Matthew Royal > Recent Status Updates

"There is one ingredient that can make mezcal different from whiskey or brandy: a dead chicken. Pechuga is a particularly rare and wonderful version of mezcal that includes wild local fruit added to the distillation for just a hint of sweetness, and a whole raw chicken breast, skinned and washed, hung in the still as the vapors pass over it. The chicken is supposed to balance the sweetness of the fruit."

"We need a few trusted naysayers in our lives, critics who are willing to puncture our protective bubble of self-justifications and yank us back to reality if we veer too far off. This is especially important for people in positions of power."

The Grand Master, by his immediate and ruthless reply showed once and for all that this was a siege in which no quarter was to be expected. When he ordered the heads of his prisoners to be fired at the Turkish lines, he was, in effect, saying to all the garrison and the people of Malta: "There is no turning back. It is better to die in battle than to die like this."

Read the nominal story "Wind from the Sun" and it was good. Clarke is clearly banking on the novelty of solar sails in this story. I have to admit -- I didn't realize we had been dreaming about them this long! Makes me even more excited for the Planetary Society's imminent launch of the LightSail. http://sail.planetary.org/

Aha -- the thesis emerges! The real point of this book is that String Theory as a discipline has a culture of groupthink making it less than the "real science" of quantum loops. (his area)

He says that Educational reform is really what's needed, and casts a wide net, claiming the expense and competitiveness for teaching positions is a problem too.

Feel like this isn't about Physics any more...

"The key was indeed to keep the principles of Einstein's special theory but to change the rules so that all observers agree that both the speed of light and the Planck scale are universal. Actually, the speed that is constant is no longer the speed of all photons, only very low-energy ones."

"A president who justifies his actions only to the public might be induced to change them. A president who has justified his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self correction."

"One point that string theorists are passionate about is that the theory is beautiful, or "elegant." This is something of an aesthetic judgment that people may disagree about, so I'm not sure how it should be evaluated. In any case, it has no role in an objective assessment of the accomplishments of the theory. As we saw in Part 1, lots of beautiful theories have turned out to have nothing to do with nature."

"The gauge principle is the "beautiful mathematical idea," noted in chapter 3, that was discovered by Herman Weyl in his failed 1918 attempt at the unification of gravity and electromagnetism. Weyl is one of the deepest mathematicians ever to ponder the equations of physics, and it was he who understood that the structure of Maxwell's theory was entirely explained by a gauge force."