So, I was watching a streaming video feed from MSNBC...oh my God... how could our military capabilities have advanced so significantly over just 10 years. It is the most well orchestrated and overwhelming thing one can possibly imagine. Every 20 seconds or so you can hear and see explosions coming from all directions. If we keep it up at this pace, Saddam won't even get a chance to use his chemical weapons before our tanks roll into Baghdad.
http://www.msnbc.com/m/lv/default.asp
Friday, March 21, 2003
So I went to a public lecture by Steven Hawkings last friday. I really wish I had gotten a chance to go to his technical talk the previous monday...it would have been a nice opportunity to see some of my old physics acquaintances from UT. At any rate, was funny listening to people after the talk as they were walking to their cars, I guess since that was probably the only exposure to physics they get, they assume that everything he talks about is original stuff. That's wierd since not only did he only talk about recently published work that has been all over the literature, it is all speculative work at that.
He went on for an hour about how great M theory is, but he failed to mention the fact that there is not a single shred of evidence to support the theory, or even to support supersymmetry, which is the cornerstone of the theory. I guess that is how you become famous. What I don't understand is why people feel compelled to go to higher dimensions with modern theories. One of the only things we know for sure is that momentum-energy 4 vector is conserved, and it is only conserved when the dimensionality of the space is exactly 4... well, then in these new theories you lose the one thing that you know for sure to be true. The best answer that I have gotten to this question was a long winded load of *&% from someone in my QFT class a couple of years ago, but he failed to explain the question outside the realm of restricting motion to the standard 3+1 dimensions. Well, that is the same thing that people are trying to do now with M theory. You start off wanting to get Poincare invariance and in the process you end up with additional dimensions, then you spend 20 years trying to figure out how to get rid of all these extra dimensions that you cooked up. I guess I am short changing M theory though since it does contain a spin-2 massless boson as one of the inherent states of the theory... then again string theory had the same thing, but it contained all possible resonance modes and that was a disaster. Oh well, I should go try to make the main page for the site stop sucking...it is nice to have an outlet for my Physics rants though...the half-wits in my med school class wouldn't know a boson from a fermion if it nailed them in the retina (and yes that was in fact a cross over physics/medicince joke).
If you want to see a complete archive of all published physic/math/CS papers for the last decade, you can go to www.arxiv.org this the physics site to end all physics sites, and since everyone posts their publications here first, there is no reason to shell out a couple of hunderd bucks for a Phys Rev subscription
He went on for an hour about how great M theory is, but he failed to mention the fact that there is not a single shred of evidence to support the theory, or even to support supersymmetry, which is the cornerstone of the theory. I guess that is how you become famous. What I don't understand is why people feel compelled to go to higher dimensions with modern theories. One of the only things we know for sure is that momentum-energy 4 vector is conserved, and it is only conserved when the dimensionality of the space is exactly 4... well, then in these new theories you lose the one thing that you know for sure to be true. The best answer that I have gotten to this question was a long winded load of *&% from someone in my QFT class a couple of years ago, but he failed to explain the question outside the realm of restricting motion to the standard 3+1 dimensions. Well, that is the same thing that people are trying to do now with M theory. You start off wanting to get Poincare invariance and in the process you end up with additional dimensions, then you spend 20 years trying to figure out how to get rid of all these extra dimensions that you cooked up. I guess I am short changing M theory though since it does contain a spin-2 massless boson as one of the inherent states of the theory... then again string theory had the same thing, but it contained all possible resonance modes and that was a disaster. Oh well, I should go try to make the main page for the site stop sucking...it is nice to have an outlet for my Physics rants though...the half-wits in my med school class wouldn't know a boson from a fermion if it nailed them in the retina (and yes that was in fact a cross over physics/medicince joke).
If you want to see a complete archive of all published physic/math/CS papers for the last decade, you can go to www.arxiv.org this the physics site to end all physics sites, and since everyone posts their publications here first, there is no reason to shell out a couple of hunderd bucks for a Phys Rev subscription
Thursday, March 20, 2003
Well, I finally got around to updating the moulik.com website. I don't know that I really like the layout, but it is good enough for now. Since noone really ever goes to the site besides me, it doesn't matter one way or the other. That means that this blog is going to turn into my opportunity to rant about anything and everything that comes to mind. Well, now that Didi is moving back to Houston, I guess I will have to move back there eventually. I think she is going to be taking over the DB clinic some day. That means that I will have to take care of the old people since she is going into pediatrics.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)