Blog Wars: Woit and Smolin vs Motl

[Kea]

Why did he stop posting?

We don't know, josh, but there is reason to believe that he has left this world for good, sadly.

 

[Ratzinger]

Why did he stop posting?

Given that selfadjoint spend such much time in this forum I wonder why no one asked that question here before.

 

[George Jones]

Given that selfadjoint spend such much time in this forum I wonder why no one asked that question here before.

Sad news; see https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=165003".

 

[Kea]

More precisely, see here:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=1273280&postcount=15

Oh, no, George, that is very sad. We did fear this, but did not know for sure. He will be missed.

 

[marcus]

... He will be missed.

True. He is already much missed.
Gentleman, scholar, ideal PF mentor.

 

[Hell_SD]

I'd like to think he's smiling somewhere on the other side of life knowing everything and still clocking into PF wishing he could post up the answers to all our questions but can't. Like us looking through an interrogation mirror where what we see is reflected back but in the soundproof room behind the mirror...

 

[Hans de Vries]

Given that selfadjoint spend such much time in this forum I wonder why no one asked that question here before.

We tried to figure out what happened to SelfAdjoint a while back when we started
missing him with the little bit bit of personal info we could find in his posts (and
which I placed on your thread now in his remembrance)

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=160724&page=6It seems he used to post on spr as DickT (Dick Thompson)
http://groups.google.com/groups/pro...jqMROIu04t5H4vEZoAYYh0OR845UJFpeFc45Ysw&hl=en

For instance here in this Peter Woit thread replying to Lubos:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci....183c4?lnk=st&q=&rnum=1&hl=en#11003445dbb183c4
Or promoting an LQG discussion on this forum to John Baez: :^)
http://groups.google.com/group/sci....deced?lnk=st&q=&rnum=4&hl=en#ab866a9f998deced
SelfAdjoint's full name was Richard Blackmore Thompson (linked by the
email address rthompson10@new.rr.com). The little note you don't want
to see in the newspaper is here:

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/obituaries/orl-flaobit1406dec14,0,1636276.story?page=3 Regards, Hans

 

[Careful]

Sigh. Yes, it really is a great shame that selfAdjoint has left us. He had a quiet way of encouraging interesting discussions.

To put it mildly, it is rather strange that interesting discussions need to be encouraged in the first place (especially for such an exotic topic which concerns so few people).

 

[Chronos]

Evil mathematicians provoked the schism between QM and GR by pointing out 'hey guys, you can't have it both ways'. We haven't seen a physicist who can play a mean violin since.

 

[kakarukeys]

A friend of mine working in deterministic q.m. refuting Motl's "Myths about Einstein".

Motl's blog post (If you have the time and energy to read)
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/05/myths-about-einstein.html

My friend's refutation:

Hi Lubos,
To me, it seems that you've misunderstood the points of Smolin's article.
a) Smolin is not at all trying to analyse Einstein's political attitude to understand his creativity. He talks about Einstein's true (not easily shown to public) political views in order to show that they are not as naive as people assumed. And I don't see that Smolin is in anyway criticizing Einstein's political views. By "the man himself was an embarrassment" Smolin is mentioning the views of the executors, not his. And all the following paragraphes with a word "embarrassment" are all the views of others, i.e. the director of IAS, the executors and Einstein's younger American colleagues. Smolin's own view is clearly opposed to them. So I failed to see why you sees Smolin as exactly the other way round.
b) About the old einstein. I think what Smolin is trying to do is this: the old Einstein remains, at the core, much the same as the young Einstein, in the sense of his priority of what a true story about Nature should be like. It is exactly his indifference to mainstream views and his emphasis on logical structure and conceptual issues of physical theories that makes him the creator of relativity and the disfollower of QM.
Smolin is not encouraging young people to merely copy and imitate Einstein. I think he is just saying perhaps Einstein's judgement of the difficulties of QM is a REAL difficulty, and thus we should perhaps take his criticisms seriously, and not just ignoring them by simply viewing the 'old' Einstein as no longer spectacular. This is far from "reliance on authorities".
c) as for Einstein's view on QM, I don't think your criticisms are convincing. You criticised Smolin's emphasis on 'sociological' factors, but it seems that you're implicitly using these factors yourself when you says there's no universal and objective methods for science to progress. Smolin is perhaps vewing that Einstein has a deeper glimpse of the observer-independent reality and so we should take his views on QM more seriously. But you seems suggest that a person's view/meethod can success for some times and then failed afterwords. This to me shifts scientific progress more towards the sociological realm.

 

[Fra]

What do you mean by "blind chickens"?

As originally noted by Marcus:

http://gesalerico.ft.uam.es/strings07/index.html

LOL. I almost fell off my chair reading this.

(I don't get around to read every thread, but today I was browsing some old threads, and I have to say some are very entertaining )

/Fredrik