{"id":4453,"date":"2012-02-27T23:07:50","date_gmt":"2012-02-28T04:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4453"},"modified":"2012-02-29T09:56:17","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T14:56:17","slug":"various-and-sundry-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4453","title":{"rendered":"Various and Sundry"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Lots of people seem to be unhappy with my characterization of Lawrence Krauss&#8217;s question &#8220;why is there something rather than nothing?&#8221; as meaningless.  I&#8217;m well aware that one can give this question a non-trivial meaning, I just don&#8217;t think Krauss does, nor do the many commenters here on the topic whose comments I&#8217;ve deleted. Happily for those of you who want to discuss this topic, the Templeton Foundation has funded a whole new institution, the <a href=\"http:\/\/philocosmology.rutgers.edu\/\">Rutgers Templeton Project in Philosophy of Cosmology<\/a>, and they now have a blog, called <a href=\"http:\/\/philocosmology.rutgers.edu\/our-blog\">What There Is and Why There Is Anything<\/a>.  They give a long list of questions they want to address which are pretty much orthogonal to ones I find interesting, ending with<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>13)  Why is there something rather than nothing?<\/p>\n<p>I imagine that all of these will be discussed during the course of our project.  However,  I suggest holding off definitively answering question 13 until our grant has expired.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So, go right ahead and help them out, but hold off on your definitive answer to this question for at least 3 years (if not more, they might want a grant renewal).<\/li>\n<li>Another new website is the all-new, shiny, WordPress-based website for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\">Columbia Math department<\/a>.  We needed a new site since the university software running the old one (&#8220;Hypercontent&#8221;) was about to die.  The new university plan, involving Drupal, didn&#8217;t seem ideal to me, so I convinced our staff that WordPress was the way to go.  Web designer Matthew Kressel did a great job setting up the site for us, and our staff member Nathan Schweer has turned it into a huge improvement over the old one.<\/li>\n<li>In other Columbia news, tomorrow there will be a panel discussion on <a href=\"http:\/\/library.columbia.edu\/news\/libraries\/2012\/20120216_access_to_research_panel.html\">Recent Developments in Access to Research<\/a>, which will discuss the Elsevier boycott amongst other things. I&#8217;ll be on the panel, not sure how much I&#8217;ll have to contribute, we&#8217;ll see.<\/li>\n<li>A correspondent sent me a link to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/blogs\/adamcurtis\/2012\/02\/a_mile_or_two_off_yarmouth.html\">this wonderful piece<\/a> centering around Fred Hoyle and film.<\/li>\n<li>For interesting video to watch, I recommend this <a href=\"https:\/\/simonsfoundation.org\/mps-science-lives\/-\/asset_publisher\/bo1E\/content\/yuri-manin?redirect=%2Fmps-science-lives\">interview with Yuri Manin<\/a> at the Simons Foundation, and videos from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.claymath.org\/researchconference\/2010\/program3.php\">Clay 2010 conference in Paris<\/a> about the Poincare conjecture proof.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  I hadn&#8217;t realized that &#8220;Why is there something rather than nothing?&#8221; studies is now a burgeoning field, with heavy Templeton funding. Besides the Rutgers Templeton Project in Philosophy of Cosmology, this past fall Yale hosted the Templeton + Yale Divinity School funded &#8220;WITA&#8221; (Why is there Anything?) conference (see <a href=\"http:\/\/whyisthereanything.org\">whyisthereanything.org<\/a>), which has its own blog <a href=\"http:\/\/whyisthereanything.org\/blog\/\">here<\/a>.  As Multiverse Mania gets to be old-hat, perhaps WITA studies will take over as the cutting edge of this kind of science.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  This <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-2106025\/Stephen-Hawking-visits-California-swingers-sex-club.html\">news<\/a> from a &#8220;Cambridge University spokesman&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It is not true that Professor Hawking is a \u201cregular\u201d visitor to the club [Freedom Acres sex club in Southern California] in question.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018This report is greatly exaggerated. He visited once a few years ago with friends while on a visit to California.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lots of people seem to be unhappy with my characterization of Lawrence Krauss&#8217;s question &#8220;why is there something rather than nothing?&#8221; as meaningless. I&#8217;m well aware that one can give this question a non-trivial meaning, I just don&#8217;t think Krauss &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4453\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4453"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4458,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4453\/revisions\/4458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}