Mark Reynolds > Recent Status Updates

Finally have a plan to read a little every day. It's a short book so it shouldn't take long.

Even though this is book 3 in a trilogy, I know enough of the period to be able to figure things out. So far so good.

So far, a fun WW2 spy novel. However, one with little connection to reality. The physics and math as portrayed is not believable. It's not the way that physics works that only *one* man has the secrets that nobody else knows. That's just not possible. Look at how reality really happened - with Meitner and Frisch "discovering" fusion. Any one of a number of other physicists could have made the same interpretation.

Chapter 12, on black hole evaporation, is quite interesting. He gives a compassionate view of Hawking and his ALS and impressively, the way Hawking developed his mind to do calculations that other physicists (even great ones like Thorne) need a pencil and paper for.

Finished first chapter. Generic overview. Not much that I didn't already know. Waiting for the good stuff.

Somewhat ridiculous premises of the "Deeper State " where the president was a Russian agent and got exfiltrated to Moscow.

"We have to learn ways to bring our energy from our head down to our abdomen. At least once every fifteen minute, we need to practice letting go."

Based on Gamow's - yet unpublished - idea concerning the application action of quantum mechanics to radioactive alpha decay, Bohr told Gamow "My secretary told me that you have only enough money to stay here for a day. If I arrange for you a Carlsberg Fellowship at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, would you stay for one year?"

"That man is like the Euclidean point. He has position but no magnitude." - Rutherford

Teacher: You don't even know a single date in history.
Victor: That's not true. I know all the dates. I just don't know what happened on any of them.

Teacher: You don't even know a single date in history.
Victor: That's not true. I know all the dates. I just don't know what happened on any of them.

…
It was the first time we became aware of the sense in all these terrible things, because Bohr right away participated not only in the work, but in our discussions. Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. This we learned from him." Victor Weisskopf

"In Los Alamos, we were working on something which is perhaps the most questionable, the most problematic thing a scientist can be faced with. At that time physics, our beloved science, was pushed into the most cruel part of reality and we had to live it through. But suddenly, in the midst of it, [Niels] Bohr appeared in Los Alamos.
…

Teller arrived with a radical new idea that he had first come up with the previous September at Columbia: using a fission bomb to set off a fusion bomb of hydrogen and deuterium.
Serber: "He'd [Teller] come in every morning with an agenda, with some bright idea, and then overnight Bethe would prove that it was cockeyed."

Arthur Compton, who directed the operation in Chicago, delegated the work of bomb design to Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer got the assignment because bomb design would have to be theoretical and he was the best theoretician available. In the summer of 1942 he convened a conference in Berkeley to review bomb theory. Edward Teller attended, as did Hans Bethe, Robert Serber, and half a dozen others, a first class team.

Fermi … soon organized the necessary measurements. They found more than two secondary neutrons per fission. War was closer by then, in March and April 1939; [someone] suggested they keep the secondary neutrons a secret, but the French refused and published their results. The world learned that an atomic bomb was possible. Within a week, physicists everywhere were sketching crude bombs on office blackboards.

Rosenfeld: "[Bohr] rarely mentions the 'laws of nature,' but rather refers to 'regularities of the phenomena.' "

Bohr: "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."

"I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on … the first of April, 1933," Szilard wrote. "The train was empty. The same train the next day was overcrowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis. This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don't have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier."

Quite impressive, but also depressing. It’s extremely important to consider our own mortality *before* we get close to death so that we can approach it then in a better way.

Clever short story. Even has a butterfly.

I asked him whether this meant that physics was degenerating into pure philosophy." I don't think so," he replied. "I think that the ingenuity of the experimentalist will find a way out of this." But he had to admit, he couldn't think of what that way might be.

At the Royal Society meeting [June 1983], Weinberg focused on this impasse. "Quantum gravitation seems inaccessible to any experiment we can devise," he said. "In fact, physics in general is moving into an era where the fundamental questions can no longer be illuminated by conceivable experiments. It's a very disquieting position to be in."

Fun book about Maine:

“she cleared them out of the kitchen with instructions to finish getting ready for school. Almost any place else 20 inches of fresh snow would’ve meant canceled classes. Not in Maine where natives consider anything less than 4 feet to be a dusting.”