The History of Byzantium

 

I'm back to where I was in November 2016. Now (and then) I've deleted my account in the fascist cesspool of X, and my Washington Post subscription. On YouTube I only watch my moron physics colleagues pine that the Nobel Prize in Physics was this year given to computer programmers. This, after they had given one to that weatherman Parisi.

The only podcast I listen to is "The History of Byzantium" . He is now at the year 1328, with episode 311. Only 125 years to go. They are typically 25 min each, my ride back or to work. But I've forgotten everything I had learned back in November of 2016,  so I'm restarting with the prelude to the year 476 episodes.

Other than that, inspired by certain Vattay's contribution to ChaosBook.org, I have discovered that the PhD theses of certain Artuso and Aurell are wrong in a subtle way (see p. 42 here, or listen to yet another bombastic video here). I do not know how to have these faulty PhD titles revoked, so I'm forced to labor alone on the correct theory . It would be fun to do this together, but all of the above have tenure, so... (see Not-Jamie Dimon's conjectures here).

As long as they do not come for me, I'll be OK.

Alberto Martínez "Beyond 1905: Einstein's Light, Love, and Lies"

(Alberto Martínez gave us a fascinating history of science lecture with above title)

Liebe Albert(o)

I think your combination of human miseries of young Einstein and what really took to get to relativity is just wonderful. Thanks for a great lecture!

I bow my head in shame. In spite of being friends with Abraham Pais and Engelbert Schuking, I knew nothing of what you taught us. I teach relativity like a late 20th century barbarian, as a triviality, first teach them SO(n) and then SO(4)=SU(2) x SU(2), then confuse them a bit with SO(1,3) and spinors. Done.
Life is even easier for Dr. Zangwill whose happy life never required learning any gruppenpest. He takes time to be pure imaginary. Done. Legitimized by real menschen, Pauli and t'Hooft.

I think why someone like Bram Pais would not bother including into a scientific biography of Einstein his "Die Leiden des jungen Alberts" sexual triumphs, pregnancies and miseries, as they were standard for any educated bourgeois male of late 19th, early 20th century. Bram's own biography would be like that - who saved him from Nazis and Dutch collaborators through the 2nd WW? And this misery might be standard again, if our crypto-fascist christian ayatollah succeed returning this country to pre-French Revolution feudalism.

A book that might be helpful in capturing the zeitgeist of pre-Nazi takeover Mittel Europa / central Europe is Margaret MacMillan, Paris, 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. I recommend it as a true Oyropeen intellectual (AKA, I have not yet read it myself): YouTube.com/watch?v=T7iXNZJsa6s&t=4s.

Regarding our conversation about Einsteins human rights activism in 1931: Albert Einstein and Heinrich Mann sent a letter to the International League for Human Rights in Paris to protest the murder of Milan Šufflay, appealing for protection of Croatian people from the oppression of Yugoslav regime.

New York Times.com 1931/05/06 article

A series of such high profile political assassinations, as well as murders of ordinary Croats, eventually led to horrific, Hitler-Mussolini sponsored civil war, a war within the 2nd World War, and then to the second, post-communist 1991-1995 war, a preview of the current Russian assault on Ukraine.

How you can do all this  without speaking German of Goethe, Heine and Kafka is beyond my ken. Should I mention that young Šufflay spoke French, German, Italian, English, all the Slavic languages, as well as Latin, old Greek, and middle Greek? Before his assassination by Serbian police, he had also learned modern Greek, Albanian, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. 

Fortunately, with AS (Artificial Stupidity) no one will ever have to waste time on learning a foreign language again. Or learning anything at all 🙂

 

"This is not physics!" or "Why did the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics go to two computer scientists"

Wonderful prize! I totally agree with the choice and reasoning for the choice.

 

My "fundamental" physics colleagues (particle physics, general relativity, strings, ...) have been more idiotic than usual. 

The funniest thing is the chorus of particle  physicists and such,   croaking

  "That's not physics!"

Sabine Hossenfelder is under impression that Hopfield is a computer scientist:)  But what for did he get the Buckley Prize, the Dirac Medal, the Boltzmann prize, was a President of APS, what for, then? Couldn't they, like, check the wiki before dismissing as prominent a physicist as Hopfield for the sin of having opened a new path forward?

 

October 18th klogW (APS GSNP and GDS) virtual seminar on the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics is excellent, especially in emphasizing the importance of this work for the development of contemporary computational neuroscience (not Large Language Models). About minute 43 into the video, Sara A. Solla tells the story of Hopfield 's 1983 APS March Meeting plenary talk, and how the work was received by Hopfield 's colleagues:

  "Very interesting. But. It's not physics, is it?"

 

There are some well based considerations about who should have also been included. I've been told Daniel Amit, but he had already committed suicide. Some people think Amari:

 

F writes: Amari in 1977 introduced the Hebbian learning and thus the 1982 Hopfield Network. Go figure what's going on! There are similar issues with the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The wife of one of the Nobel laureates is the first author, along with her husband, on the key paper that led to him receiving the prize.  

For this, the required viewing is The Wife, with Glenn Close. Amazing movie. Especially for me, as S is taking me to the Nobel festivities in Stockholm as her spouse. Though, she did all her work with no interference from me 🙂.

S had been Amari's guest at RIKEN, and has fun stories to tell about what is it to be a famed physicist visitor from Bell Labs (while visiting as a woman 🙂)

Shun-ichi Amari is universally respected, cited by Hopfield in The Paper, and I am not  aware of any contentious Nobel Prize priority claims from him.

Benny Lautrup: Så megen venlighed 1953

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"Min mor gled i en hundelort på Vesterbrogade i København, da min far tilfældigvis kom gående forbi. Han hjalp hende op, og derfor er jeg."

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