, 2004 at 8:47 pm

    Well I for one endorse the defense of Bumo-er-Lubos, and hope that he will not in future refer to excrements in any place or context.

    But we should stick to physics, yes.

    -drl
12. CW says:

    October 27, 2004 at 7:24 pm

    ..and he has been known to express his interest in loop quantum gravity by suggesting that its practitioners be deprived of research funding. (See some of postings on sci.physics.research.)
13. Fabio says:

    October 27, 2004 at 7:00 pm

    You’ve got it backwards. It was Lubos who introduced “excrement for brains” into the discourse here. He’s shown himself to be quite thin skinned and quick to go personal when someone starts to get the better of him.
14. Anonymous says:

    October 27, 2004 at 6:07 pm

    C’mon. Whoever is writing these mock Lubos Motl entries needs to stop. This blog is about physics, not mockery and insults.

    Some of you might not realize that the reason why Lubos spends any time on this website is that he is, at least in part, sympathetic to some of its views. Quite reasonably, therefore, he is compelled to defend string theory and his research. His point of view is defendable.

    It would be a shame if Lubos and other string theorists stopped using this website on account of unprofessional attacks. Let’s keep our eye on what the real issues are and debate them.
15. ltom sobul says:

    October 27, 2004 at 5:33 pm

    This is obviously an implicit endorsement of string theory by the two top US accelerator labs, since string theory has more symmetries than any other theory.

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