#Mensa channel log, quantum mechanics etc. 13 February 2004 around 5 p.m. PST [16:57] <@gloriae> I'm reading Heilbron's bio of Max Planck [16:57] do you like it? [16:57] <@gloriae> JL Heilbron [16:57] <@gloriae> very interesting fellow [16:58] planck is one of those fellows i never really know much about off hand [16:58] like, planck's constant comes to mind [16:58] Im having spaghetti squash [16:58] <@gloriae> professor of history and vice chancellor emeritus of UC Berkeley, also senior research fellow at worcester college, oxford [16:58] but i can spit back heisenberg's and born's bios out on demand [16:58] <@gloriae> yes, the famous h :) [16:59] <@gloriae> his planck book is The Dilemmas of an Upright Man [16:59] cool [16:59] so how do you find it? [17:00] <@gloriae> very satisfying [17:00] <@gloriae> I read Heilbron's The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories a couple of years ago [17:00] <@gloriae> he's a terrific science historian [17:00] <@gloriae> there's a lot more math in the astronomy book :) LOTS [17:01] ah [17:01] <@gloriae> it pretty much covers the history of European astronomy from the dark ages up to the 19th century or so [17:01] <@gloriae> during the time when the main source of money and sponsorship was the catholic church, which had also declared the Copernican view of the solar system heretical [17:01] i just checked out Landau and Lifschiz's Quantum Mechanics out of the library [17:02] <@gloriae> ah, you'd find Planck's work fits right in there [17:02] <@gloriae> Planck's conversion to quantum mechanical theory was slow, thorough, and permanent [17:02] <@gloriae> he was probably the steadiest of the characters involved [17:02] i'd say feynman was [17:03] many of the others used varying tools in their methods [17:03] but feynman pretty much always stuck with path integrals [17:03] <@gloriae> Planck lived from 1858 to 1947 [17:03] <@gloriae> wasn't feynman later? [17:04] yeah [17:04] but is considered a main guy in qm [17:04] just as planck [17:04] <@gloriae> when I say 'characters involved' I mean the ones in the time of Rutherford, Einstein, Bohr, etc [17:04] <@gloriae> very late 19th century through the 1930s and 40s [17:04] feynman is still in there [17:04] yeah [17:05] feynman was 30s-60s [17:05] <@gloriae> Feynman isn't in the index of Heilbron's book [17:05] <@gloriae> although there's a good deal about quantum mechanical theory in it, the primary focus is on Planck 'as spokesman for German science' [17:06] interesting [17:06] oh [17:06] <@gloriae> an increasingly problematic position with WWI and even more so with WWII [17:06] i could certainly see that [17:06] <@gloriae> I'm up to about 1917 in it at this point [17:06] planck being a sort of example of german science [17:07] and authority [17:07] <@gloriae> well, Einstein's an example of German science, too, but he left [17:07] <@gloriae> very different personalities [17:07] there are bits and pieces of other qm books that like MUCH more than their counterparts in this one by landau and lifschiz [17:08] but this is probably the one i like the most [17:08] as an overall text to have on qm [17:08] <@gloriae> Here's the kind of line that makes me want to read more Heilbron: [17:09] <@gloriae> "In giving notice that the progressively more abstract world picture asymptotically approaches the real world, Planck went against the concept of physics most frequently set forth by his colleagues around the turn of the century." [17:09] <@gloriae> asymptotically approaches the real world ... ... I love that [17:10] that's a very good analogy [17:10] <@gloriae> Heilbron is very, very good [17:10] I believe in dark matter! [17:10] it's just hard to convey, because "imaginary world" in qm context is just as much real [17:11] it's not like things discussed about in *theoretical* qm is unworldly [17:11] <@gloriae> even if you're not interested much in astronomy, you'd undoubtedly enjoy the other book very much not only because it's a great story (Cassini and all those guys :) but because Heilbron includes lots of mathematical astronomy in detail [17:11] it occurs in this world [17:11] <@gloriae> yes. it's not unworldly, it's in this world. [17:11] <@gloriae> it's just smaller than most people think about. [17:12] right [17:12] what i mean to point out is.... [17:12] <@gloriae> it's on a different scale, like thinking under a microscope [17:12] <@gloriae> only more so than that [17:12] dark matter eh? [17:13] I think I may be lagging. [17:13] when you tell someone about particles that literally create themselves out of thin air, you usually end up having to submit to a notion of "well, it's theoretical", but it happens all the time [17:13] <@gloriae> well, the more deeply you go into anything, the fewer and fewer people there are who will understand what you're talking about :) [17:14] yea [17:14] but i like that analogy [17:14] asymptotically approaches real world [17:14] heh [17:15] <@gloriae> here's Boltzmann's interpretation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics as a statistical principle: "entropy does not always increase, just almost always" [17:16] yeah [17:16] and "almost" enough so that it's a law [17:17] <@gloriae> Heilbron says later, on the same page, "...it appears that Planck did not hold Boltzmann's approach to be absolutely wrong but--to use a phrase from the gas theory--only infinitely improbable." [17:17] it's funny how you find things like that in the tiniest corners of science [17:17] <@gloriae> anyway, by 1897 Planck pretty much knew his direction, he'd come to regard the problem of "the reconciliation of mechanics and thermodynamics" as the most important problem in physics at the time [17:18] like you'd never think to look in gas theory, but you find neat concepts like "only infinitely improbable", just like as, opposed to say straight pure Group Theory, you look in Finite Group Theory, and thos people have their own language that group theorists don't even understand [17:19] <@gloriae> in 1900, it was judged that not many more than FOUR physicists in the world 'troubled themselves about the conflict between atomism and entropy' and yet this is where quantum theory took off [17:19] <@gloriae> yes [17:19] <@gloriae> when they get together, they have to teach each other a few new words, it's not impossible [17:20] yup [17:20] yeah [17:20] noone cared about atom physics at that time [17:20] <@gloriae> very very few [17:20] like how noone cared about gravity when einstein took up the problem [17:20] everyone was still into e/m [17:20] <@gloriae> Rutherford did [care about atom physics], but most thought he was messing about with a problem in chemistry :) [17:20] <@gloriae> that number, four, is probably very close to accurate [17:21] <@gloriae> the extraordinary salience of small things, as is said in the I Ching :D [17:21] really [17:21] small things make all the difference [17:22] weyl's urging physicists to look more into group theory, saying it wasn't just abstract nonsense, has been absolutely invaluable to contemporary physics, just as much as a contribution like qm was [17:22] and that isn't widely spoken off [17:22] if at all [17:23] <@gloriae> group theory as applicable to contemporary physics, that makes a great deal of sense to me [17:24] <@gloriae> amazing how much tension there is between related disciplines at times [17:24] <@gloriae> territoriality etc [17:25] knowing that group theory talks a lot about symmetry is enough to see it's value in qm, where the symmetry of compounds etc give much information, and general relativity, where symmetry tells A LOT about the spaces gr [general relativity] talks about [17:25] symmetry tells physics a lot of things [17:25] <@gloriae> yes [17:26] yeah [17:26] there is a lot of politics one has to go through when doing things like that [17:27] introducing vastly new tools [17:28] the most documented case would be heisenberg's introducing linear algebra techniques into physics for qm [17:28] most heisenberg bios document the politics that were involved [17:28] <@gloriae> "One of the striking oddities of relativity theory is that the usual rule for the addition of velocities along a straight line, w=u+v, no longer holds. It's violation, which followed from Einstein's postulate that the speed of light in free space is the same to all observers, indicated a need to revise the sacred mechanics of Newton, of which the usual addition rule was a direct consequence. [17:29] <@gloriae> "Planck undertook to perform this sacrilege. As early as 1906 he could show in a simple case how to rewrite Newton's laws of motion in the spirit of relativity." [17:29] <@gloriae> I got interested in this because I wanted to read more Heilbron [17:29] <@gloriae> I didn't fully appreciate Planck's role in all this [17:29] yeah [17:30] planck is someone i don't know as much about as i'd like to [17:30] <@gloriae> yes, this book is full of the politics too [17:30] <@gloriae> strong arguments for the merits of living a long life include the opportunities to learn more about such people and processes [17:31] indeed [17:31] <@gloriae> if only because we can go to our reward with a smile [17:31] <@gloriae> thinking "dayum, that was INTERESTING" [17:32] hehe [17:32] <@gloriae> Heilbron comments on p. 39 that Planck considered mathematics and philosophy to be auxiliaries of physics [17:32] that's a very interesting postulate [17:32] the speed of light in free space is the same to all observers [17:33] <@gloriae> one of those things that so many teachers will say is "counter-intuitive" [17:33] the most important tool in sr [special relativity] from which everything else follows is getting the lorentz invariance thing [17:33] i wonder if that can be obtained entirely from assuming that postulate [17:33] <@gloriae> Lorentz figures largely in this tale [17:33] i forget exactly what is needed to get the lorentz thing [17:33] yeah [17:34] the recipe for sr is this: [17:34] galilean transformations aren't right, correct this, call the new thing lorentz transformations [17:35] assume hopping from coordinate system to coordinate system obeys this [17:35] that's sr [17:36] using that recipe turns all the old laws into the right ones [17:36] like E=mc^2 etc [17:37] <@gloriae> part of the drama in the early 20th century involved conflict with Mach, whose prestige in philosophy was one feature in the landscape of things holding physics back from where it was trying to go [17:37] wow [17:37] i've never heard of mach [17:37] <@gloriae> "...the Machists chose as the basis of science precisely those elements--the particular and the parochial--that science discards as it progresses. [17:38] <@gloriae> "Their doctrine made unintelligible the fact and the standard on which physics rests: independent investigators, working in different times and places, must agree about the phenomena before the experiences of any of them have any scientific value." [17:39] wow [17:39] yeah [17:39] that's a pretty big axiom of physics [17:40] results have to be able to be obtained by everyone [17:40] <@gloriae> Ernst Mach, Austrian philosopher-physicist [17:40] <@gloriae> the standards of what physics is were much looser, largely because of guys like Mach [17:40] i see [17:40] <@gloriae> "the leading German-speaking epistomologist" [17:41] <@gloriae> he "continued to spurn atoms after others had given in and ... insinuated that a physics free from presuppositions could be built from direct sense experience alone." [17:41] <@gloriae> that's part of what Planck, Rutherford, Einstein and the rest were up against [17:41] <@gloriae> guys like Mach still had a lot of prestige [17:42] <@gloriae> many in science would take him seriously before they'd take the investigators who were out ahead of him seriously [17:42] fascinating [17:42] it's hard to see that now [17:42] living in today [17:42] <@gloriae> I should get off this, I'm just really enjoying the book and the window into this work at that time, very much [17:43] <@gloriae> well, I don't think that changes [17:43] yeah but i mean [17:43] <@gloriae> that is happening now, too, it's just that conversions are faster [17:43] german epistemology... vee have vays of makink you know... [17:43] <@gloriae> conversions to new discoveries/directions occur on shorter time lines probably [17:43] not knowing that you wouldn't think someone like that had more credibility than a planck/einstein/etc at the time [17:44] <@gloriae> but the obstacles to progress in fresh science resemble the old obstacles [17:44] i think the copenhagen inmterpretation is by far the most diplomatic way of interpreting perception [17:44] <@gloriae> who wrote that copenhagan play about two physicists meeting during WWII? [17:45] <@gloriae> I think Niels Bohr was the one working for the Reich, who was the one in Copenhagen? [17:45] <@gloriae> I'm drawing a blank on a name I well know [17:45] I dunno but I have a fictional book about Einstein and Joyce bein drinkin buddies [17:45] <@gloriae> Bohr was trying to pump his old friend and colleague [Heisenberg] for information about the physics being done outside Germany [17:45] those are great [17:45] lol [17:46] <@gloriae> I have Schwartz and McGuinness cartoon illustrated Einstein for Beginners too :) [17:46] I wish I knew all music [17:46] so I could hear a song on the radio [17:46] and not worry about not catching the name [17:46] glo; I think you'd enjoy Robert Anton Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati [17:46] <@gloriae> I don't think I would, kallisti [17:47] it's written like a theatre production [17:47] it's a pretty unique selection from his work [17:48] <@gloriae> I guess I don't get into those like you two do [17:48] into which? [17:48] <@gloriae> I didn't like half of GEB because of those [17:48] <@gloriae> fictionalized conversations between various emblematic characters [17:48] what is GEB? [17:48] <@gloriae> Godel Escher Bach [17:48] <@gloriae> sorry [17:48] <@gloriae> An Eternal Golden Braid [17:49] well every character in the book is a famous character from the historic era [17:49] <@gloriae> I mean, you said that about a fictional Einstein and Joyce as drinkin buddies, and muto said those are great at the exact moment I was thinking I hate that stuff LOL [17:49] it's writtin like a long dark joke [17:50] <@gloriae> I'm not quarreling with you, I'm just noticing where this diverges [17:50] <@gloriae> even though it doesn't diverge at every point [17:50] Wilson's more about humor and parodies of perception [17:50] <@gloriae> you'd probably like those passages in GEB [17:50] <@gloriae> humor and parodies of perception, exactly [17:51] <@gloriae> that's what Hofstadter was getting at with them [17:51] well [17:51] <@gloriae> that's only one of the things he was doing in the book, there are a half dozen or more of those [17:51] i've only read one of those fictional things [17:51] it was between godel and another logician [17:51] i liked it a lot [17:51] i think the idea is to introduce convolutions of methodology into how a person contemplates detail [17:52] <@gloriae> to introduce convolutions of methodology into how one contemplates detail ... kallisti, sometimes you pack a LOT into a sentence [17:52] <@gloriae> nice [17:52] glo: I believe in flexibility of templated perception [17:52] <@gloriae> I'd like to cop that for a /topic [17:53] *** gloriae changes topic to ' introducing convolutions of methodology into how a person contemplates detail' [17:54] <@gloriae> ideally, methodologies serve contemplation, not vice versa [17:54] if only [17:54] <@gloriae> yea [17:54] <@gloriae> otherwise it's just make-work that gets farther and farther from reality [17:55] like a global oil shortage [17:55] we need a political party that promotes Fusion research [17:55] <@gloriae> the enchantment of plenty in the midst of the reality of a dwindling finite resource [17:55] i recently went around my math dept [17:55] putting pieces of chalk in profs hands [17:56] and asking them to give an example of an increasing function on their board [17:56] <@gloriae> cool, what kind of results did you get? [17:56] the topologists/dynamical systems/people in algebra into geometry drew a graph of f(x)=x [17:57] the number theorists/partial differential equation/logicians/homological algebra people wrote "f(x)=x" [17:58] * @gloriae finds herself grinning [17:58] :) [17:58] <@gloriae> THAT was an in joke! [17:59] <@gloriae> so the first group still had the language of graphs, the second had only the language of labels [17:59] yeah [17:59] well [17:59] i think I belong to the first group [17:59] i meant to point it at what was going on about how people contemplate detail [18:00] or think differently [18:00] <@gloriae> yea [18:00] but they all still used the same example [18:00] <@gloriae> excellent illustrative case [18:00] <@gloriae> right, but they used it differently, which revealed something about them and their skill sets [18:00] mathmatics is a slave to the = sign [18:00] actually it isn't [18:00] with contemporary language, the equal sign appears nowhere [18:01] k, well when i was being taught [18:01] cuz "=" is theoretical [18:01] <@gloriae> = is what IS is :) [18:01] <@gloriae> what it IS [18:01] contemporary language uses all arrows [18:01] everything looks like graph theory [18:01] nothing is...it's all relative.... [18:01] <@gloriae> oh baloney [18:02] <@gloriae> it all is, and it's all relative [18:02] <@gloriae> or perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by 'nothing is' [18:02] <@gloriae> "What do you believe in?" "Everything." [18:02] even so, it seems the emphasis is on balancing or showing one thing, rather than a focus on process [18:02] <@gloriae> oy [18:02] <@gloriae> well, I guess we're done for today, muto, I really enjoyed talking with you! [18:04] me too [18:04] as always [18:04] yes it all is [18:04] wb [18:05] does that muon thing bother you? [18:05] <@gloriae> I'll leave you with this: To Planck, philosophy was arbitrary, and every one was entitled to choose one's own; science was obligatory, the same for every one, and more important in proportion to its larger constituency. [18:06] oh ya...we invent our religions according to our emotional responses to perception [18:06] I agree with planck [18:06] <@gloriae> I like the dichotomy he sketches between arbitrary and obligatory [18:06] <@gloriae> it makes me want to think. [18:07] my best friend is a strong believer in psychic phenomenon [18:07] he was disturbed when i said i didn't believe it is possible for human beings yet [18:09] if a time machine is invented 20000 years from now....all our present perception becomes infinitely debatable [18:10] be a neat theme for a conspiracy movie [18:10] who killed kennedy [18:13] gloriae, are we having a banfree month? [18:13] ;> [18:15] <@gloriae> ThrasheR: if not entirely ban-free, certainly not ban-dependent. [18:23] *** gloriae changes topic to 'asymptotically approaching the real world' [18:25] that topic assumes the 'real world' is on a bent path...