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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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What do you like better...vulnerability or invulnerability?
In case anyone was wondering about the state of string theory today, this review by Sean Carroll of Lee Smolin's new book, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, and the subsequent debate in the comment thread (in which Lee Smolin participates) gives a good picture. I gave myself permission to skip over the bits that read like this:
"The correlation function W(x,y) ~ |x-y|^-2h. is clearly not diffeomorphism invariant."and instead attempt to grasp the bits that read like this:
"[A fundamental theory] cannot-by definition-have a more fundamental underpinning. So it must stand up on its own. This means we must be able to formulate it cleanly and precisely and the important properties it enjoys should be theorems. It doesn’t mean physicists should all work at a rigorous level, but that rigorous framework must be there to refer to.
This is not an unrealizable ideal. Classical Newtonian mechanics satisfies it. So does classical statistical mechanics, ordinary non-relativisitic quantum mechanics and general relativity. In each of these cases there is a body of rigorous results and a community of mathematical physicists who work on them.
Is this too much to hope for theories of quantum gravity. No!"
 | I will be giving a free performative lecture at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ont. on Sunday, October 15th at 1:30pm, and then Rebecca Diederichs, Gordon Hicks and I, with participation from the Queen's Department of Physics, will be hosting a free workshop/lab at the gallery until 5pm. Please join us for the events and visit our exhibition, Neutrinos They Are Very Small (on display until December 10th). Note: Rumour has it our lovely catalogue designed by the inimitable Lisa Kiss might be delivered in time for the event. Agnes Etherington Art Centre University Avenue at Bader Lane Queen's University, Kingston, ON Tel: 613.533.2190 | Fax: 613.533.6765 Email: aeac@post.queensu.ca |
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I just deleted the post that was here. It was much too long and self-indulgent. The best bit was this: ...I've been worrying a lot about the preponderance of supernatural tv shows & movies. If it ain't reality tv, it's vampires, psychics, demons and zombies. I like some of this stuff a lot (especially the zombies) but why all the fantasy? Is it the culture-tainment industry's way of accepting and answering to the rise of the religious right to power in North America? Is it simply an escape? Are we playing at magic in an attempt to imbue a culture based on commodity and surface with some kind of mythic depth?
And this other bit: ...I've also just started reading Gwynne Dyer's revised edition of WAR, and the very first page of the first chapter gave me something concrete:
Soldiers often prefer to cloak the harsh realities of their trade in idealism or sentimentality, as much to protect themselves from the truth as to hide it from the rest of us, but at the professional level they have never lost sight of the fact that the key to military success is cost-effective killing. The relentless search for efficiency in killing that ultimately led to the development of nuclear weapons was just as methodical when the only means of introducing lethal bits of metal into an enemy's body was by muscle power.Just like urban planning, health care and education, war planning is something that society does by choice, and Canada is no exception.
NOW magazine this week has a piece by Dyer about Afghanistan:
The combat in Afghanistan is more severe and sustained than anything seen in Iraq, for the Taliban fight in organized units with good light infantry weapons. In the past month, Britain and Canada have had about half as many soldiers killed in Afghanistan as the U.S. lost in Iraq in the same time, out of a combat force perhaps one-10th as big.How is this a good choice? After reading a bit of Dyer I understand better how our soldiers might genuinely feel un-supported by those of us who would prefer that they come home, because, like little children deciding not to clap their hands to keep Tinkerbell alive, we are failing to believe in the myths that sustain them, such as the oft-repeated (and insulting to our intelligence) rallying cry that they are protecting us from terrorists. Worrying that the military is perhaps not doing its job at cost-efficient killing in Afghanistan demonstrates a cultural lack of fantasy. We consumer-citizens are supposed to be eating up the narratives we are fed, not calling for accountability.