Poet re-discovered this week: Rabindranath Tagore, India's only Poet Laureate.
Yeat's comment on Tagore/Indian poetry: "A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble."
My older Indian friend concurs and comments that Indian poetry is a mirror-image of Hinduism, much more a way of life than a religion.
My comment on Tagore: He's been around a long while, but his work has something that is just so FRESH about it. Pick up Gitanjali again and see for yourself.
Tuesday, January 17
Thursday, January 5
It's Just Stupid
Favorite quote of the week: “It’s like you’re throwing
darts, and the bullseye is just one part in 10^120
of the dart board,” says Leonard Susskind, a
string theorist based at Stanford University in
California. “It’s just stupid.”
From "Outrageous Fortune," published in Nature by Geoff Brumfiel, the beginnings of which is excerpted below.
Why are we here? It’s a question
that has troubled philosophers,
theologians and those who’ve
had one drink too many. But
theoretical physicists have a more essentialist
way of asking the question: why is there anything
here at all?
For two decades now, theorists in the thinkbig
field of cosmology have been stymied by a
mathematical quirk in their equations. If the
number controlling the growth of the Universe
since the Big Bang is just slightly too
high, the Universe expands so rapidly that protons
and neutrons never come close enough to
bond into atoms. If it is just ever-so-slightly
too small, it never expands enough, and everything
remains too hot for even a single nucleus
to form. Similar problems afflict the observed
masses of elementary particles and the
strengths of fundamental forces.
In other words, if you believe the equations
of the world’s leading cosmologists, the probability
that the Universe would turn out this
way by chance are infinitesimal — one in a
very large number. “It’s like you’re throwing
darts, and the bullseye is just one part in 10 to the 120
of the dart board,” says Leonard Susskind, a
string theorist based at Stanford University in
California. “It’s just stupid.”
One in a zillion
Physicists have historically approached this
predicament with the attitude that it’s not just
dumb luck. In their view, there must be something
underlying and yet-to-be-discovered
setting the value of these variables. “The idea is
that we have got to work harder because some
principle is missing,” says David Gross, a
Nobel-prizewinning theorist and director of
the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in
Santa Barbara, California.
But things have changed in the past few
years, says astronomer Bernard Carr of Queen
Mary, University of London, UK. String theorists
and cosmologists are increasingly turning
to dumb luck as an explanation. If their ideas
stand up, it would mean the constants of nature
are meaningless. “In the past, many people
were almost violently opposed to that idea
because it wasn’t seen as proper science,” Carr
says. “But there’s been a change of attitude.”
Much of that change stems from work
showing that our Universe may not be unique.
Since the early 1980s, some cosmologists have
argued that multiple universes could have
formed during a period of cosmic inflation
that preceded the Big Bang. More recently,
string theorists have calculated that there
could be 10 to the 500 universes, which is more than
the number of atoms in our observable Universe.
Under these circumstances, it becomes
more reasonable to assume that several would
turn out like ours. It’s like getting zillions and
zillions of darts to throw at the dart board,
Susskind says. “Surely, a large number of them
are going to wind up in the target zone.” And of
course, we exist in our particular Universe
because we couldn’t exist anywhere else.
darts, and the bullseye is just one part in 10^120
of the dart board,” says Leonard Susskind, a
string theorist based at Stanford University in
California. “It’s just stupid.”
From "Outrageous Fortune," published in Nature by Geoff Brumfiel, the beginnings of which is excerpted below.
Why are we here? It’s a question
that has troubled philosophers,
theologians and those who’ve
had one drink too many. But
theoretical physicists have a more essentialist
way of asking the question: why is there anything
here at all?
For two decades now, theorists in the thinkbig
field of cosmology have been stymied by a
mathematical quirk in their equations. If the
number controlling the growth of the Universe
since the Big Bang is just slightly too
high, the Universe expands so rapidly that protons
and neutrons never come close enough to
bond into atoms. If it is just ever-so-slightly
too small, it never expands enough, and everything
remains too hot for even a single nucleus
to form. Similar problems afflict the observed
masses of elementary particles and the
strengths of fundamental forces.
In other words, if you believe the equations
of the world’s leading cosmologists, the probability
that the Universe would turn out this
way by chance are infinitesimal — one in a
very large number. “It’s like you’re throwing
darts, and the bullseye is just one part in 10 to the 120
of the dart board,” says Leonard Susskind, a
string theorist based at Stanford University in
California. “It’s just stupid.”
One in a zillion
Physicists have historically approached this
predicament with the attitude that it’s not just
dumb luck. In their view, there must be something
underlying and yet-to-be-discovered
setting the value of these variables. “The idea is
that we have got to work harder because some
principle is missing,” says David Gross, a
Nobel-prizewinning theorist and director of
the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in
Santa Barbara, California.
But things have changed in the past few
years, says astronomer Bernard Carr of Queen
Mary, University of London, UK. String theorists
and cosmologists are increasingly turning
to dumb luck as an explanation. If their ideas
stand up, it would mean the constants of nature
are meaningless. “In the past, many people
were almost violently opposed to that idea
because it wasn’t seen as proper science,” Carr
says. “But there’s been a change of attitude.”
Much of that change stems from work
showing that our Universe may not be unique.
Since the early 1980s, some cosmologists have
argued that multiple universes could have
formed during a period of cosmic inflation
that preceded the Big Bang. More recently,
string theorists have calculated that there
could be 10 to the 500 universes, which is more than
the number of atoms in our observable Universe.
Under these circumstances, it becomes
more reasonable to assume that several would
turn out like ours. It’s like getting zillions and
zillions of darts to throw at the dart board,
Susskind says. “Surely, a large number of them
are going to wind up in the target zone.” And of
course, we exist in our particular Universe
because we couldn’t exist anywhere else.
Bumpers Beware
Believe it or not, I've taken a six month hiatus from this page to start a "Stop the Snark" bumper sticker campaign aimed at all the too-cool-for-you, FOX-network watching, haven't-been-sincere-(at least publicly)-a-single-day-in-my-life, let's-poke-tongue-in-cheek-fun-at-pretty-much-anyone-who-actually-
CARES-about-anything types. Write me if you want one.
CARES-about-anything types. Write me if you want one.
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