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What Light Through Yonder Nite Sky Breaks

Last night we went to the boondocks (or as close an approximation as we could get to the boondocks, living in L.A.) to watch the Perseid meteor shower.

“For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” – Vincent van Gogh

Driving back, I was thinking about how amazing it is that we can even do cosmology! What an amazing setup that we can look back in time by collecting light from more and more distance objects. Our universe didn’t have to be this way: it could have been action at a distance, instantaneous transformer of information, etc. And then how would we do cosmology?

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Notice the Dates

On arXiv today we find quant-ph/9804008:

from : Andrew Gray [view email]
Date (v1): Thu, 2 Apr 1998 18:51:30 GMT (27kb)
Date (revised v2): Sun, 8 Aug 2004 18:25:20 GMT (0kb,I)
A Design for a Quantum Time Machine
Authors: Andrew Gray
Comments: This paper has been withdrawn
This paper has been retracted, for obvious reasons.

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Oye! Harsh!

Elections destroy any positive karma…today I thought of a new bumper sticker:

Reagan died because of research Bush denied.

Ouch! Oye!

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Baez Decrypts

John Baez’s description of Hawking’s talk at GR17 is the best scientific commentary on the talk I’ve come across. It’s a notch above all of these descriptions I’ve read which are of the form: I don’t like Euclidean quantum gravity, but I do know [insert other theory of quantum gravity here], and we already knew [insert claim here]. Which is fine for learning about [insert claim here] but doesn’t really tell me anything about what Hawking was trying to say!

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Northern New Mexico

From George Johnson’s New York Times July 3, 2004 article “Los Alamos’s Super-Secret Heritage Shows Some Cracks:”

When science is conducted in secrecy it takes on the air of magic.
From its beginnings as an outpost of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos has operated in a state where the ideal of science as the free exchange of information has been indefinitely suspended, replaced by a conviction that there is safety in ignorance, that life is more secure when certain powerful ideas are kept among a few.
Peace through the nonproliferation of knowledge, another of the ingrained absurdities of the nuclear age.

Which reminds me of why cryptography (and quantum cryptography in particular) is so disturbing to me: does the universe really allow for the hording of information? Our unsharing universe? Of course, the type of knowledge Johnson is talking about, “scientific knowledge”, does appear to be open to everyone: you don’t get exclusive rights to the science when you discover it. But what if the universe didn’t even work that way? What if the mere discovery of some new bit of science closed the door for all others investigating the same phenomenon?

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NM Bumper Stickers

New Mexico
A giiigantic truck, like a trillion cabs, with a big sports stripe on the side, with a rainbow square bumper sticker, also a rainbow square with the words “family” in the middle of the square, and a support George Bush bumper sticker. Well, I’ll be…
also
A bumper sticker that said “bumper sticker.” Would a blank bumper sticker be the same? No. And why?

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Center of the Universe

Yahoo headline:

FBI Issues Terror Warning for Calif., N.M.

Which either means (1) the terrorists are following me on my trip to find housing or (2) I am subject of the terror warning. Well (2) is obviously not true, but I suspect I will be getting some unlisted IP address hits to this web page soon. And (1) is certainly strange, as I am but a bit player in this grand old world. On the other hand, I did see “Fahrenheit 9/11” in Toronto just in case the U.S. version was censored. Quoteth Nirvana: “Just cus you’re not paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.” Every day, the world more philipdickian.

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Wednesday and Friday

To the city different I go to find me some housing (842 miles!)
Ouch
Blessed be books on tape. Or perhaps I will work on memorizing some stories again. At one point I entertained memorizing a Shakespearing play. I think I will work on another Borges story. Perhaps the short “Borges and I” or as a long term project “The Circular Ruins.”