Comments on: Your Weakness, Revealed

By: Jacob Freeze

Jacob Freeze — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:41:05 +0000

The ghost particles Jonathan mentions have a peculiar real-world resonance with “ghost” detainees, where the CIA introduces negative probability by also disappearing anyone who looks for the original “ghosts.”

How many “ghost” detainees will you find if you poke around in Romania? One less than is now not lost, because the CIA will also lose you.

By: A.J.

A.J. — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:53:48 +0000

This reminds of something Alexander Givental said to his algebraic topology class.

“Spectral sequence is essentially tautological tool…”

“…but the human mind is weak.”

By: Jonathan Vos Post

Jonathan Vos Post — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:32:28 +0000

This was my second try for a comment on the related thread at “Not Even Wrong.” It was, like the first one, rejected. I suspect that John Schwartz and Peter Woit actively dislike each other. So I’ll post the comment here.

# Jonathan Vos Post Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
February 26th, 2008 at 10:03 am

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=657#comment-35341

In arXiv:0802.3249, From Dual Models to String Theory, by Peter Goddard, the name John Schwartz does not appear until p.11 of 35, referencing A. Neveu and John Schwartz, “Factorizable Dual Models of Pions”, Nucl. Phys. 31 (1971) 86-112.

Does the Florence proceedings or notes give John Schwartz’s recollection of this period in history? I’d discussed with Richard Feynman at that time (1971) the problem of ghosts. Feynman said that he first heard from me what was in the grapevine about negative probabilities, which attracted him as crazy in a way that was not obviously wrong. Of course he had his own take on tachyons, and on skepticism of specific number of dimensions demanded by such early theories of what became string theory.

I spoke with John Schwartz again about this era, and Feynman’s string skepticism, on Sunday 24 Feb 2007, at the Herbert Keller memorial service, where I spoke to the extremely distinguished gathering about the psychological similarities between Feynman and Keller, in emphasizing “chutzpah” over artificial divisions between scientific or
mathematical disciplines.

By: hellblazer

hellblazer — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:39:07 +0000

Heh. I particularly like the fact that the quote, if divorced from the context of the anecdote, would make sense if “group theory” is replaced by any other perceived-to-be-abstract branch of mathematics.

(So, to try and pick a non-inflammatory topic: in infinite group theory, we could have “covering spaces”.)