Infinite Reflections

Infinite Mind … is a pretty interesting site with close connections to second life.

I am listening to a youtube borne interview with Kurt Vonnegut ….

truly fascinating …

Gowers’ is on! Yet another Math Blog … awesome … and we’re all waiting for the PCM.

Awesome and coggrats

via Terry’s PCM article: The Schrodinger equation

Why did it take so long for the Fourier Series to take?  Why did it take so long to come about … I think all can agree it was a breakthrough … why did it take so long for that step of adding pure sinusoids to each other?

Terry Tao’s  preprints, notes, lectures, and others’  material related to “Structure and randomness in combinatorics”  are linked in his recent blog entry -

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

A. Einstein

You just have to love him!

Straying from mere infinities … reflecting the popular will  …

So  the community consensus about the best movies ever made goes something like this ….

so Cosmic Variance … has a really interesting piece (and follow up comments) onBoltzmann’s [Anthropic] Brain. An absolute must read. [Boltzman …{S=k ln (omega)} is a must know] … of course .. Boltzman’s Brain now joins Schrodingers Cat and Maxwell’s Demon … to name a few critters] … Part of the scaffolding of popular science. It took me a while to find it … but I was vacationing with my son at Blood Mountain [Ga] and just did not get to the entropy reducing blog regimen on time. There’s more to this story, but it will have to wait.

just a later Edit … to add the aspect of Free Will … The information philosopher has a section on the History of the Free Will Problem

with pointers to Core Concepts such as:Determinism Indeterminism Causality Certainty Chance Creativity Necessity Predictability Indeterminacy and more … take a look …[ also explore works on Free Will — here]

Eigenket devotes its entire site to the proposition that Free Will is a ‘local gauge symmetry’

[and all this just for trying to see how ‘free will’ and Boltzmann pair up…]

“Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.

… How does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all?

… The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown;”

Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life

So considering Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, What about the Certainty Principle?

OK   … so we’re adding Xconomy — “dedicated to providing business and technology leaders with timely, insightful, close-to-the-scene information about the local personalities, companies, and technological trends that best exemplify today’s high-tech economy”  - to the blogroll following a link from NotEvenNew … (actually this is pretty new).  I guess we’ll just have to see if the Kendall Square Buzz turns up anything worthwhile …

All kinds of things are going … we’ll have to return to these later.  In the meanwhile … Godel did have some justifiable concerns about the way Leibniz was treated.  More and more mysterious  … what’s up with all these logicians and philosophers???

“World’s largest telescope to make first observations Friday” at least that’s what the University of Florida’s press release says

it continues to say:

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The world’s largest telescope will take its first peek into the heavens this week, ushering the University of Florida into the top ranks of the “big observers,” as one astronomy professor put it.

The Gran Telescopio Canarias, or GTC, under construction in Spain’s Canary Islands for the past seven years, will hold its “first light” opening ceremony Friday. UF, which contributed $5 million to the project and owns a 5 percent share, is the only U.S. institution with a stake in the massive telescope.

….
The roughly $175 million GTC is not yet complete. Only 12 of the 36 mirrors that together will compose its 34.1-foot primary mirror have been installed, Dermott said. The rest are expected to be mounted this year, with the telescope’s grand opening — to be presided over by King Juan Carlos I of Spain — set for next summer. Only after that date will scientific-quality observations begin.

All that said, enough of the mirror is assembled to allow telescope operators to make initial test runs, he said. So at 10 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time Friday (6 p.m. EDT), Prince Felipe, heir to the Spanish throne, will train the telescope on Polaris, the North Star, for a ceremonial observation to be attended by about 300 people.

pretty impressive … way to go Gators …

Did you know that the Archaeobatrachians are the most primitive of frogs? I didn’t, but thanks to the Wiki entry List of Anuran families … I now do

I am not exactly sure why I am including this …. but .. who knows maybe its six degrees of separation close to something important. [ yes Virginia, the entry does say; “Anura is an order of animals in the class Amphibia, that includes frogs and toads”]

The lecture notes and streaming video for Ed Lazowska’s History of Computing course are awesome, [the course goes by University of Washington CSE P 590A, UC Berkeley PP 190-003 / PP 290-003, and UCSD CSE 291 (D00) — Instructors: Ed Lazowska, UW Computer Science & Engineering; Steve Maurer, UC Berkeley Golman School of Public Policy; Geoff Voelker, UCSD Computer Science & Engineering] There are quite a few interesting guest lectures there … including those by Steve Wozniak Gordon Bell and others. Really impressive -and an interesting concept for multiversity teaching collaboration.

[discovered following Scott [Quantum] Aaronso’s post You down with SPP?]

His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass) by Philip Pullman will generate a discernable surge in quantum studies. In fact … this might be the newest rage with overachieving teens! Church, Money, Mystery, Consciousness, Shadows, Mystery, Nicloe Kidman, Dark Energy, Dark Materials, Dark Matter, Alethiometers, its all there!

At first - it all might sound kind of corny — Harry Potter - type Korn — but — physics as “experminetal theology“? Universal Consciousness … [ever think about vedanta? — did you really read your Schrodinger?]

IF you ever wondered about Multiple Universe / Multiverse theories … this is YOUR destination. IF you were a fan of David Bohm type physics … just wait … this will popularize it! …Schrodinger’s Cat is ALIVE … and keeps morphing … Wave function collapse is for dilettantes …

serious communication — only via entaglement … [and there’s a concept for an interesting weapon there … one wonders if Pullman is going to patent it…]

Faraday Cages? Yes but in code …

yes … and the movie is coming out in November 2007 [Directed by Chris Weitz … Nicole Kidman plays Marisa Coulter, Daniel Craig plays Lord Asriel, Eva Green plays Serafina Pekkala, Kevin Bacon is there too .. Sam Elliott plays Lee Scoresby and without a doubt Dakota Blue Richards wow everyone as Lyra Belacqua — watch out Harry Potter]

While Harry Potter will not likely inspire many to science … Lyra Belacqua is destined to inspire many young ladies (and men) to theoretical and experimental quantum physics

and that’s my Quantum Prediction of the Month!

… OK … so I was going to avoid commenting on anything QFT for a while, but I stumbled on Nigel Cook’s … The physics of quantum field theory [via NEW’s Random Collection of Stuff — just when you think you’re going to have a boring old weekend .. it gets exciting] …Nigel’s QFT Blog is pretty interesting … as is his QFT Resource site

The new genetics is pretty interesting …

That’s right … that’s all you the buzz time you can really expect … take a look at the Truth Laid Bear’s Hot Topic Graphs

Ethan Cotterill writes about Geometry of curves with exceptional secant planes -listed subjects: Algebraic Geometry; Combinatorics . The full preprint is here - the heart of the claim “Working in the framework of an extension of Brill-Noether theory to pairs of linear series, we prove that a general curve of genus g has no exceptional secant planes, in a very precise sense.”

Looks like it could be interesting ….would this be of any use to topological quantum computing over at Microsoft’s Station Q?

This is purely random … but as we might expect randomness has a way … of breaking intractiblity …

Just some memory jogger notes … those who need to know will know …. and they might end up in the Winners’ Circle  …  in any case what does this have to do with  correlation and eomics?

According to the information at IDEA … the top ranked papers are:
Mankiw, N Gregory & Romer, David & Weil, David N, 1992. A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 107(2), pages 407-37, and
Arellano, Manuel & Bond, Stephen, 1991. Some Tests of Specification for Panel Data: Monte Carlo Evidence and an Application to Employment Equations, Review of Economic Studies , Blackwell Publishing, vol. 58(2), pages 277-97, April.

some how via Greg Mankiw’s Blog [don’t remeber the path … but look at Greg’s advice on how to write wells ….

Ok … so maybe you need some spare change, like a million bucks … well the Clay Institute of Mathematics has this Millennium Problem challenge that says if you solve one of these problems you get a million bucks. One of these is the Yang-Mills Theory problem. According to their description “Almost half a century ago, Yang and Mills introduced a remarkable new framework to describe elementary particles using structures that also occur in geometry. Quantum Yang-Mills theory is now the foundation of most of elementary particle theory, and its predictions have been tested at many experimental laboratories, but its mathematical foundation is still unclear. The successful use of Yang-Mills theory to describe the strong interactions of elementary particles depends on a subtle quantum mechanical property called the “mass gap:” the quantum particles have positive masses, even though the classical waves travel at the speed of light. This property has been discovered by physicists from experiment and confirmed by computer simulations, but it still has not been understood from a theoretical point of view.”

If you want to find out a little more … watch this fine movie … [starring UT’s Lorenzo Sadun].

If you want to find out a lot more … check these … [50 Years Of Yang-mills Theory by Gerardus t Hooft looks pretty interesting] In any case did you know that Chen-Ning’s nick name is Frank … it took me a while to figure that out . You can find out a lot more about Frank’s work … by … reading his work … like in Selected Papers (1945-1980) of Chen Ning Yang (World Scientific Series in 20th Century Physics)

Just in case you were wondering what IS really going on … apparently, according to a talk by Juan Estrada(Fermilab)[Fermilab Users’ Meeting:June 7, 2007]

Our “Milky Way Galaxy is devouring its closest satellite neighbor: The Sagittarius Dwarf Tidal Stream -(a loose filament of stars, gas, and possibly dark matter that entangles the Milky Way).” Ouch for the Sagittarians …

just another dark energy story … and NOÂ it has nothing at all to do with Paris Hilton ….

If you like a few equations . … there a few here

IF you don’t there’s an interesting timeline here