Wife: (reading paper) Did you hear about the U of Alabama shooting?
Me: Only vaguely
Wife: (reading)...It was a professor who was denied tenure.
Me: (pause) ...Yeah, I can see that.
Saturday, February 13
Thursday, February 11
the value of a sabbatical, discovered...
Simply put - It's easy to get things accomplished when you aren't constantly recovering from doing all the shit you don't want to do.
Tuesday, February 9
last paragraphs of the book...
(I was so pleased with this section, I thought I'd post it. It feels awesome to write the last sentence of a book, even if you still have 30,000 words of the middle left to fill in.)
The full implications of quantum mechanics are beyond the scope of this book and this course. Next semester, I teach a course called “The Quantum Universe” that explores the history and the development of these ideas in great detail. For now it is enough to know this: If you are troubled by the idea that you are trapped in a deterministic, Newtonian cosmos with no control over your actions or your future, quantum mechanics may be just the thing to rescue you from this oppressive sense of inevitability.
Or perhaps not. Einstein was notoriously opposed to the seeming randomness of quantum theory, famously uttering the dismissive ”I do not believe that God plays dice with the universe”. Of course, we know from Einstein’s other writings that he was not speaking of a traditional, anthropomorphic, personal, Judeo-Christian God when he made remarks like this. The God of Einstein was more like a metaphor for the sum total of the laws of nature. And Einstein did not feel that the laws of nature should allow for randomness and uncertainty.
Most contemporary scientists regard Einstein's opposition to quantum mechanics as old-fashioned and misguided. But even today, not all physicists agree on how to interpret the meaning of the new quantum laws of nature or the role of randomness in the universe. This much is fairly certain, though; whatever new theories and new discoveries await, the success of quantum mechanics makes it very unlikely that we will ever return to a worldview that is as strictly deterministic as Newton’s. For better or worse, we have made some room in the laws of nature for ourselves.
The full implications of quantum mechanics are beyond the scope of this book and this course. Next semester, I teach a course called “The Quantum Universe” that explores the history and the development of these ideas in great detail. For now it is enough to know this: If you are troubled by the idea that you are trapped in a deterministic, Newtonian cosmos with no control over your actions or your future, quantum mechanics may be just the thing to rescue you from this oppressive sense of inevitability.
Or perhaps not. Einstein was notoriously opposed to the seeming randomness of quantum theory, famously uttering the dismissive ”I do not believe that God plays dice with the universe”. Of course, we know from Einstein’s other writings that he was not speaking of a traditional, anthropomorphic, personal, Judeo-Christian God when he made remarks like this. The God of Einstein was more like a metaphor for the sum total of the laws of nature. And Einstein did not feel that the laws of nature should allow for randomness and uncertainty.
Most contemporary scientists regard Einstein's opposition to quantum mechanics as old-fashioned and misguided. But even today, not all physicists agree on how to interpret the meaning of the new quantum laws of nature or the role of randomness in the universe. This much is fairly certain, though; whatever new theories and new discoveries await, the success of quantum mechanics makes it very unlikely that we will ever return to a worldview that is as strictly deterministic as Newton’s. For better or worse, we have made some room in the laws of nature for ourselves.
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