A few links to interesting things before I hop on an airplane:
- We’ve talked before (well, Anthony Aguirre talked for us) about the Foundational Questions Institute, an organization devoted to supporting work on, how should we put it, foundational questions in the physical sciences. I was originally a little leery about the whole operation, but have since been convinced that FQXi is a respecable and independent organization, even if the acronym continues to baffle me. I’ve even become a member, although I’m still working out what that means.
Now they’ve launched a new community site, which looks interesting. There are feature articles, news items, forums, and blogs. We’re talking serious Foundational Questioning 2.0 here. Have a look.
- Stuart Coleman at Daily Irreverence will soon be hosting Philosophia Naturalis, the physical-sciences blog carnival. If you’ve written or read something great along those lines recently, be sure to send him a line to have it included.
- David Harris at symmetry writes to let us know that they’re compiling a Particle Physics Life List, and need good suggestions. That is to say, they want a list of the 101 particle-physics-oriented things that everyone should do once in their life. I would have suggested “enjoy a buffalo burger at a Fermilab barbeque,” but they’ve already included “see one of Fermilab’s newborn baby buffalo,” and there’s some tension there. Cycle of life and all that, however.
Absolutely! You should submit it… we can’t have people walking out of Fermilab all misguided about what happens to the buffalo. ^_^
I’m also a member of FQXi, also despite initial misgivings, and it seems fine. I’ve already done work for them, so I have some idea of what it means: mainly, funding cool projects. Maybe they’ll tell you more details if you go the meeting in Reykjavik this summer. Unfortunately I’ll be in Greece at the time: conferences in Olympia and Delphi. It’s a tough life, all right.
Yeah, I’ve warmed to the idea too. I think I needed convincing that the motivations and philosophy were distinct from the conciliation betwen science and reliion, and have indeed been increasingly convinced of that. Anthony’s post and related comments on the blog and in private were a big part of that.
How can they be anti-incrementalism and pro-rigour?
“see one of Fermilab’s newborn baby buffalo,”
You mean the Higgs Bison?
Dave, did you know that that bison was bullied by bisons from upstate New York?
See here 🙂
A business/academic associate of mine would like to get a grant for fundamental physical geometry research. She has, (off my tentative immediate memories) a Math PhD. from Cambridge, has studied string theory and given talks re at Jefferson Lab, various publications, is a member of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (unless I got that mixed up with a similar….), and etc. However, she is not attached to an academic or research institution at present (but has indirect connections and relationships.)
She applied for a NSF grant a few months ago, is still waiting, and you know how that goes…
What sort of chance does she have for a modest grant in that area of fundamental theory, from the FQXi or similar? Any tips on how to best go about it, besides the obvious? Also, any tips on how to find an ArXiv sponsor if hard to get in the immediate vicinity?
thanks
re Dr. Harrell, check this out:
http://www.newton.cam.ac.uk/programmes/NCG/Poster2/harrell.ppt
It is a summary of the concepts, some general background and some her own ideas.
Sorry to write this as a comment on this post, but I was wondering – what would happen if particle physicists don’t discover anything new at the LHC? Or, what happens if all that IS discovered is the Higgs? And is there anyway to predict the possibilities of these chances? I was curious of this by talking with a physics professor.
No new discoveries at all can be ruled out. The scattering cross section of particles can’t be completely arbitrary functions of the energy, unitarity imposes some bounds on this function. In turns out that without the Higgs, the scattering cross section of W particles would violate this bound at the energies that can be probed at the LHC.
This means that if the Higgs doesn’t exist you must have new physics to prevent the violation of unitarity.
i think every particle physicist should once in their life try to explain what (s)he actually means with ‘particle’. if anybody has a good answer, i’d be interested to hear.
OK, I feel like I figured out the acronym FQXi:
On many pages, they show fq(x), and then the blurb under says,
“Foundational Questions in Physics & Cosmology”.
So, the “x” is the unknown, and the “i” is subscript for the many questions we have. It is also maybe the “I” in the equation: we have to think about it; each person is a relative “I” (and eye) that is his or her own relative center (also like an “eye”, like the eye of a hurricane, which looks a lot like a galaxy by the way…)
It could even be thought of in terms of those odd ideas of observers making the conditions neccesary for their existence what they were, like Wheeler’s ideas (which I don’t buy, but it’s worth thinking about.)
Sean, Mark, and John,
Thanks for your supportive words. We’ll keep doing our best to make FQXi as helpful as possible to its consitutuent community.
Sean and Neil B:
A fundamental question that I really feel like I can shed light on is what FQXi stands for. ‘i’ is definitely ‘insitute’, though I like the theories of Neil B. ‘x’ can be either ‘Physics and cosmology’ as in “foundational questions about physics and cosmology”, or as per the logo, it can signify ignorance as in “Our foundational questions are a function of our ignorance.” 🙂
Neil B:
Your associate is certainly welcome to submit an application in our next ‘big grant’ round in 2007-8; and hopefully we will have some other potentially interesting programs of interest to her as well — stay tuned.
Lab Lemming:
I personally see no contradiction between ‘pro rigour’ and ‘anti-incremental’. In many senses, it’s much more important to be rigorous when you are doing something very new/risky/speculative. But beyond that, I would not say that FQXi is anti-incemental (as the vast majority of scientific progress is incremental, and we applaud it) — it’s just not FQXi’s niche.
Hello colleagues.
Related to other approaches on fundamental physics than Strings or LQG:
What do you think of this paper here?
For me it seems to be a very interesting point the author is raising.
http://aps.arxiv.org/abs/0705.2568
The work has something to do with this earlier work of the same author in Annalen der Physik (the journal where Einstein published):
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/104544152/ABSTRACT
If true, it could change our opinions on quantum mechanics and very likely be used to build a very sound theory of quantum gravity.
(These two papers which were released by now are in fact only a part of a still unpublished book. If the author will publish its content on quantum field theory and renormalisation, it will be definitely of interest for quantum gravity. From this content (which lies on my desk here) it becomes clear that a true Quantum gravity must, in some sense use strings. But a very different version of String Theory which is used by now.