There are very few recurring characters in this series. One is an American named Steve. As if his name and blonde hair isn’t enough of an indication he’s American, nearly every scene with him has a (admittedly) nice instrumental version of The Star-Spangled Banner play.

Wrote ~2000 words of Almost Nowhere yesterday, FWIW

Notes on the Einstein Fandom

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redantsunderneath:

studyinglogic:

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eka-mark:

I recently remembered something my old roommate once said to me, when we were undergrads, about the how people’s perception of Einstein evolves as they study physics.

Practically everyone starts out thinking of Einstein as one of the greatest physicists of all time, if not the greatest. His name is an epithet for genius, the theories he’s best known for (special & general relativity) have stood the test of time, and he is typically portrayed as good-natured and humble. He is probably the physicist whose name lay people encounter most often.

As one studies more physics, it becomes clear that there have been many important and brilliant physicists, and Einstein’s relative importance among them seems to decline. Sure, he gets great PR, but plenty of other people deserve to be just as famous. He becomes “just another fairly important physicist” in one’s mind, and the list of “fairly important physicists” grows rapidly as one learns more.

But then, at some point in one’s physics education, it becomes increasingly obvious that Einstein really does stand out, even among the greatest physicists of the past! One learns a little about what physicists actually thought of their contemporaries; one reads that Wigner thought Einstein’s “mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's”, and many similar statements. One notices that most great physicists made a major contribution or two to a branch or two of the subject. Meanwhile, in a single year, at the beginning of his career, Einstein made three revolutionary contributions:

1) By taking the idea of energy quantization, as proposed by Planck, seriously (apparently Planck thought of it as “a purely formal assumption”), and applying it to electromagnetism and optics, Einstein invented the idea of photons, providing the first successful explanation for the photoelectric effect. This is what he won the Nobel for, and is of the most important chapters in the origin story of quantum mechanics.

2) By taking the atomic/molecular theory of matter seriously (which some physicists, e.g. Mach, considered a convenient fiction, as molecules were too small to observer directly), Einstein derived a novel description of Brownian motion, which connected the physical properties of matter’s molecular constituents to the dynamics of macroscopic objects. This is mainly what finally convinced the remaining skeptics that matter was made of microscopic discrete objects.

3) By taking the Lorenz transformations (as developed by Poincaré, Lorenz, FitzGerald et al.) to indicate something fundamental about the geometry of spacetime, Einstein invented the special theory of relativity, explaining the relativistic effects known to earlier physicists without reference to a preferred rest frame, in a way that has informed all subsequent physical and philosophical ideas bout space and time. As a consequence of special relativity, energy and mass turn out to be interconvertible.

But Einstein was just getting started! He continued to make pioneering contributions to quantum theory - including developing the first quantum theory of the heat capacity of solids, predicting (with Bose) existence of Bose-Einstein condensates, and (with Podolsky & Rosen) pointing out issues related to hidden variables and locality. He argued for many years with Bohr about the foundations of the theory in a productive and insightful way; as Tim Maudlin puts it, “while Einstein won—and would continue to win—all the logical battles, Bohr was decisively winning the propaganda war”. It was Einstein’s insistence on focusing on the nonlocality of standard quantum theory (which Bohr apparently did not think was terribly important or interesting) that led to Bell developing his eponymous theorem, decades later; Bell presented his theory explicitly as an extension of the EPR paper (which was actually written by Podolsky, but based on work he did with Einstein & Rosen).

And of course there’s Einstein’s own realization, almost as soon as he’d published his work on special relativity, that it was not compatible with Newton’s theory of gravity, and his subsequent development of general relativity, requiring him to learn the relatively cutting-edge mathematics of Riemannian geometry and tensor calculus to make his physical intuitions precise.

The complete list of Einstein’s publications is pretty impressive; I’ll just note here that, while he was making all these seminal contributions to statistical mechanics, special & general relativity, and quantum theory, he apparently found time to resolve the long-standing “tea leaf paradox” in fluid dynamics.

In conclusion, the people who are vocal about how awesome Einstein was are distributed bimodally with respect to their level of physics education.

I wonder how many other things have this bimodal distribution (to completely ignore the point at hand and immediately swerve meta); it seems surprisingly common to follow the Bruce Lee progression of “as a beginner you act without thinking, as an expert you think about everything, and as a master you act without thinking”.

Reminiscences of Zen -

Qingyuan declared
that there were three stages
in his understanding of the dharma:

the first stage,
seeing mountains as mountains
and water as water;

the second stage,
seeing mountains not as mountains
and water not as water;

and the third stage,
seeing mountains still as mountains
and water still as water.

You see this dialectic all the time through philosophical structures, where the thesis is naive unquestioned perception (just living in the world), the antithesis is mental activity/awareness and questioning/denial (an attempt to grapple with the world where the goal is mastery), and the synthesis is a subliminal understanding that involves a re-embrace of the immanent and a unification with the ontic (which involves the middle stage mastery revealed not possible or desirable… the wrong kind of goal). Valentinianism (and other gnostic groups) had hyle (matter, just living), psyche (soul, seeking cognitive mastery of the world) and pneuma (spirit, the ultimate goal of transcendence).  I sometimes think the purging of gnostic thought, getting the “eastern” stuff out of christianity, is why so many philosophers needed to reinvent this wheel.  Not just Hagel and his descendants, either.  The id, superego, ego is structured like this, and Lacan’s symbolic, real, and imaginary is a bit non-intuitive but works similarly.  

Terry Tao talked about a similar thing with maths, where as a beginner you do things intuitively, at an intermediate level you do stuff explicitly and rigourously, and then at a high level you do things intuitively again with a more developed intuition and make it rigorous before explaining it to others/ to make sure.

Yeah, it’s one of those patters you start to see all around, in art too. Oldboy, the Matrix movies, every Grant Morrison thing, V for Vendetta… it’s kind of implied in the monomyth, with the stages transitioning as the Hollywood 3 act breaks. Breaking from “the ordinary world,” mastering the “special world,” and returning to the “ordinary world” to reunify with it.

Verbal brain noise: “the Slow Fourier Transform Movement”

jaiwithani:

“Is your refrigerator running?”

“Yeah, fucker already has three field offices in Iowa.”

(via purgatory--and--probiotics-deac)

zepeli:

kyra-writes:

zepeli:

Poughkeepsie, 3/9/2019

I got a clearer shot if ur interested

WHAT lmao

(via jollityfarm)

Imagine how pathetic a sight the NBA would be if there were no games as such, and teams could simply score on each other at literally any time between the start and end of the season: 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday, noon on Christmas, you name it. What you’d see would be haggard, cadaverous players, in extreme sleep debt, forcing vigilance with chemical stimulants, almost losing their minds. War is like this.

I mean, if you allow the intervals between dumplings to be arbitrarily long and eventful, life could be described as a “free self-guided dumpling tour”