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Frank Wilczek has brought out a book The Lightness of Being that is a perfect follow-up to Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics.
Wilczek presents a vision of unification that is predicts phenomena at LHC energies, that is understandable and relevant in terms of today's experiments, and optimistically presages a new Golden Age of physics. As an honest popularizer he clearly wants to get all his readers on board---and provide decent balcony seats for the opening of LHC-and-beyond.
So how is the book going to do? Let's pick a target date of 1 November and use our familiar stringy topfive average as a benchmark for comparision.
At noon today pacific time, 9 September, the Wilczek book's salesrank was 901, and the average rank of the five most popular stringy books was 4526.6, making the ratio 5.02.
In case anyone is curious, the stringy top five were black, fabric, elegant hardbound, elegant, and parallel---with ranks 644, 4748, 5320, 5813, 6108 in that order.
What do you predict will be the ratio as of 1 November? Closest guess wins.
Unless there is objection, we will use a smoothed figure arrived at by averaging the noon ratios for 30 October thru 3 November. This will eliminate some of the more erratic fluctuation.
I'd guess the possbilities are anything from 1 (par with stringy average) to 5 (its value today.) I'll include the very optimistic figure of 6 even though I don't think it reasonable.
Wilczek presents a vision of unification that is predicts phenomena at LHC energies, that is understandable and relevant in terms of today's experiments, and optimistically presages a new Golden Age of physics. As an honest popularizer he clearly wants to get all his readers on board---and provide decent balcony seats for the opening of LHC-and-beyond.
So how is the book going to do? Let's pick a target date of 1 November and use our familiar stringy topfive average as a benchmark for comparision.
At noon today pacific time, 9 September, the Wilczek book's salesrank was 901, and the average rank of the five most popular stringy books was 4526.6, making the ratio 5.02.
In case anyone is curious, the stringy top five were black, fabric, elegant hardbound, elegant, and parallel---with ranks 644, 4748, 5320, 5813, 6108 in that order.
What do you predict will be the ratio as of 1 November? Closest guess wins.
Unless there is objection, we will use a smoothed figure arrived at by averaging the noon ratios for 30 October thru 3 November. This will eliminate some of the more erratic fluctuation.
I'd guess the possbilities are anything from 1 (par with stringy average) to 5 (its value today.) I'll include the very optimistic figure of 6 even though I don't think it reasonable.
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