There is no concept more evil, more corrupting than that of the continuum. Why at the very bottom of physics do we bury the most unprovable of assertions. All science is counting. No science counts for ever. Real numbers can never be more than conjecture. But of course, you answer: it works so well! The [...]
If you want your vote to count, shouldn’t you move from a state where the election won’t be close, to one where it will be close?
When I first caught sight of it (Mount Shasta) over the braided folds of the Sacramento Valley, I was fifty miles away and afoot, alone and weary. Yet all my blood turned to wine, and I have not been weary since. – John Muir, 1874 Unlike John Muir, I don’t recall the first time I [...]
As will be spreading through the mainstream news shortly, I’m sure, Nature has two papers out today demonstrating the teleportation of the internal states of trapped ions. Both the NIST and Innsbruck groups have, using fairly different ion trap systems, succeeded in deterministic teleportation of the internal states of the ions. Woot! Woot! Not only [...]
I put away Jorge Luis Borges many years ago when I wrote my Literature thesis as an undergrad. Tonight I returned to him and read Death and the Compass: “It’s possible, but not interesting,” Lönnrot answered. “You will reply that reality hasn’t the slightest need to be of interest. And I’ll answer you that reality [...]
Without a sense of your place in the universe, you end up writing funny shit: The Revolution Against Evolution, http://www.rae.org is not associated with the Raelians http://www.rael.org. The Raelians claim to be creationists, but not in the Biblical sense. Instead they believe that life was imported from outer space by aliens. Their god is a [...]
Yesterday I subjected myself to the SciFi Channel minseries “5ive Days to Midnight.” Why would I subject myself to five hours of such torture? Well, the main character is a physicist and the plot involves time travel! That withstanding it was not a pretty site. First, because the dialogue was atrocious, but second because the [...]
Patrick Hayden, Luis de la Fuente, and I are going to attempt to climb Mt. Shasta next week. Please do a weather dance in our honor next Friday and Saturday. Here is a picture of current conditions on Shasta courtesy of the fine ShastaCam The route we will take to climb Shasta goes up Avalanche [...]
Congrats are due to Doctor Luis de la Fuente. Ph.D. UCSF 2004! Here we see Luis (middle) thinking while everyone else swills beer: What exactly is he thinking? I think he is thinking “what happened to the left side of my body in this photo?”
I’ve switched blogging software to WordPress from MoveableType. Upgrade and transfer were pretty painless. Let me know if anyone is having crazy problems with this new setup.
Nonlocal determinism implies local indeterminism. In a universe which evolves nonlocally, a localized observor does not have access to enough information to correctly predict his deterministic evolution. This ignorance will lead to local laws which are probabilistic due to the ignorance of the nonlocal information. In such a universe there are two mysteries: (1) why [...]
For those of you who keep not recognizing me at conferences. Old Dave: New Dave: Notice that the key difference is the necklace. Crazy Dave:
