NEQNET: Non-equilibrium Phenomena

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On Harvard – again

By the way, why Harvard is called Harvard? Who is it named for? I guess, everybody knows that, but for me – it was a discovery of the day.

It was named for English clergyman John Harvard. Mr. Harvard together with his wife has moved from London to America in 1673. He became a clergyman there and has died of tuberculosis a year later.

Since Mr. Harvard did not have children, he has left 779 pounds and his library (about 400 volumes) to the New College created in 1636 – he and the president of the latter were good friends.

This money allowed to construct the first building for the New College, and the latter was renamed to Harvard College in 1639, which became the full blown University a hundred years later – in 1780.

It is interesting to note that the very first building constructed thanks to Mr. Harvard’s money as well as all Harvard’s original library were destroyed during the fire in 1764. All except one book – called “The Christian Warfare Against the Devil World and Flesh”.

There exists a statue of Mr. Harvard at Harvard University – however, it does not really reflect how the actual Harvard looked like since no images/pictures of him exist.

Via Boris Ivanov.

Saturday’s photoguess: what are they doing?

and where are they located? (take a careful look at the lower part of the photo.)

The full answer is: they took a tour at the Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo, Egypt. The date was June 4, 2009. The mosque is one of the largest in the world (it was built in 1256).

Via uzhas_sovka.

JHEP is to be published by Springer

Just received an interesting email:

Dear Colleague,

we would like to inform you that as of 1st January 2010, JHEP will be published by Springer.

This agreement is based on the following key principles:

* The scientific community will remain in full control of all the scientific and editorial aspects of the Journal.
* As in the past, the subscription fee for JHEP remains as low as possible, covering no more than the actual costs of the journal and its development.
* The general financial conditions offered by Springer will allow us to pursue in the long term our aims of ensuring scientists a better compensation for their editorial and peer-review activity, and to continue to invest in research and development, thereby remaining at the very forefront of modern technologies applied to scientific publishing.
* The agreement with Springer on both subscriptions fees and open access activities adequately reflects the strategic views, anticipated market developments and willingness to explore new avenues of scientific publishing by both parties in the field of High-Energy Physics and beyond.

Best regards,

Daniele Amati
Marc Henneaux
Hector Rubinstein

Does the same fate await JCAP as well?

Biocentrism: book review

I was asked to review the book by Dr. Robert Lanza called “Biocentrism: how life and consciousness are the keys to understand true nature of the Universe“.

If you are a scientist good enough in your area of expertise, at some point you start wondering whether you can explain everything around you, every single event, physical phenomenon, consciousness, human nature etc. etc. by using methods from your area of expertise.

For example, Robert Laughlin, condensed matter theorist and Nobel Prize winner, seems to be seriously thinking that the Theory of Everything is a theory of quantum Hall effect, while other condensed matter theorists are trying to find Universe in a helium droplet. On the other hand, some string theorists believe that Universe was created by a collision of two huge D-branes widely spread along extra dimensions, etc. etc. Sorry for being poetic, but that how Dr. Lanza presents his ideas, so I’ll naturally try to mimic his style.

Dr. Robert Lanza is a famous biologist. Not surprisingly, he wants to argue that the whole Universe can be described only using the language and methods of biology – as he explains in his recent book “Biocentrism: how life and consciousness are the keys to understand true nature of the Universe“.

To support this statement, Dr. Lanza tries to combine some ideas from biology, psychology and neuroscience as well as physics. Although his opinions about biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists are usually polite, he seems to be particularly angry on physicists for some reason – here is, for example, one passage from the very end of the book:

Finally, one must consider the endless ongoing attempts at creating GUTs – grand unifying theories. Currently, such efforts in physics have been maddeningly lengthy – stretching typically for decades – without much success except as a way of financially facilitating the careers of theoreticians and grad students.

I guess, the reason of his attitude towards physics and physicists is that he wasn’t able to establish a healthy dialogue with them while developing his ideas (on the other hand, as it seems, he was able to establish such dialogue with biologists and psychologists). Since I am a physicist myself, let me try to explain why it did not happen.

In my explanations, I will also try to be as polite as possible since, I must admit, I am always sympathetic with rebels, and Dr. Lanza seems to be quite a rebel. Here are my notes, anyway.

1. Regarding physics, the book contains multiple factual errors and features misuse of physics terminology. Let me list some of the errors and such misuses:

a)

Attempts to combine all forces in order to produce an underlying oneness – currently in vogue is string theory – require invoking at lest eight extra dimensions

I am afraid, it is “at least six”, not eight.

b)

…Z-point energy…

There is no such physical quantity as Z-point energy (and I am not sure how exactly this term was born by the Dr. Lanza’s conciousness), but from the context it is clear that he is talking about zero energy vacuum fluctuations (vacuum energy).

c)

…vacuum field…

There is no such thing as “vacuum field”. Generally, a field can be in the vacuum state or in an excited state. In other words, “vacuum” means a particular state of a quantum field (the state without particles).

etc. etc.

Finally, the word “ether” should actually be spelled “aether” (sorry for that, but facing with the same wrong spelling for the 6th time in the book is a bit annoying.)

2. Dr. Lanza really misses several important pieces of the overall puzzle such as

a) general relativity. Dr. Lanza mentions it a couple of times but never actually demonstrates his understanding of what he is talking about – actually, his physics discussions only include special relativity.
Einstein did not really stop after discovering special relativity in 1905, he has also discovered general relativity in 1915. In essence, general relativity explains what gravity really is – roughly speaking, it is a curvature of spacetime. Spacetime is dynamical since any matter (any non-zero mass/energy density) curves it – sources its curvature, as we say. I guess, Dr. Lanza could throw his argument “spacetime is not real” on the table in 1905, but not after 1915: it is actually possible to detect dynamics of spacetime – and the Nobel Prize 1993 in physics was awarded for exactly that (check out Google for details).

b) general relativity leads to several important conclusions such as, for example, existence of horizons (in cosmological context as well as for black holes). To put it brief, horizon essentially means that an infinite time is needed for a photon emitted inside horizon to reach the area outside it.

c) There is no problem with “coupling” special relativity with quantum mechanics – this is what quantum field theory does, the area of physics which took off back in 1950s. The real problem is to “couple” general relativity with quantum mechanics – that’s what the buzz is currently about in cutting edge physics (as it was for the last 50 years). I cannot believe that Dr. Lanza could have missed this.

d) In quantum mechanics experiments involving wavefunction collapse and EPR paradox information cannot be transferred. This is simple to understand, really. Surely, you know what’s the polarization of the photon far away if you measure the polarization of the entangled particle, but try inventing a way to exploit this knowledge – try to send some information via EPR.

e) decoherence. Actually, wavefunction collapse does not only happen if we, ourselves, try to detect the properties at a quantum object. It is enough if the quantum object interacts with another, nearly classical, object or – even better – with environment. For macroscopic objects, with sizes of the order the ones we are dealing with in our everyday’s life, decoherence time is shorter than sec. That’s why we are mostly dealing with classical objects in everyday’s life, and that’s why quantum mechanics was only discovered in 20th century. Whether you want it or not, you are sitting on a classical stool in front of a classical table.

g) a process of quantum measurement does not really have much to do with conscience. Canonically (in Heisenberg’s interpretation of quantum mechanics for example), any interaction of a quantum object with a classical device can be considered a “measurement”, since it leads to wavefunction collapse.

Probably, Dr. Lanza would be able to incorporate all these ideas into the version 2.0 of his book, so, I guess, there is really no point in criticizing his ideas this way. There is a much more important issue related to his constructions. Any theory can only be denoted as such if it has a predictive power, i.e., if it predicts something. I think, Dr. Lanza’s theory has a fatal flaw – it explains everything, but it does not really predict anything, and it is really impossible to come out with a physics experiment that would determine whether Dr. Lanza is right.

In this respect, his ideas are no better than any religion – which by the way also explains everything we see around us by stating that it was God’s Will for the world to look like we see it…

Instead of conclusion, let me strengthen Dr. Lanza’s arguments for the sake of fun

Of course, physicists won’t understand

Actually, I believe, I understood the idea quite well. Lanza’s point is that any measurement really includes a human factor, and no measurement device can be considered fully classical. If so, wave functions will never ultimately collapse – they will seemingly “collapse” only in our minds, simply because our perception of reality is not perfect (that is, not complete). This idea has its right to live, I guess, but the problem is that Dr. Lanza does not throw enough arguments on the table to support it. Ultimately, it means that he won’t be crucified for his work (and he seems to want it – as I would imply after reading one of his interviews). iInstead, most probably his work will be soon forgotten.

P.S. Dr. Lanza has a co-author, astronomer Bob Berman. I don’t mention him in this review since I was unable to determine what’s his particular contribution into the book – actually, I believe, would Dr. Berman even read the book, he would at least pick some of the errors and misunderstandings mentioned above and advice Dr. Lanza how to present his ideas more appropriately.

P.P.S. Yep, and about anthropic principle… you see, it is not really anthropic. The very same physical laws and values of physical constants are necessary to make a piece of rock – in this sense, you could denote the Anthropic Principle as the Lithic Principle (the first who made this observation – several decades ago – was actually Carl Sagan). At which point life “enters the equation” is really unknown.

Harvard near bankruptcy

Just wanted to finally end my day and go to sleep (way too much work today), but heard some news and cannot help sharing it with you.

According to Boston Magazine Harvard University is to face some very serious problems. The University currently spends about 1.5 billion USD/year, it has lost several billion during crisis – including 500 million thanks to Larry Summers, super feminist fighter (essentially, he presented those 500 million as a gift for GS). If only Dr. Summers spent more time thinking about what he was supposed to think about… but he is clearly not the person to blame as they want him to be.

11 billion of Harvard’s money are currently to be repaid to private investors as capital commitments in the next 10 years, Harvard currently has 13 billion in various assets – and what if the crisis did not reach its bottom yet? What if Harvard is to expect more endowment losses? And all this does not include construction of the new campus in Allston which will be surely put on hold.

Sad, saaad news.

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