Biographies, history, personal accounts

[sbrothy]

Michael Ellis Fisher: CV and achievements

This text was supposed to be included in the book "50 years of the renormalization group, Dedicated to the Memory of Michael E. Fisher", edited by A. Aharony, O. Entin-Wohlman, D. Huse and L. Radzihovsky, World Scientific, Singapore (2024). It will be included in future printings and in the electronic version of the book.

 

[sbrothy]

Tensorial Quantum Mechanics: Back to Heisenberg and Beyond

Interesting footnote:

It is important to remark that most physicists are not interested at all in the many “interpretations” which are heatedlydebated in philosophical journals. As Maximilian Schlosshauer [38, p. 59] has recently described: “It is no secret that a shutup-and-calculate mentality pervades classrooms everywhere. How many physics students will ever hear their professor mentionthat there’s such a queer thing as different interpretations of the very theory they’re learning about? I have no representativedata to answer this question, but I suspect the percentage of such students would hardly exceed the single-digit range.”

EDIT:

Heh, I just found the official name for this kinda problem:

Newton's Flaming Laser Sword.

 

[sbrothy]

Some history:

Fusion divided: what prevented European collaboration on controlled thermonuclear fusion in 1958

I admit this one mostly intrigued me because of Sean M. Carrol. Also, I just think emergence is a cool concept.

What Emergence Can Possibly Mean

This one just kinda spoke to me intuitively:

Geometric Proof of the Irrationality of Square-Roots for Select Integers

Got all sorts of stuff going on. I'm trying to make my computer draw some fractals for nostalgia's sake but ended up wasting a lot of time on an invalid GPG server key problem. That now out of the way I'll be looking into John Baez beautiful roots as well. I have the GNU Scientific C++ API solving lots of 23th-degree polynomials but getting it on screen......

 

[pines-demon]

This page by the AIP is a good source for the history of cosmology: https://history.aip.org/exhibits/cosmology/index.htm

 

[sbrothy]

Wow, here we're really venturing into metaphysics land:

The game of metaphysics

"Metaphysics is traditionally conceived as aiming at the truth -- indeed, the most fundamental truths about the most general features of reality. Philosophical naturalists, urging that philosophical claims be grounded on science, have often assumed an eliminativist attitude towards metaphysics, consequently paying little attention to such a definition. In the more recent literature, however, naturalism has instead been taken to entail that the traditional conception of metaphysics can be accepted if and only if one is a scientific realist (and puts the right constraints on acceptable metaphysical claims). Here, we want to suggest that naturalists can, and perhaps should, pick a third option, based on a significant yet acceptable revision of the established understanding of metaphysics. More particularly, we will claim that a fictionalist approach to metaphysics is compatible with both the idea that the discipline inquires into the fundamental features of reality and naturalistic methodology; at the same time, it meshes well with both scientific realism and instrumentalism"

EDIT:

Stumbled upon this one last second:

Hard Proofs and Good Reasons

"Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that there are a large number of theorems that have only exponentially-long proofs, and such proofs can not serve as good reasons for the truths of what they establish. Either mathematicians are adept at encountering only the reasonable truths, or what mathematicians take to be good reasons do not always lead to equivalently good proofs. Both resolutions raise new problems: either, how it is that we come to care about the reasonable truths before we have any inkling of how they might be proved, or why there should be good reasons, beyond those of deductive proof, for the truth of mathematical statements. Taking this dilemma seriously provides a new way to make sense of the unstable ontologies found in contemporary mathematics, and new ways to understand how non-human, but intelligent, systems might found new mathematics on inhuman "alien" lemmas."