Computational Art & Design

800px-Jaguar_Petascale_Supercomputer
The Petascale future of computing is already here and we are now into the Exascale.

In my own home country of Australia, Business is utterly oblivious to what this means. They simply have no idea. The word clueless springs to mind.

There is a whole new computing revolution building rapidly in the wings. Business is destined to have this Rogue Wave simply break over and crush them. Government is throwing billions at a flagging car industry without realizing that the future of design and manufacture is software. It is sad to watch, but I am not my brother’s keeper. This is why I make my plans exclusive of whatever gigantic mess Australia creates for itself. It is time to avoid poor leadership and seek a more welcoming climate.

Now that I have renewed my contact with the mathematical sciences I have to say I am wildly excited. The single mathematical innovation of the last twenty years which most excites me is the wide application of control theory principles to computational design. This area goes by the rather dry name of PDE-Constrained Optimization:

large-scale-pde-constrained-optimization
Large Scale PDE-Constrained Optimization

Let us try to bring that to life a little…

The term PDE refers to the laws of Physics, Chemistry and Biology expressed in the form of Partial Differential Equations. There have been huge advances, especially in mathematical biology, in bringing those laws into mathematical form. You can think of this as the Laws of Nature freshly canned. Systems which do not presently exist can be modeled fairly well on a computer nowadays. That is a huge deal when it comes to the Lucrative Business of Design. You can now forward simulate a design and predict its behavior. This is Product Design by Computer, a trend now sweeping through the entire global manufacturing supply chain.

In addition to the huge performance boost of the multicore computing age, we now have the practical advance of optimization methods into Computational Design. The phrase Operations Research is the original name given to optimization methods and principles. It began in World War II with mathematicians and physicists assigned to figure out how to improve Allied operations against U-Boats.

That was the first Big Data exercise. Take a bunch of bombing and aiming statistics along with tactical information and work out a better way to strike the enemy. There is huge hype today about the “data” dimension of Big Data, but the truth is that Insight comes from Reductive Analysis. Compress the big data into a Smaller Model.

This fact is the origin of much public confusion over the Scientific Method. The whole reason we use it stems from the ability of Scientific Analysis to literally compress a vast array of seemingly unrelated phenomena into Systematic and Reliable Rules. It is not the data itself which presents the prize. It is the distillation of that to rules.

Sadly, they do not teach this idea in Business School. It is not complicated but many Business Leaders utterly fail to comprehend the power of it.

The PDE is the culmination of that research effort over centuries. For example, via the Navier-Stokes equation we can compute what the airflow over a complex shape looks like. The essential properties required to predict performance of an aircraft wing can be calculated. Experimental data remains valuable to check and refine methods but we can do a lot virtually. This greatly accelerates the design cycle.

Now imagine that you combine forward simulation with backward inference. Through numerical experiments you might figure out that some designs for a wing profile perform much better than others. How might you find the best for a given application?

The naive answer is the right answer.

Do massive trial and error. Use the computer to compute many designs. Through the methods of operations research, in the modern form of Optimal Control Theory, you can then home in on the better designs from among an infinite field of possibilities.

This is the essence of the new revolution in Computer Aided Art & Design.

I say Art also, since the newer methods permit such ideas as Shape Optimization and Computational Aesthetics. Our ability to describe shapes has evolved greatly since the 1940’s and 1950’s through applications of Differential Geometry, the math used by Einstein in his General Relativity. Now we can do dynamics with them!

Now we can turn this Promethean power towards Practical Art, Commerce and the Entertainment industry. It really is the very dawn of a new Golden Age of Mathematical Invention. We can capture the Natural world in equations and then use those as the raw material for a design process. The human possibilities are truly immense.

So far, these approaches have been limited to the so-called hard sciences. However, with the rapidly growing mass of social data the time of Practical Psycho-physics is fast approaching. We are learning to describe basic individual and social decision processes. At the head of this trend is Marketing, but it is wider than that.

People may have thought the Statistician and Economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth to be an eccentric dreamer when he coined the word: Psycho-physics. However, I now believe that history shall prove otherwise. Edgeworth simply lacked the data. My own personal research into the drivers of Investor Sentiment has convinced me that mass-market behavior has predictable elements.

The Statistical Mechanics of Crowds is coming.

Contrast these advances with that of the financial community at large. Charged with the task of managing precious capital, Banks seem incompetent to do so.

I have personally spent about equal amounts of time in my career in both Science and Finance. I have had two 15 year sentences, served consecutively. Every field of human endeavor has its foibles, but Finance appears unique. All progress in finance seems cyclical, with the same mistakes repeated over and over and over again.

Finance is an area which takes a perverse pride to avoid knowing even something about anything of economic consequence. The general human desire to actually know something about the world is replaced by the charade of convincing people you know something. Sure, there is a lot of talk, but mostly it is a moveable feast of noisy commentary on what just happened.

It seems that the financial community suffers greatly from Scientific & Technological Illiteracy on a truly Grand Scale. Far worse, it is an arrogant ignorance which seems to manifest itself. The claim that not only do people not know anything practical about the real world, but that they are proud of it.

I am no longer surprised that the Global Financial Crisis happened. It is a direct consequence of a giant Cognitive Deficit in systems-level thinking.

The folks involved simply lack the mental preparation to know how to think about complex social systems and their consequences. This mental failing is present on both the upside and the downside. We saw failure on the downside with the GFC. Now let me predict a forthcoming failure on the upside.

The next Crisis will be a Titanic Failure of the Imagination:

Market participants simply do not realize how huge this next revolution will be.

It is for this reason that I chose the path of being both an Investor and Innovator. There is the old adage:

If you want to see the future it is best to make it.

The marriage of Optimal Control with Engineering and Artistic Design on Petascale Compute Clouds will be enormous.

Word Processing, Email and Status Updates are nice to have, but this will quite literally change the world.

The Misanthropic Principle

alien-1992

“What is well known in general, exactly because it is well known, is not known.”

G. W. F. Hegel, “Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit”

“Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do; such as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe”

David Stove, “The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies”

The historical development of modern science carries with it several philosophical underpinnings that while common, often pass unnoticed by becoming parts of a “social cliche”.

The recent Creationist Agenda managed to bring about one such issue which is commonly referred among professional philosophers with the pompous name of the “Three Major Cosmological Indignations of Mankind”

These are attributed to the three major revolutions, the Copernican, the Darwinian and the Freudian. All share a common attribute consisting in a decentralization of the human kind with respect to the rest of the Universe. Although the last may be in doubt due to more recent neurological evidence, it is the second one that presents the most interesting evidence of a self-contradictory attribute in it’s very name by which it became known to a general audience’.

Despite the core of Darwinian teaching, we still prefer to use the term “Evolution”. In doing this, we preserve a place for us in the upper parts of a tree-like diagram of species variation. Implicitly, we enjoy a special place on the upper leaves of that tree for our own intelligence and scientific understanding.

However, one should be reminded that a “tree” structure is in itself an abstract construct that only shows variation. The true nature of the so called evolutionary record is in fact the mere and raw prevalence of one specimen to another.

It is perhaps by a sheer luck that the lack of contact with any possible alien race allows us to show such arrogance by putting ourselves on the top leaves and considering our own science as the best of anything achievable. But just think of a species able to sense all the acoustic and electromagnetic spectrum, what need would it have of all our precious and expensive equipment!

[Ed. Indeed, the Mantis Shrimp is a crustacean found in waters of Thailand with extreme perceptual powers from ultraviolet through infra-red]

Consider also the case where all the massive ingenuity and trickery of nature would have been concentrated on another species like the “Alien” in Scott Ridley’s film, not requiring anything more than its own reflexive power to face all our defenses. If ever on Earth it would have wiped us all out in months if not days!

We are flattered enough by still thinking of ourselves as the culmination of natural history, a kind of self-prize and yet we show no true evidence of such a progress when the issue of social relationships comes about, even in Academia.

There, the same old natural attitude abounds and that is “pre-eminence”.

The Long and Short of Physics

Physics is a very peculiar subject. When it changes, it does so radically in concept. However, the difference in results is barely perceptible.

Quantum mechanics is close to a hundred years old now. However, the classical theories of point and continuum mechanics are fine for most applications. How can the conceptual structure of a theory be so different and the results so similar?

For instance, under quantum theory we are supposed to believe in wave-particle duality. Bohr introduced the idea of complementarity to support his assertion that things are just too weird down there to understand. However, I wonder if this was just a ruse.

In 1926 there were two contending pathways forward: the continuum wave-mechanics of Schrödinger; and the discrete matrix mechanics and transition theory of Heisenberg. Of course, Dirac was able to demonstrate how they might be viewed as equivalent.

The philosophy of wave-particle duality has potentially obscured an important reality. While the two theories may be mathematically equivalent, due to the Dirac transformation theory, they are not physically equivalent as pictures. They suggest different ideas.

The wave-mechanics of Schrödinger leads the mind in different directions than does the matrix mechanics of Heisenberg. What we think of as natural in one picture can seem unnatural in the other picture.

For example, particle physics conceives of all particles as point-like and subject to creation and destruction via quantum transitions.

That picture is rather unnatural in the Schrödinger scheme of things. The wave equation has no inherent jumpiness to it at all. It is completely deterministic. Moreover, when one thinks this way the usual matrix elements for atomic transitions become rather obvious derivates of classical charge densities. It is a just a small variation on the classical theories of the dielectric due to H.A. Lorentz.

In the Heisenberg scheme, the transition element is just plucked from thin air. It has no obvious connection to the previous theory of classical dielectrics. Indeed, students are mercilessly beaten if they should dare to even suggest such a thought!

The lesson for me in all this can be stated rather briefly.

Suppose Schrödinger and de Broglie were right and we should treat matter waves as real stuff and not probability amplitudes?

Where would that take us? What would become of wave-particle duality? What is logical?

One thing seems very clear to me… There would be no particles.

In this picture, everything is a wave, albeit one which can be dynamically localized. The electron, as a wave, has an extent, and this is determined by the prevailing interactions. These can naturally be of two kinds:

1) mutual interactions

2) self-interactions

In the detailed development of quantum chemistry we can say a lot, in detail, about the first class of interactions. They are entangling, and so ensure that the waves in question must exist in configuration space. In short, entanglement is the normal state of affairs.

However, about the second kind of interaction we do not actually know very much. What we do know is that if you break wave-particle duality in favor of particles then you need to introduce a vacuum, along with particle creation and destruction. This is the basis for Quantum Field Theory and the reason why most particle physicists habitually refer to a wave-function of a single coordinate as a classical field.

Within this way of thinking, it is necessary to turn this classical field into an operator and then speak the language of particles.

Of course, with that goes another problem. One needs to figure out how to obtain finite answers for the electron self-energy and the related vacuum polarization effects. One has also bought into an infinite zero-point energy and a host of other technical difficulties.

On the other had, if we break wave-particle duality in favor of waves things look different. In that case, it is easy to get a finite self-energy term and there is no vacuum, nor any pesky zero-point energy. However, there are still meaningful problems. The main one is to get a stable bound structure for the electron since the static Coulomb field is repulsive. This would seem to involve the need to introduce an auxiliary field.

The purpose of this all too brief survey is to highlight one simple fact. Waves and particles are most definitely not equivalent as ideas for theory construction. When you attempt to build a theory based upon waves in configuration space then many things look different:

1) particles are no longer point-like and must therefore be dynamic entities

2) quantum fields are simply entangled wave-functions in configuration space

3) the reconciliation of mutual-interactions with self-interactions is incompletely understood

It is the last item which presents the major difficulty. Quantum Field Theory does not go over into this new regime in unmodified form. However, there is a new freedom gained to treat certain questions differently. For instance, pair processes and indeed all higher energy resonances, as seen in particle accelerator experiments, would need to be differently interpreted as resonant wave phenomena.

If I had to make a bet for the next hundred years in physics I would take these positions:

Waves: Long
Particles: Short

de Sitter Gravity: Long
String Theory: Short

Schrödinger: Long
Heisenberg: Short

Non-Linear Field Theories: Long
Linear Field Theories: Short

Einstein on Determinism: Long
Bohr on In-determinism: Short

It seems to me that these are all in fact the exact same bet.

When you change a theory, you need to make it self-consistent as well as empirically accurate. Strings go away because the reason for them is gone: the particle is really a wavy quasi-particle. The other bets relate to the physical consistency of real matter waves.

Of course, these are all quoted at very long odds right now.

However, they are my personal bets.

In a world obsessed with the very latest: everything old is new again.

Who’s Afraid of Bourbaki?

nosferatulargeNicolas Bourbaki: A Symphony of Horror

Nicolas Bourbaki is the Evil Genius Who Never Was that Ate the Soul of Mathematics.

Worse, he sucked the blood clean out of the entire subject leaving only a Dessicated Husk to Haunt the Musty Corridors of Academe.

A huge array of contemporary issues in Science Education and the Motivation of Youth to study Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, STEM, subjects can be traced to the influence of this one fictitious person.

How so, you may well ask? How could a fictitious character, in the Mathematical Sciences of all places, lay waste to Society? Well, perhaps I exaggerate some concerning Society at Large, but certainly Bourbaki has damaged the Society of Mathematicians.

This happened over many years starting in 1935 with a founding group of exemplary French Mathematicians. They formed a group and published anonymously under the pseudonym: Nicolas Bourbaki.

The official title for this group is:

Association des collaborateurs de Nicolas Bourbaki

The ambitious purpose was to place all of mathematics on a rigorous foundation.

In the way of these things, the purpose for which the group was founded was preceded by the demonstration of its futility.

While the Bourbaki movement was founded in 1935, the Austrian genius Kurt Gödel had just proved, in 1931, that the pursuit of rigor in Mathematics was ultimately to prove a Chimera. There are true statements, propositions in Math-speak, which are simply undecidable within the axiomatic system.

There is an element to mathematical invention which lays beyond logic.

One can pursue rigorous arguments to support the Towering Edifice of Mathematics but the result is a Tower of Babel. The problem is that there will remain statements within any axiomatic system which are undecidable within it. Such self-referential propositions point outside any axiomatic system and declare it to be logically incomplete.

In the vernacular, logic ain’t everything it is cracked up to be.

I should hasten to add… this does not make Mathematics less useful. In truth, it makes mathematics more interesting since it highlights that which exists beyond logic.

When a real Mathematician creates new Mathematics there is an operation in play which exists beyond mere deductive logic. There is a genuine creative force. The identification of axiomatic systems, especially new axiomatic systems, is a creative exercise Ex Nihilo. You simply cannot derive axioms from axioms.

Unfortunately, the Bourbaki movement took root in Mathematics Departments and spread like wildfire. Coming fast on the heels of the Great Insight of Gödel came a mighty social movement to Make Mathematics Rigorous. It became a veritable Crusade.

The leaders involved comprised a Who’s Who of the French Elite:

Henri Cartan
Claude Chevalley
Andre Weil

Undoubtedly they are counted among the first rank of 20th Century mathematicians.

However, in light of Gödel, the movement was destined to fail from the get go.

Bourbaki produced a huge array of formal material on foundational issues in mathematics. However, it also led to a delusion among mathematicians, and later physicists, that true and correct thought was a rigorous: Definition, Theorem, Proof and Lemma style of mathematical discourse.

The idea was that Mathematics must be Kept Pure of Intuition.

Rigor is Bliss.

Of course, the problem is that Mathematics soon Disappears Up It’s Own Functor and becomes: Arid, Dry, Boring and Irrelevant.

When the express purpose is to eliminate intuition it is no surprise that there a few women in sight. Educators are surprised that few young kids want to study mathematics.

Golly Gee, I wonder why?

This brings me to the reason why Bourbaki was anonymous.

It was a direct reaction to the towering presence of the departed genius Henri Poincaré. This man may rightfully be thought of as: The Last Mathematician with a Personality.

Unlike the dry and dull mathematics of today, Poincaré rightfully stressed the development of mathematical intuition. He believed, as I do also, that the ultimate source of mathematical inspiration comes from the human spirit.

Intuition drives mathematical invention.

Just as Poincaré opined, in his reflective work Science and Hypothesis, I maintain that there is an element of invention in mathematical creativity.

Man does not derive Mathematics, but does something far greater, man invents it.

He or she does so in the manner of all invention. Through observation, introspection, experimentation and inspiration. There is not some algorithm at work that simply enumerates dry propositions from some ultimate source of truth.

Evidently, if you wish to Kill a Great Spirit, the spirit exemplified by Poincaré, then you must do so in a group and anonymously. Thus was the Great Hatchet Team of Nicolas Bourbaki born. They hacked away at the Spirit of Mathematics until it was dead.

Now there is almost nothing left of the great motivating creative force in mathematics.

It is dry, dull and actively shunned by students. It is considered abstract, tedious and impenetrable. All of the interesting mathematics happens outside of Mathematics.

It surfaces in the Computer Science approach to classical dynamics.

It pops up in the Isogeometric Analysis of NURBS-adapted Finite-Element Analysis.

It lurks in the role of Generating Functions in the area of Adiabatic Quantum Computing.

Decoding the above, I will explain the connections:

How do we understand and represent physical law in a world of software algorithms?

How do we pass between the representation and design of artifacts alongside modeling their behavior?

Where do solutions to hard problems come from and is it the programmer who solves the problem or the computer?

There is a huge amount of work to be done in getting mathematics back into shape.

I believe that this Sad and Sorry Carcass can be Re-Animated.

Today I announce the formation of a counter-insurgency group:

Association des agents provocateurs pour éliminer de Nicolas Bourbaki

We have Silver Bullets, Wooden Stakes and Buffy Attitude.

Who’s Afraid of Nicolas Bourbaki?

Rigor leads to Rigor Mortis.

Multi-Verse Dreaming and the Fredkin-Zuse Ambush

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on;
and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

W. Shakespeare, “The Tempest“, Act 4, scene 1.

In a previous post on Privateer Science, one phrase caught my attention:

“all physics is an algorithm”

I believe this is worthy of further analysis.

Can we reduce everything to an Algorithmic formulation? Are we living in a digital universe or a simulation? There is much blood spilled over such claims, which makes it interesting to trace their history backwards.

The earliest version was offered by a pioneer of digital computers, Konrad Zuse. In 1967, he published a treatise with the name “Rechnender Raum”, [Ed. in English: Calculating Space], which conceived of the Universe as a set of interconnected parallel processors. The problem of quantum correlations is not there resolved but is attributed to “external” machinery of some sort.

Later, the American physicist Edward Fredkin developed this story. He tried to build a realistic model based upon the conception of parallel automata given by Von Neumann. Later, this became known as “Cellular Automata” as in the computer game “Life”. This philosophy was renamed the “Fredkin-Zuse Hypothesis” in analogy with the famous “Church-Turing Thesis”.

It is unclear how to build the Standard Model as Cellular Automata and how many properties and symbols these should have. Such systems, if properly defined, have a vast number of combinations so any disproof is difficult.

The most recent creative attempt is a book by Stephen Wolfram, “A New Kind of Science”. At 1200 pages, this colossal tome claims that a short collection of Cellular Automata might reproduce the complexity of the Universe as we perceive it.

There remains the problem of consciousness, or freedom of will, and a serious attempt by the Roger Penrose. In his masterpiece, “Shadows of the
Mind”, he claims to present a complete and rigorous proof for the non-algorithmic nature of the human mind. The key is the intuitive capability of proof, as shown by mathematicians.

Others think differently, including Marvin Minsky and John Searle.

Let us be dispassionate. Personally, I would not be surprised if these questions turn out to be undecidable!

What is interesting to me is that the history of such claims goes way back in ancient Greek philosophy. Indeed, the allegory of Plato’s Cave, in the “Republic”, describes how people can live chained like prisoners. They perceive the shadows of things as reality projected on the walls of the cave from an external source of light which is always behind their back.

If by accident, or by favor, one of the prisoners ever grasps the
external reality, he finds it impossible to explain it to the rest of his comrades. They still prefer the shadows into which their minds are accustomed from the actual reality. This is the mystery of Life.

Later Plato’s followers and intellectuals like Carneades and the Pyrrhonists established a kind of “Academic Scepticism” which in a sense  precludes the Kantian notion of the ever inconceivable “Being in itself”. Soon after, the Pre-Christian tradition of the Gnostics went a step beyond, by claiming to have discovered an external constructor or “programmer” of our reality in the face of the evil mad god “Demiurge or “Yaldabaoth”  in the effort to also answer the famous “Problem of Evil“.

Strangely enough, modern sociology and anthropology was also influenced vby the notion of simulated reality. This is evident in the works of Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard, especially the Baudrillard’s
work “Simulacra and Simulation“. In this and similar works, modern sociology sees a kind of “Apo-Semiosis” or designification where the Sign is finally deprived of any need for a signified “true” object to gradually become an empty signifier. This is reminiscent of all the “quantum this and quantum that” hype or the “All Popes and no God” attribute mentioned earlier in this blog.

One of the most important works of fiction that made heavy use of such a paradigm was the 1992 novel “Snow Crash” based on a 3D Metaverse, a kind of fully “Immersive Reality“.

In an acute critic, Richard Rorty mentions that the most important symptom of such a worldview is not so much its artificiality but rather the total lack of inspiration. In another important work by Walter Michaels, titled “The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History”, the following phrase still echoes concerns expressed in this blog.

“So a world in which everything – from bitmaps to blood – can be understood as a “form of speech” is also a world in which nothing actually is understood, a world in which what a speech act does is disconnected from what it means.”

The above really sounds so “Quantum” if so “Copenhagen” that one cannot avoid the temptation offered by direct comparison!

And by another stranger coincidence, one can even be tempted to ask of what it would mean if a kind of “Entangled Brains Hive”  could exist where not just two separate dreamers but a myriad of them could tune into one and the same common dream!

Would such a dream be able to materialize and what kind of elusiveness would such a dream matter appeared to have? What would the scientists and intellectuals inside the World Dream conclude on the nature of the Dream-matter? Would it be as elusive as the
wave-particle duality appears to be?

I cannot avoid a last comparison in here with the verses from a very common popular song, the well known “Hotel California”

“We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! “

Privateer Science

Pirate_Flag_of_Jack_Rackham.svgJolly Roger of Calico Jack Rackham

The ongoing multicore parallel computing revolution seems to have gone up a gear or two in the last few years. As I have written before, this is the Age of Amdahl’s Law: what matters is the serial bottleneck.

Work comes in two basic kinds: serial and parallel. The first cannot be sped up by adding new resources but the second can.

In my view, this is the least understood of all economic laws and the one with the greatest consequences for business and social innovation.

Hierarchical decision-making structures are replete with bottlenecks. Think of any bureaucracy. To get a form you stand in line. The first line is to get a number, so you can wait. You wait so you can get in line. The second line is to get the form. However, that form is the wrong form so you go back to stand in line. Then you get a number…

You get the picture. In any society that does this habitually very little gets done.

Of course, this problem is not limited to Government. Business suffers greatly from this problem. So too does Academic Research.

Call me a cynic, but my experience of academic research in physics taught me that before you were allowed to discover something you had to get in line.

The first line was about doing stuff that made you an Academic. Usually that process was so long and drawn out that you wound up forgetting what the line was for.

It turns out you could just go right ahead and discover a whole bunch of things right of the bat. However, then you were Not in Line. Get back in line!

This is a perfect example of a serial bottleneck.

However, once you understand the power of Amdhal’s law then things look different.

Here are the game changers:

1) all physics is an algorithm
2) algorithms can be turned into software
3) software can be protected and is valuable

Finally, in this new world of Google Compute Engine you can spin up a cluster for rent. Hence the capital cost barriers to radical innovation in algorithms is low.

So what are the real barriers?

The social bottleneck of Academic “publish-or-perish” screw-you syndrome pretty much ensures nobody with any good idea will get anywhere.

Chalk that up as a good thing.

The negative network economy of Academic Rivalry pretty much stalls all real advances for at least one generation until all opponents have finally died out.

The Academic flotilla may have all the Pomp and Pretty Pennants of the Spanish Main, but they are: Dead in the Water.

So how does one exploit this?

I think the answer is Privateer Science.

Academics are not crash-hot at business.

For decades, they enriched publishers by madly competing to publish in journals that nobody read. Now they are madly competing to pay top dollar to be published in journals that the public can read for free.

Okay, so first barrier down.

You can read what they did for free while they fight each-other for scraps.

What does a modern Privateer do in this circumstance?

Focus on the profitable bottleneck.

In quantum mechanics, that is many-body theory with strongly correlated fields.

I know, I know, every wanna-be genius in Physics will duke it out on quantum computers.

Okay, cool… but where is the market?

The market for strongly correlated fields is Chemistry, Superconducting Electronics, Photovoltaic Devices and Nano-structures among other things.

These are Big markets, here today, and served by existing Multi-Physics software companies with real product.

And it is all about parallel algorithms

That is what any budding Tesla or Edison of today should focus upon. The Big Score.

Work out a better QED that is simpler for strong self-interactions and you are done.

Better yet, if you find one – keep it a secret. Exit the rat-race of Publish-and-Perish.

Raise the Jolly Roger and load those cannons with grape shot…

All is Ripe for Plunder on the High Seas.

A Blinding of Naked Emperors

Emperor_Clothes_01There seems to be a global special on Naked Emperors right now. They are everywhere, like a New Year Clearance Sale.

Get your Naked Emperors now… by the brace, by the pound, by the dozen.

Personally, I blame Advertising. Why not? It is ubiquitous and rots the mind.

The plethora of positive messages about product has corrupted the normal channels of curmudgeonly defenestration.

Truth Talking is Trash Talking in a Sound-Bite World of Blinding Gloss.

No longer can we just throw our Naked Emperors out the window and wait for the satisfying splat as they hit the dung heap.

This leads me to ponder an obvious deficiency of language.

Where is the Collective Noun for Naked Emperors?

We have a skein of geese, a coffle of asses, a parliament of baboons and a bellowing of bullfinches. With this many Naked Emperors one must have the proper word…

Enter an obvious Thought Experiment.

Suppose we were to place a number of Naked Emperors in a darkened room behind one-way glass. What would happen?

A whole bunch of Naked Cavorting in the Dark, I would guess.

That whole pirouetting Naked Emperor thing!

There is an old Danish proverb which speaks to this situation:

Necessity teaches the naked woman to spin.

Naked Emperors are no different, only the rate of spin is much higher. Indeed, in a sufficiently dense medium – such as Physical Review Letters – we can often witness Naked Emperors spinning much faster than the phase velocity of light in such a medium. The result is the brilliant blue light known as Eminence Radiation.

This is positively blinding to the General Public. Hence our collective noun:

A Blinding of Naked Emperors.

Your most Scintillating Spinning Eminence… I am Blind before your Nakedness.

All Popes and No God

I grew up in a religious family but am not myself a believer. This upbringing shaped my attitudes to life, belief, certainty and respect for contrary views. When members of your family harbor beliefs that you do not share then it is necessary to come to some accommodation. You cannot simply discount matters of the human spirit.

In my view, that which moves the human spirit is ultimately some form of faith. It may be faith in an External God, for the Spiritually Minded. It may be faith in the Scientific Method, for those who believe in a Rational World. Or, something else entirely.

In my case, I developed Faith in Creativity. To me the God was innate in the ability of us all to create. We may not be able to create in the Biblical sense, but we sure can be creative in our lives, thoughts, actions and artifacts. This idea has proven to be a meaningful motor for my spirit. It gets me out of bed each morning.

However, many other Scientists seem contemptuous towards matters of faith. There grew up in the 1990s a form of Scientific Triumphalism which irritates me immensely. On the one hand, you had scientists lambasting faith-based religion as lacking any sound basis. However, they then trumpeted ideas such as The Theory of Everything, Many Worlds, Parallel Universes and a host of other bits and pieces of histrionic nonsense. None of these had evidence to support them – pure mind fluff.

All of this happened in the context of a quantum theory which has never once seemed self-consistent. It makes no direct statement of how the objects of the theory relate to observable reality. It is based on a panoply of rules without coherent foundation and a set of recipes for throwing away any results that should prove embarrassing.

Infinite predictions? Don’t worry, just settle on a cut-off and re-normalize away.

Infinite zero-point energy? Don’t worry, just ignore it.

Paradoxes of measurement and self-reference? Don’t worry, just kick the cat.

It is not bad to be pragmatic. It is sensible to press on and see what can be done in face of these difficulties. However, there also seems to be a stark double standard.

On the one hand, Scientists lambast faith as an arcane and primitive deficiency of the intellect. They trumpet rationalism in place of this and then laud Science as its most perfect exemplar. On the other hand, they hound and pillory those within their ranks who would fix the cracked foundations of their own glorious theories.

You simply cannot have it both ways.

If Scientists want the Public to be humble before their own God of Rationalism then they must be humble before the Flaws in Their Own Theories.

However, this is not the spirit of our age…

Much as a messianic leader of old, there is an attitude among Scientists, especially Physicists, that questions are unwelcome for the answers have been given.

I do believe in Rationalism, but I also believe in what the philosopher-investor George Soros described as Rational Fallibility. No theory is perfect. There is no Final Theory.

When you think you know it all, a surprise is surely in store.

In this connection, Weinberg once said that:

Science has Heroes but no Prophets.

Perhaps that is true, but who then will show the way to new theories? Is not prophecy the art of foreseeing that which the multitude will not see?

No rational mind would attribute divine qualities to a Hedge Fund manager. However, what equipped George Soros with the gift of financial prophecy was an understanding of Human Fallibility, both his own, and that of other market players.

The Prophet sees what could happen which the multitude do not want to happen.

Hence I am led to a small prophecy about Physics.

I think physics has become very authoritarian. What is done and what is praised no longer seems to bear a strong relationship with scientific method. Instead, it seems to have become a game to garner social favor. Ideas are presented and then canonized seemingly without regard to their level of empirical support.

Once we develop a social caste of High Priests then the destination is clear:

Physics will have Popes but no God.

Once a community stops asking the searching questions, the rational basis of Science is lost. Not for ever, but until the boil is lanced.

Until that day, there is next to no difference between Science and Religion.

It will be High Priests versus the Heathen Mongols.

Age and Invention

There is a common view that invention is the province of the young. For an interesting discussion of this see Age and Great Invention, where some contrary evidence is also presented. Reflecting on observation of my peers and my own experience:

1) I believe that the dissemination of any invention is much harder today

2) However, the capacity for meaningful social innovation grows with age

The reasons, I think, are largely social.

The big change over the last fifty years or so has been the huge expansion of global research activity. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Of course, it is good to have more research. However, it is also more difficult for ideas to become widely adopted. That may seem paradoxical, but lies at the heart of my observations.

If you reflect on the scale of research today, in terms of the sheer number of persons involved, then it is clear where the social friction comes from. There is a tendency in social systems towards a Winner–Take–All mentality. In the field of ideas, that is very problematic. Crafting a Win–Win Outcome is hard — perhaps impossible.

Perhaps the best analogy I can think of is the network law due to Bob Metcalfe:

The economic value of any network of N members goes as the square of N.

Allow me to introduce Jones’s First Law of Academic Fractiousness:

The bitterness and intensity of Academic disputes and in–fighting goes as the square of the number of Academics involved.

This does not make any individual Academic a bad person. They are not. It is just that the Laws of Economics predict an Almighty Bun-Fight at the End of Time.

Folks better hope that nobody ever finds a Final Theory or the resulting priority dispute may spin the Earth clean off its axis! It would be Academic Ragnarök.

Returning to points 1) and 2) my summation is simple:

Innovate while you are young then spend the rest of your life explaining what on Earth it was you did. Embrace the second part since it will make you a better person.

That seems to be the general rule and pattern of life nowadays.

Perhaps this seems cynical, but then part two — learning how to introduce something useful to society — is good for the soul. It is all about framing: “What’s in it for me?” on a genuine basis of mutual engagement. This happens to be great training for starting any business and so is very useful indeed.

To paraphrase Jessica Rabbit: Academics are not bad, they just behave that way.

Stringy Ectoplasm

It is a commonplace for folks to imagine that lasting innovation in physics is down to raw intelligence. I think it may be more complicated than that. Physics is most definitely not mathematics. Pure intelligence is an unqualified asset in mathematics, but, in physics this seems doubtful. After all:

It is about Nature, Not about You.

A good example is Richard P. Feynman. Undoubtedly a great genius, Feynman was not your regular smart guy. A most appealing attribute of this “half-genius half-buffoon” was his proud reflection of a moderate IQ, 127 he claimed. However, you never know with Feynman. Ever the showman, he also aced the USA Putnam math exams.

This leads me to reflect on the high profile of String Theorists. I find this puzzling given the tenuous links to observational data. String theory is everywhere in the Mind and appears nowhere in Nature. How did these folks hoodwink everybody?

It is hard to puncture this eternally inflating bubble of irrelevance. String theorists seem impervious to criticism. If you were feeling cruel you might observe:

That’s some Pretty Pulchritudinous Phenomenology you’re Packing my P-Braned Pal!

However, string theorists do not get out much. They probably don’t spend much time in bars and would doubtless consider this an insult.

In short, I have to admire them for getting away with it thus far.

There has grown up around this community a popular view that they are the smartest of the smart and therefore must be on the right track. About this I have mixed feelings. I have zero doubt that Edward Witten is an order of magnitude more intelligent than me. However, I have grave doubts that string theory is on the right track in physics.

The reason has to do with something that really was exceptional about Feynman. He knew in his bones when he was fooling himself and backed away.

It is about Nature, Not about You.

Clever may be a pleasant detour, but Right is the correct destination.

Sometimes being right means appearing to be dumb.

Let me illustrate. String theory is popular because the notion of an “extended object” seems like the “right” way to move beyond point particles. The physical reasons for wanting to do that have to do with infinities in quantum field theory.

These are especially acute for quantum gravity which happens not to fit the pattern of other theories. String theory is a neat piece of mathematics which intuitively seemed to fit the idea of how you might propose other degrees of freedom and then integrate them out to make the theory finite. People who are excellent mathematicians warm to this idea. They are drawn to it like moths to a flame: it seems “obviously right”.

However, this is where it pays to be less smart but more in tune with Nature. It may shock folks, but we actually have little evidence that particles are point-like.

The best example I know of is Carver Mead with his Collective Electrodynamics. Mead develops a cogent argument that we have misunderstood electrodynamics. He points out that coherent quantum behavior represents the real lesson of “how things are”.

This is important, because the popular view is that Quantum Mechanics is intrinsically indeterminate. Carver Mead provides a straightforward path of reasoning to a different conclusion. He argues, successfully I believe, that the indeterminacy is a function of a particular observational regime. Instead of supposing that we know how things are at the subatomic level, we should recognize how things are at our level.

Carver Mead may well lay claim to be operating in the tradition of Newton: Hypotheses non fingo. I make no hypothesis. I invoke what is necessary to explain the data and no more. I do not presume to know why it is that way. I make no hypothesis. The task of the Scientist is to mold his or her mind to the Ways of Nature.

Another fine example of this trend is John G. Cramer and his Transactional Quantum Mechanics. This can be best understood as a development of the Wheeler-Feynman Source–Absorber theory. The idea is to consider the “photon” and all other “exchange quanta” as resonance phenomena between the source and the absorber. The result is a transactional view of exchange quanta. This provides a different explanation of photons, and indeed all other such quanta as artifacts of resonant interaction.

I find these ideas interesting because they conform to a long tradition of conceptual physics. This approach involves deep thinking about physical models. It places at a lower rung the sophistication of the mathematics. A wonderful historical example is the dielectric model of H.A. Lorentz in his landmark: Theory of Electrons. This may have been classical, but it is still useful.

A contemporary example is Tony Seigman’s book Lasers which manages to develop most every aspect of laser operation using only classical physics.

People schooled in the finer details of Quantum Electrodynamics might find such works quaint. However, the goal of physics is to understand not to impress.

In contrast, String theory seems to come at things backwards. It proposes that more sophisticated mathematics is necessary to understand the structure of matter.

When this fails, the String Theorists claim: If theory does not work, let us invent new Hypothetical Universes where it might.

I am not a believer.