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0300254172
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| 0300254172
| 3.89
| 35
| Sep 27, 2022
| Sep 27, 2022
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liked it
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National history, except honest: all about the huge international effects coming in and firing out from the subject nation. Pittock is sceptical, as y
National history, except honest: all about the huge international effects coming in and firing out from the subject nation. Pittock is sceptical, as you have to be with things as romanticised and politicised as small-country national identity. He has a long popup box about how the Highlands are bullshit, for instance. [There are now] five times as many Scots by birth or descent in the world as live in the country The important bit, familiar to anyone paying attention (which excludes most Scots in my ken) is the enthusiastic role of Scots in conquest and slaving. (in the Scandinavian and Russian conquests as mercenaries, in Ulster and Darien as colonisers, later in the British Empire as subject imperialists crushing Quebec or sepoys or .) These empires would mot have worked without Scotch soldiers - 64 per cent of Swedish naval captains were Scottish by the late 1620s., the Scottish Army composed almost 60 per cent of [Cromwell’s] army . This is inconvenient for people who trade in symbols or consume them. It doesn’t much sound like an underdog. It’s easy to see why you’d want to portray your country as subjected to things rather than subjecting others to things. As usual with history books, there’s a forest of irrelevant detail and you’re mostly left to divine the significant bits and judge how cherrypicked this all is yourself. There were only fifty Scots in London in 1567… the total number of Scots in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth ranged as high as 40,000. But assuming you give a shit about the topic and can tell why e.g. the Covenant of 1638 is a big deal, it’s a good book. I wish he’d make judgments more - Charles’ move to ally with Spain in return for troops to defeat the Covenanters in 1640 was alike toxic and incompetent: hallmarks of his government. - but he’s already above baseline for his profession. It has been years since I read prose this academic though. The Scotland of this study articulated itself distinctly in terms of its foundation myth and national story and its literary relationship to the classical and European generic and canonical traditions. It inflected and interpreted external influences – Dutch, French, English – towards its own specific conditions, and its people articulated themselves in national terms wherever they were in the world, performing identity in diaspora. But I can still parse this stuff and Pittock lacks the vices that usually attend such constipated writing (vagueness, extremism, self-congratulation, lazy deconstruction, applause lights, innumeracy, bias). Actually a lot of it is concentrated in the introduction, so just skip that. ...more |
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019875535X
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| Mar 06, 2020
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really liked it
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A good book about maximally important ideas. She invites various technical experts to write some info boxes about mathematical matters, which is extre
A good book about maximally important ideas. She invites various technical experts to write some info boxes about mathematical matters, which is extremely admirable since the meat of Ramsey is all in the maths and the logic. Here's an essay with my gushing thoughts on his work. We can evaluate the various outlooks on life and see which have the best consequences. In his assessment, the key to meaning in life is to be optimistic, thrilled, and actively try to improve conditions for people now and in the future. Live as fully and as ethically as you can, was his conclusion. Ramsey understood that inequalities get in the way of being thrilled by life. He put much effort into trying to make the world a fairer place. He also understood that individuals’ psychological makeups have an impact on whether one is depressed or not. His own tendency was to be cheerful—he was remembered as always smiling and looking rather pleased, not so much with himself but with things in general. He knew that Wittgenstein was not so disposed. But Ramsey too had periods of crippling anguish, and he thought that one should try to improve one’s life by engaging with what clinical psychology has to offer and by trying to be happy. If psychology can help change our outlook for the better, we should avail ourselves of it, as he had. * I only spotted Misak being fatuous once, taking the usual liberty where philosophers speak shit about utilitarianism as if it was for idiots: Ramsey was not a full-out utilitarian, to whom discounting is the obvious and correct thing to do. -_- uh huh. * How bloody erotic the (defiance of the) old morality seems from my safe remove. If you're caught you lose your job, like Empson, fired for owning condoms. * It is tragic that he wasted months of his life (2% of it) with Freudians who were unfit to treat him -- among all people they were unfit to treat. Misak repeatedly refers to Frank being 'cured' by them. This seems inapt: at the time of the analysis, he was physically distant from his forbidden crush for 6 months and was forbidden from writing to her. Seems enough to get over it! Talking to the funny Austrian was just sauce. Maybe. He also suggested to Frank that he had an Oedipus fixation, drawing on the Freudian contention that every son wants to kill his father so that he can have sex with his mother. Glover told Frank to have a talk with Margaret, and that seems to have helped: ‘I did and she was awfully nice.’ But his three months or so with Glover were on the whole not working: ‘It wasn’t really improving my mind very much, so I decided to stop it and go back to sea.’ Margaret too was being psychoanalysed, by Dr James Glover, the brother of Frank’s therapist. James Glover was also psychoanalysing Dick and Geoff. Their analysts had no qualms about discussing a patient’s analysis not only amongst themselves, but also with other patients. [Wittgenstein] had never before said of anyone that they had understood the [Tractatus] and, as far as I know, he would never say it again. The book is another reminder of Wittgenstein's cruelty and shallowness. But his mistakes were emotionally rich, and so we keep talking about him. I cannot forgive Wittgenstein's obituary for Ramsey: Ramsey’s mind repulsed me. When I came to Cambridge months ago I thought that I would not be able to have dealings with him, for I had such unpleasant memories of Or this Frank’s sisters remembered that he wrote a terrible letter to their father, saying that Arthur had failed to get Frank proper medical treatment and so was responsible for his death. The gratuitous cruelty leaves one aghast. Wittgenstein was notoriously and severely self-critical. But he seems not to have understood that extending his brand of moral self-criticism to others was itself not very moral. This surprised me though: on the death-bed he told jokes, with either reading (agitation or kind deflection) uncharacteristic of him: Frances said that it was clear that Wittgenstein shared with her both an immense personal sadness, as well as sympathy for Lettice. But he made poor and flippant jokes, perhaps to disguise emotions he couldn’t cope with, or perhaps to help Lettice keep her composure. ...more |
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Jan 28, 2020
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0099494280
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| 0099494280
| 3.98
| 11,540
| Jul 03, 2007
| May 27, 2008
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it was ok
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1848312385
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| 1848312385
| 3.94
| 1,322
| 2009
| Jan 01, 2011
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liked it
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Not so much a biography: instead a study of recent Russian anti-Semitism, the viciousness of Soviet academia, and but also the wonderful alternative s
Not so much a biography: instead a study of recent Russian anti-Semitism, the viciousness of Soviet academia, and but also the wonderful alternative subculture that lived uneasily within it. This subculture hid inside the superhuman apolitical dreamland, mathematics.* It could only exist because of the sacrifices of famous and decent men, Kolmogorov and Aleksandrov. Their selective maths schools seem to have been the only nice places to be in the entire empire, for any intellectual with a taste for actual discourse, or for the truth. (Reasons it can't be so much a biography: the subject refused to talk to her, does things that are very hard to explain, and doesn't go out much.) The teacher Ryzhik's story about the evil entrance exam he sat is so, so sad: “Coffins” were questions specially designed for the Jewish applicants... rejection was administered in a peculiarly sadistic way... if [Jews] succeeded in answering correctly the two or three questions on the ticket, then, alone in the room with the examiners, they would be casually issued an extra question... a problem not merely complex but unsolvable. The examiners would then nail the cover of the coffin shut: the Jewish applicant had failed the exam... Gessen is well-placed to write this - she was a maths nerd in Soviet Russia around the same time. As far as I can tell (which isn't very far) her grasp of the maths (one chapter for the crown jewel) is fit for purpose. But Gessen is out to bust Perelman's reputation for hyper-individualism; so she focusses on the devoted teachers and functionaries that pulled strings to get an abrasive Jew into the heart of Soviet academia, and his incredible luck in starting graduate study just as Glasnost happened. She wants to highlight the poverty of his character - his antisocial withdrawal, his complete and intentional ignorance of politics, his naivete, his savantism. It doesn't work. Yes, he's rigid; maybe he is composed of a curiosity, a competitiveness, an ethics, and nothing else (no vanity, humour, romance, charisma, empathy, theory of mind, tolerance, compromise, doubt). So what? Why does everyone need to be rounded? Does she sneer at athletes, the other people with lives this seemingly contorted and simple? David Foster Wallace managed to get over himself, on this note:
Gessen is, to be frank, quite cruel: she never passes up an opportunity to mention appearances - that that athletic boy of 1970 is "now an overweight and balding computer scientist", that the house of a man caring for his wife with late-stage dementia is "a messy place, lived in awkwardly" and he himself "similarly unkempt"; that Perelman didn't change his underwear or clip his nails as a teen. This is the shallow side of the New Yorker style on show - or else the malign side of Russian honesty. Either way fuck it. (Though Perelman would probably approve.)
The great mystery, which Gessen understandably can't touch, is why after 36 years of focus he suddenly stopped doing the only thing he'd ever done. How could he? How can that much momentum be shed? What does such a man do next? Subtract a star if you don't care about maths or if you can't abide people being mean to nerds (as both the old apparatchiks and Gessen were). --- * One of the oddest things about Perelman, because it maybe explains him turning down a million quid and the highest honours the world can bestow, is that he'd disagree with that sentence: maths, the least animal and least irrational thing we have, is too political for him. There was a little bit of nasty jostling at the time of the announcement - but nothing compared to any other science, let alone any government. Maybe the bubble everyone set up for him was bad for him, because it robbed him of perspective and so made the mild case of fuckery seem like a complete invalidation of mathematical culture. But maybe a rigorous rule-based mind would always explode eventually even given a scale to measure instances of bias. ...more |
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0571225233
| 9780571225231
| 0571225233
| 4.08
| 4,057
| Aug 19, 2010
| Aug 19, 2010
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it was amazing
| ‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles th ‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles the issue. He is not scoring political points, or pleasing his friends, or giving shrewd knocks to his enemies. He expects to persuade people. He thinks that scientists are rational beings who respond to logic if you show it to them. Of course, he judges everybody by himself. He makes his mind up according to induction and deduction. Therefore, everyone does.’ according to his daughter... he wrote to every Soviet leader from Stalin to Andropov [telling them they were doing it all wrong]... without making any reference to demand or to markets, Kantorovich had discovered a demand-like logic in the structure of production itself. In his scheme, it was the volume of planned output that was to be maximised, not the customer’s satisfaction, but he had still introduced the idea that the utility of the output to somebody should be the guide to how production was configured. What is a question mark? An exclamation mark in middle age Reminder of what a book can be and almost never is. Above mere nonfiction and mere fiction. A deep and moving treatment of one of the most important questions (how can we make everyone happy?) and my current fixation (how can we make people realise the giant romance and supreme moral imperative of technology and work?). A light on the ignored gears that drive the world, the terminally boring made fascinating by the sheer force of understanding and curiosity and taste. A celebration of an unjustly obscure great man, Leonid Kantorovich, and woman, Raissa Berg, and man, Alexander Galich. A moving portrait of a great and terrible man, Nikita Khrushchev. Comically well-researched (he reads Brezhnev's tailor's memoirs; he visits the dance hall; "all of the tattoo designs here are authentic, and can be found in Danzig Baldaev et al., Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Gottingen: Steidl, 2004)"), synthesising a vast literature (and but also a single sampled path taken though its indeterminacies). I care for every character, including the monsters. Real tragedy - for some of them really did mean well. We begin in the confident rationalism of catch-up-growth in a socialised economy. It's easy to forget that even the capitalist economists briefly glumly agreed that the reds had the edge in growth: If he could solve the problems people brought to the institute, it made the world a fraction better. The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, or allowing the old forces of superstition and greed to push people around. Here, and nowhere else, reason was in charge... The Plan: Gosplan’s annual output of commodity allocations... 11,500 pages in seventy volumes [nearly all computed by hand, recalculated hundreds of times each year] Spufford does more to make me feel Khruschchev's coarseness, idealism, and vitality than reading his smuggled memoirs did, and despite S often using the same direct quotes: They tried to crush us over and over again, but we wouldn’t be crushed. We drove off the Whites. We winkled out the priests, out of the churches and more important out of people’s minds. We got rid of the shopkeepers, thieving bastards, getting their dirty fingers in every deal, making every straight thing crooked. We dragged the farmers into the twentieth century, and that was hard, that was a cruel business and there were some hungry years there, but it had to be done, we had to get the muck off our boots. We realised there were saboteurs and enemies among us, and we caught them, but it drove us mad for a while, and for a while we were seeing enemies and saboteurs everywhere, and hurting people who were brothers, sisters, good friends, honest Spufford manages this without knowing Russian! Your mental picture of the Red Army’s advance into Nazi-occupied Europe is not complete if it does not include, alongside the mass rapes and the dromedaries pulling baggage wagons, the sight of Eddie Rosner and his band playing ‘The Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ among the ruins of cities The crux, the point at which the dream died, and forever: If they could produce a million tons of steel, they could produce a million tons of anything (No.) Throughout this book, it is necessary to remember that, on certain crucial points, most people in the Soviet Union will have known less about its history than does an averagely-informed Westerner in the twenty-first century The deep inequality of the state which sacrificed all values except growth and equality: life was pretty good up at the top, with a salary twenty times, thirty times the wages on the shopfloor, as steep a relative reward as the spoils of any capitalist executive. There’d be a car and a cook and a housekeeper, and a fur coat for Mrs Red Plenty to wear when the frost bit. There’d be a dacha in the country, from whose verandah the favoured citizen could survey the new world growing down below The reserved car lanes for Party officials is only the most visible division. One remarkable bit involves the distinction between the original revolutionaries and the professionals (represented by Kosygin and Brezhnev). The sociopaths and mops. The most egregious and tragic goodharting in human history. It almost looked like Paris. But he had seen Paris. Moreover he worked in film: he saw this city, and he couldn’t help but notice the way its surfaces habitually turned face-outward to be seen, instead of inwards for the comfort of the inhabitants. He recognised the thinness of the scrim, the cutting of corners where the audience would have its attention elsewhere and be content to register a general blur of grandeur. Those doors would be out of focus anyway: who needed to make sure they actually fitted their frames? The skyscrapers blocked out bold volumes of air, the walls of the city were receding planes, leading the eye back to a sky painted on glass. Moscow was a set, and like all sets looked more convincing from the middle distance than close up.He had started to brood lately on what was behind it; on what you would find if you peeled back a corner of the painted hardboard... On top of everything else it is, it is one of the great works of scientist fiction, an actual depiction of actual thought (though as usual, not the steps of the mathematics). She had her own professional vision which removed her, in some ways, even further from everyday human sympathies, when she was looking through her science’s eyes. She too was a believer in a world that could be reduced, along one dimension of its existence, to information: only in her case, it was the information of the genes, not the information of the computing circuit, which stood as the pattern of patterns. And once you had seen it, once you had parted the curtains of the visible world and seen that human beings were only temporary expressions of ancient information, dimly seen in tiny glimpses by the light of science’s deductive flashlight, but glimpsed enough to tell that it was vast, and intricate, and slowly changing by indifferent rules of its own as it went on its way into a far future – then all the laws and plans of the self-important present looked like momentary tics and jitters in comparison. A dark message, posted from the past to the future; a dark armada, floating through time. Dark masses, moving in the dark. Dark water. Dark ocean swell... See also Crooked Timber. ...more |
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3.72
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| Jan 01, 2012
| 2012
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liked it
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Another history of the origins of science: our long trek to GWAS, livermorium, and CERN via astrology, natural magic, alchemy, Neoplatonism, herbalism, occultism, and philosophy. So, superficially, the book is just about an especially fruity context of discovery. But this period holds two of the most important lessons in history: 1) science grew out of work by people who diverge wildly from the modern idea and practice of science, whose variously false frameworks led to the Royal Society and e.g. the Newtonian triumph. (And from there to contemporary, professional, university science.) So wrong people can still make progress if their errors are uncorrelated with the prevailing errors. And, 2) a small number of the most powerful people in Britain - the Lord Chancellor, the king's physicians, the chaplain of the young Elector Palatine and bishop of Chester, London's great architect, Privy Councillors * - successfully pushed a massive philosophical change, and thereby contributed to most of our greatest achievements: smallpox eradication, Sputnik and Voyager, the Green Revolution, and the unmanageably broad boons of computing are partly theirs. The received view of all this is one-dimensional: you have superstitious, pompous cretins at one end and rational, experimental moderns at the other. But really you need five axes before you get a basic understanding of the great, great revolution that began in the C16th - before you can see how science differs from every other community: Supernaturalism vs Naturalism. Did they explain things solely in terms of natural causes? (Absentee Gods only.) Apriori vs Aposteriori. Did they view actual observation as decisive and indispensable? ** Qualitative vs Quantitative. Did they make measurements? Did they model the data? Did they use standard units? Holism vs Reductionism. Did they analyse things into their constituent features? Did they explain phenomena in terms of ? Infallibilism vs Fallibilism. Did they allow for the possibility of error? Did they view uncertain knowledge as still worthwhile? *** **** ^ So I'm modelling science as naturalist, fallibilist, quantitative empiricism with pretensions to openness. I've categorised the early scientists mentioned in Curiosity according to this: you can see the data with additional justifications here. (Ball doesn't state this model, but it floats around in his debunkings and "well actually"s.) All of the pieces of science are very ancient - we had mathematics and data collection well before the Ten Commandments, naturalism before Buddha and Confucius, reductionism before the Peloponnesian War at least one controlled trial centuries before Christ, fallibilism likewise. Everything was ready BCE; we can see indirect evidence of this in the astonishing works of Ancient Greek engineers, mostly unmatched for 1000 years until y'know. So the question is not "was Bacon the most original blah blah?": he wasn't, particularly when you remember Alhazen's Baconian method, developed in the C11th. But we need an explanation for how we messed it up so badly. The received view, which is all I have at the moment, is that the fall of Rome, Christian anti-intellectualism and, later, the enshrining of Aristotelian mistakes was enough to destroy and suppress the ideas. I want deeper explanations though. (For instance, what did we do to the economy?) A fun regression on this data would be to see how my scienciness measure correlates with the importance of the person's work. It would not be that highly proportional, in this time period. *************************************************************** Back to the book eh! Book structure is lots of little chapters on fairly disjointed topics: early modern ideas of space travel, universal language, pumps, etc. Chapter on "cabinets of curiosity" is great though: suddenly their dull zany blare makes sense and I want to build one:
Ball doesn't like us calling the Scientific Revolution a revolution, and I agree: the revolution didn't consist in the theories of Bacon or Newton: it consists in the diffusion of the worldview into all subjects and all inquiry. It transformed society and gave us marvels, but it hasn't finished happening. The general will, or default state, is still strongly unscientific. (The largest and most grievous holdout, larger even than the enduring hold of fideist religion, is our tribal politics and our largely nonempirical government policy.) Ball expends a lot of time on a history of wonder vs curiosity vs dispassionate robot inquiry. People hated all of these things for various reasons, up until the Renaissance when curiosity became acceptable on what are now classic economic grounds, or in line with the Italian cult of the virtuoso - someone who's so bloody brilliant that you have to just let him get on with it. I always like Ball's drawling prose and catty editorialising. (For instance, Margaret Cavendish - the darling of arts academics who latch on to the only woman in sight in this period - gets a round dissing by Ball, as an anti-experiment idiot, a vitalist, and a misogynist.) Stimulating as always. * Bacon has some claim to being the most influential philosopher ever, in terms of counterfactual effect on history. (Rather than number of bloody citations!) No-one with his social standing was resisting the Aristotelian consensus in 1620; his prototype scientific method is a century ahead of its time. (Yes, ibn al-Haytham's was 7 centuries ahead of its time, but to limited avail.)⏎ ** This one is hard to refer to, because we now find it incredibly easy to understand why "go and look" works as a general route to knowledge; Medieval thought rejected this on the basis of things like the problem of induction. The cliched way to refer to the split between those who want to start with the apriori and those who want to start with data is "Rationalism" vs "Empiricism". But these words confuse people: the two of them are also used in a C17th debate about psychology, to do with the nature of mental content. More: it can't be a dichotomy, since many of the greatest rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz) were experimentalists too, doing what we now call empirical work. Three meanings of rationalism, and three words for them: 'Rationalism1': Belief in innate ideas. Call it 'Continental Rationalism'. Descartes and Leibniz but not Dawkins and Shermer. 'Rationalism2': Belief in the supremacy of apriori knowledge over empirical knowledge. Call it 'apriorism'. Aristotle was apriorist, as was Descartes. 'Rationalism3': Belief that everything should be subject to reason and evidence. Includes Descartes and Leibniz and Dawkins and Shermer. Contemporary rationalists are highly if not radically empiricist. I use Alberto Vanzo's criteria for deciding if someone was enough of an experimentalist: let us consider four typical features of early modern experimental philosophers: This is unusually inclusive: the famous Rationalist Leibniz counts as experimental under this rubric. But a stronger definition of aposteriorist - like "refuses to use purely analytic reasoning", or even "spent most of their time running experiments and analysing data" would exclude many contemporary scientists. Sticking with Vanzo for now. ⏎ *** Hard to imagine a fallibilist apriorist: perhaps Lakatos. (Some say Leibniz was, in practice.) I actually have met a methodist infallibilist apriorist, but I won't meet another. ⏎ **** I had included "openness" in the model - Obscurantism vs Openness. Did they write in the vernacular? Did they publish for a wide readership? Did they spurn Noble Lies? Did they encourage replications with and data sharing? Did they build scholarly networks? - but I admit this is just wishful/normative thinking: modern academic science fails at this. Whether with its low-status replications, unreadable prose, paywalls on most research (tax-funded or no), pathetically low levels of data sharing, or the prevalence of noble lies... But it's definitely a core aspiration now: the greedy impulse behind hermeticism is blatantly unscientific, if not actually shunned by actual scientists. First, lip service... Things can be science without being published, obviously: consider the invention of public key cryptography by a GCHQ wonk, classified for 25 years - or even the secret infrastructure and algorithmics of high-frequency trading. ^ Obviously these five factors aren't the end of the matter either. But I reckon it catches a decent amount of the variance in the term "scientist". Others e.g. Particularism vs Consilience. Did they believe that the scientific method could explain every phenomenon? Realism vs Instrumentalism. Most scientists are realists about best current theories Theism vs Nontheism I had included non-theism in the core of modern science - and so it is, in the form of strong naturalism. Scientists, on the other hand, differ from this, globally. This is partially because humans are so compartmentalised and can hold severe contradictions indefinitely. But, clearly, atheism is not an essential part of the modern method. But causal closure and (at most) a private faith are. ...more |
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it was amazing
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There are few, if any, other instances in recorded history where we have the conversations of leading figures as they complete one era,[image] There are few, if any, other instances in recorded history where we have the conversations of leading figures as they complete one era, come to terms with it, and prepare their strategy for the next. It is as though these men were lifted out of history at a crucial turning point—from the age of conventional weapons to the nuclear era — placed within a timeless container and told to discuss their past and future as the recorders roll.- Jeremy Bernstein Astonishingly dramatic; also as pure as primary sources get. These reports were the result of months of secret eavesdropping on the German nuclear scientists, including after they hear of Hiroshima. Innocent of the microphones, the men concede their ignorance without ego, their character without any obfuscating propriety. (There are still two impurities: their words are both transcribed and translated by strangers. The physicists speak to us here in full sentences, with little of the fragmentariness and repetition of real speech. And it takes someone as highly trained as Bernstein to get us over the technical barrier.) Even so, this is as plain and self-interpreting as history gets. For six months they play madlibs, argue, and run around the garden, while the English and we listen in. Hahn is a sweetheart and von Laue a droopy hero. The Party functionary Diebner is comic, even though he has most responsibility for the Nazi weapons project. Harteck is the most technically astute by far: he guesses a huge amount correctly, all in the teeth of loud ignorance by his more prestigious peers. von Weizsacker is the slimiest. Heisenberg is just weird: he has a very faint echo of the strange clear-sight-and-moral-vacuum of Eichmann. Enormous intelligence and no sense. The morality of their wartime actions does not come up very much (except when raised by sweetheart Hahn or von Laue). They are mostly glad of the destruction of the Nazis, and Wirtz is horrified by the scale and singularity of SS murder. But the rest are more self-regarding than pro or anti Nazi. (Again, it is wonderful to read these and actually know they meant it.) (What about the morality of our reading the reports? I don't have a clear opinion, but doing so after their deaths seems mostly fair.) They very often speak about money, Heisenberg in particular. (Not just research funding or aid for their families in Occupied Germany, but dolla dolla bills.) On hearing that Hahn had won a Nobel: "it says that you are supposed to receive the Nobel Prize for 1944." The excitement that struck the ten detainees at this moment is hard to describe in a few words. Hahn did not believe it at first. In the beginning he turned away all the offers of congratulations. But gradually we broke through, with Heisenberg in the lead, who congratulated him heartily on the 6200 pounds. As you can see, Bernstein's editorial voice is a bit strong. But his other qualities are huge and unique: he knew some of the protagonists personally, and worked on nuclear weaponry himself. He is out to get Heisenberg, and overreads a few times. But this is because people (Powers, Frayn to a degree) persist in rose-tinting him: there's this idea that Heisenberg feigned incompetence at reactor-making as anti-Nazi activism. The transcripts make clear that he'd have made a bomb if he could, not because he is a Nazi or a German but because he was amorally curious, and hungry for primacy. Heisenberg does object to Nazism. But not very strongly. Bernstein's conclusion is that the project was pretty much a shambles. They had a two-year head start on the Allies, but failed for several reasons: they had < 1% of the funding of the Manhattan Project, an unbelievably bad administration and communication of data and ideas, and key resources like deuterium kept getting bombed. But Bernstein feels able to go for the jugular: reading this lecture, I am once again struck by the intellectual thinness of this group. Here are ten German nuclear scientists — nine if one does not count von Laue — who are supposed to be the cream of the crop, the intellectual elite, of German nuclear physics, men who had been working on these questions for several years. And look at the discussion it produced. Yet even with these handicaps, it looks like Harteck could have built a basic pile in 1940, if the project was headed by someone less arrogant than Heisenberg. And that pile would have brought all the funding, and maybe sorted out their many collective muddles and lack of engineering care. 5/5 for Bernstein's commentary and the hair-raising fact of their existence. ...more |
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| Jan 01, 2014
| Mar 11, 2014
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liked it
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How did the Roman empire last so long with leaders like this? Seneca is complex, if by complex you mean "among the most contradictory people in history How did the Roman empire last so long with leaders like this? Seneca is complex, if by complex you mean "among the most contradictory people in history". He was a vocal ascetic and one of the richest men in the world. He was a beautiful exponent of liberty and prudence, and a shill for an insane rapist for a decade - but it would have worse to abandon Rome to Nero and his rapey mates. Thrasea Paetus is the respective true stoic, the noble abstainer. Classic historian move: when dealing with possibilities that don't appeal to him, Romm just hems and haws and says that they're implausible; I'm not even mad. He also reports very dubious "evidence" via Dio and Tacitus, like the content of private conversations between Agrippina and Nero with no one else present. Sense of doom on Seneca's family throughout, including his blameless nephew. Why didn't they run? They were so rich, and the government was so much smaller and poorly-informed. ...more |
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0743264738
| 9780743264730
| 0743264738
| 4.16
| 189,022
| Apr 10, 2007
| Apr 10, 2007
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really liked it
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Physics becomes in those years the greatest collective work of art of the twentieth century. - Jacob Bronowski What to say about the stereotypica [image]
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Physics becomes in those years the greatest collective work of art of the twentieth century. - Jacob Bronowski What to say about the stereotypically great? Start by scrubbing off the accumulated century of journalism and appropriations. Einstein's scientific achievements: - A model of Brownian motion: the decisive argument for the existence of atoms. His model enabled experimental confirmation of Dalton's theory, after a hundred years of denial or instrumentalism. - An elementary particle, the photon. The atomic hypothesis applied even to light. - A law for the photoelectric effect, implying a quantum theory of all EM radiation. (A realist about quanta, unlike Planck.) - So also lots of pieces of the "old" quantum theory. - A theory of light and so space and time, special relativity. - A physical constraint on metaphysics: no absolute time. - A fairly consequential law, mass-energy equivalence - A flawed but progressive theory of heat capacity, the Einstein theory of solids - A better method of analysing quantum systems, "EBK". An ignored semiclassical precursor to quantum chaos theory. - The greatest scientific theory, General Relativity. Explaining gravity and, so, the shape of the universe. - Implies the first modern cosmology - Gravitational lensing (confirmed 1998) - Inadvertently predicted dark energy. - A crucial experiment: gravitational waves. (Confirmed 2015.) - Implies a whole lot more like black holes but you can't name everything "Einstein thing". - A general method for thermodynamics and information theory: Bose-Einstein statistics. - New state of matter: the Bose–Einstein condensate - Fruitful failed theory: first local hidden variable theory - A profound phenomenon, quantum entanglement. (Susskind calls entanglement "Einstein's last great discovery", though he 'discovered' it by trying to reductio away Copenhagen interpretation, taking entanglement to be a disproof.) (Confirmed properly 2015.) - A crucial experiment for a metaphysical principle, local realism is false!: EPR - Inadvertently, a physical constraint on metaphysics: nonlocality. - Thought-experiment: The content of the "Schrödinger's" cat setup - Repostulation of wormholes. (Not confirmed.) - Isotope separation methods for the Manhattan project. - Also a nontoxic fridge Besides his own prize, confirmations of Einstein's theories have led to 4 Nobel Prizes (1922, 1923, 1997, 2001) so far, and first-order extensions several more (1927, 1929, 1933 at very least). We should expect a few more, for grav waves and not inconceivably for wormholes, some day. Isaacson, like most people, portrays Einstein's post-1935 work as a dogmatic waste - he spent about thirty years straining to produce a field theory that could get rid of the spookiness and probabilism of QM. If you compare the output of the first half of his life to the second, sure it looks bad. But he was giving classical physics (determinism, continuousness, simplicity, fierce parsimony, beauty-based reasoning) a well-deserved last shake. Imagine the strength of will needed to maintain full-time effort over thirty years of failures, with your whipsmart peers all tutting and ignoring you. His unified field efforts are methodologically sort of like string theory: a hubristic search over mathematical forms without contact with the actually physical to help limit the formal space. And he actually had a decent decision-theoretic argument for his doomed crusade: When a colleague asked him one day why he was spending — perhaps squandering — his time in this lonely endeavor, he replied that even if the chance of finding a unified theory was small, the attempt was worthy. He had already made his name, he noted. His position was secure, and he could afford to take the risk and expend the time. A younger theorist, however, could not take such a risk, for he might thus sacrifice a promising career. So, Einstein said, it was his duty to do it. People also try to attach shame to him for his wildly stubborn anti-Copenhagen crusade: years spent thinking up tricky counterexamples for the young mechanicians, like an angry philosopher. But I think he had a good effect on the discourse, constantly calling them to order, and leaving it clear, after all, that it is a consistent view of the evidence. The only unforgiveable bit in his later conservatism is that he ignored the other half of the fundamental forces, the strong and weak forces, and for decades. Two forces was hard enough to unify. I suppose another point against his long, long Advanced Studies is that he could have done even more if he had helped push QM along; as late as 1946, Wheeler tried to convince him to join in. As it is we have evidence against the unified field: "Einstein failed". ************************************************** Einstein is like Bertrand Russell, only much more so: even more brilliant, even more rebellious, even more politically active, even more aloof, even more relentless, even more neglectful of his family. (Russell, on hearing relativity for the first time: "To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.") Along with Ibn Rushd, Leonardo, Pascal, Leibniz, Darwin, Peirce, Russell, Turing, Chomsky, Mackay*, Einstein is one of our rare complete intellectuals: huge achievements in science, beautiful writing, good jokes, original philosophy, moral seriousness. To have warmth too, as Einstein does abundantly, doesn't have much of a precedent. However much Einstein is misattributed vaguely pleasant, vaguely droll, vaguely radical statements, the fact is he actually was brilliant, pleasant, funny, radical. Believe the hype. * The usual word is 'polymath', sure, but although we are mad keen on polymaths, their generalism is seen as a laudable extra, rather than the vital service I now think they alone can give: you want people who have proven they can discover truths to tackle your ancient ill-defined questions (beauty, justice, existence). And you can't do good unless you know a great deal about the targets of your morals; you want the vast imaginative search over philosophical possibilities to be aided by what we actually know. (As the noted writer against scientism, Ludwig Wittgenstein put it:
) Maxwell, Boltzmann, Schrödinger, and Feynman basically fit the above: they are as good at writing and philosophy as they are at physics, and very funny to boot. But they didn't push society forward much (...) Goethe tried admirably, but didn't achieve much science. Descartes should definitely be on there but eh. Hilary Putnam discovered important logical results and has all the other virtues, but I guess science is a stretch?. von Neumann covered perhaps the most intellectual ground of all of these people, but I'm not sure he had a moral or political life to speak of. Herbert Simon is deep and broad and fun. And Bohr is brilliant and moral but can't write. (There's others I'd include, but won't because I know I'm a fanboy** / it is too soon to say: Scott Aaronson, David Pearce, Nick Bostrom.) ** A new Moore's paradox: "I know I'm a fanboy, but my thinker is still better than your thinker." ******************************************** What was so moral about him? Well, he was ahead of his time (still is): - Denounced WWI as the senseless crap it was. - Never went to the Soviet empire (despite repeated invites). - Denounced the Nazis from '31, despite/because of public threats to his life. - Flipped from pacifism at the right moment. - Many early actions for US civil rights, including work against McCarthyism. - Sold his original manuscripts for War Bonds Even his Zionism was enlightened (pro-migration, anti-state, anti-Begin): “Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs,” he wrote [Chaim] Weizmann in 1929, “then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering.” ********************************************** One particularly charming bit in this book covers Einstein's long friendship with the Queen Mother of Belgium. When Szilard warns him that nuclear fission has been achieved and could give the Nazis dominion over all, Einstein's first thought is to ask Elisabeth to sort it out, by grabbing all the Central African uranium and sending it far from the Nazis. (As it happens, the Uranverein got their uranium from Czechoslovakia.) ****************************************** Isaacson read all the letters, formed a view on all the academic controversies (Maric's contribution, baby Lieserl, what sort of deist or Zionist or pacifist he was), and covers most of the papers, recasting the classic thought experiments very lucidly. This was a huge pleasure. Read with Wikipedia open, though: C20th physics and its physicists are way too deep and broad for one book. |
Notes are private!
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