Paul Dirac - Best Story EVER in Physics

There may be better stories than the one I will copy'n'paste from the Wiki entry on Paul Dirac, below,but if so I haven't heard them.

Heisenberg recollects a friendly conversation among young participants at the 1927 Solvay Conference about Einstein and Planck's views on religion. Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg and Dirac took part in it. Dirac's contribution was a poignant and clear criticism of the political purpose of religion, which was much appreciated for its lucidity by Bohr when Heisenberg reported it to him later. Among other things, Dirac said:^[21]
 

“

I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.

”

Heisenberg's view was tolerant. Pauli, raised as a Catholic but soon to leave that church had kept silent after some initial remarks, but when finally he was asked for his opinion, jokingly he said: "Well, I'd say that also our friend Dirac has got a religion and the first commandment of this religion is 'God does not exist and Paul Dirac is his prophet.'" Everybody burst into laughter, including Dirac.^[21]


:-)


Many young men, rabid in their enthusiastic embrace of atheism, change their points of view on religion in their later years. Dirac later said: "God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world." Amen to that.

The Physics of Perfection, Part 2 of 2

 For Part 1, click here.

As expected the top three at the end of Tuesday's Short program won the Gold, Silver, and Bronze in exact order after last night's Long program and finals in Ladies Figure Skating at the Olympics. For only the first time since 1964 (the second time since 1948 and the fourth time since 1908, that is to say: ever), an American lady was not one of the 3 medalists (Mirai Nagasu of USA came in 4th and Rachael Flatt of USA came in 7th, in spite of flawless performances). They are:

2010 Vancouver:  G: Kim Yu-na (KOR -South)   S: Mao Asada (JPN)  B: Joannie Rochette (CAN - French)

 

Going backwards in time, here are the medal winners at the Olympics previous to 2010:

2006 Turin:  G: Shizuka Arakawa (JPN)  S: Sasha Cohen (USA)  B: Irina Slutskaya (RUS)

2002 Salt Lake City: G: Sarah Hughes (USA)  S: Irina Slutskaya (RUS)  B:  Michelle Kwan (USA)

1998 Nagano: G: Tara Lipinski (USA)   S: Michelle Kwan (USA)    B: Chen Lu (CHN)

1994 Lillehamer:  G: Oksana Baiul (UKR)  S: Nancy Kerrigan (USA)    B: Chen Lu (CHN)

1992 Albertville:  G: Kristi Yamaguchi (USA)  S: Midori Ito (JPN)  B: Nancy Kerrigan (USA)

 

Here's a "representation" (Representation Theory! ... I knew I'd work Mathematical Physics in here somehow) of Tonya Harding, who never medaled at the Olympics:

1988 Calgary:  G:  Katarina Witt (GDR)   S:  Elizabeth Manley (CAN)  B:  Debi Thomas (USA)

1984 Sarajevo:  G:  Katarina Witt (GDR)  S:  Rosalynn Sumners (USA)  B:  Kira Ivanova (USSR)

Simon Donaldson

From wiki:

Simon Kirwan Donaldson (born 20 August 1957, in Cambridge, England), is an English mathematician famous for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds. He is now a Chair in Pure Mathematics and President of the Institute for Mathematical Science at Imperial College London where he holds a professorship.
Donaldson gained a BA degree in mathematics from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1979, and in 1980 began postgraduate work at Worcester College, Oxford, at first under Nigel Hitchin and later under Michael Atiyah's supervision. Still a graduate student, Donaldson soon proved in 1982 a result that would establish his fame. He published the result in a paper Self-dual connections and the topology of smooth 4-manifolds which appeared in 1983. In the words of Atiyah, the paper "stunned the mathematical world".
Whereas Michael Freedman classified topological four-manifolds, Donaldson's work focused on four-manifolds admitting a differentiable structure, using instantons, a particular solution to the equations of Yang-Mills gauge theory which has its origin in quantum field theory. One of Donaldson's first results gave severe restrictions on the intersection form of a smooth four-manifold. As a consequence, a large class of the topological four-manifolds do not admit any smooth structure at all. Donaldson also derived polynomial invariants from gauge theory. These were new topological invariants sensitive to the underlying smooth structure of the four-manifold. They made it possible to deduce the existence of "exotic" smooth structures - certain topological four-manifolds could carry an infinite family of different smooth structures.
After gaining his DPhil degree from Oxford University in 1983, Donaldson was appointed a Junior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, he spent the academic year 1983–84 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and returned to Oxford as Wallis Professor of Mathematics in 1985. In 1999, he moved to Imperial College London.
Donaldson received the Junior Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society in 1985 and in the following year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and, also in 1986, he received a Fields Medal. He was, however, turned down for fellowship of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications on the grounds that he applied too soon after his doctorate. He was awarded the 1994 Crafoord Prize.
In February 2006 Professor Donaldson was awarded the King Faisal International Prize for science for his work in pure mathematical theories linked to physics, which have helped in forming an understanding of the laws of matter at a subnuclear level.
In April 2008, he was awarded the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics, one of the most prestigious mathematics prize awarded by Northwestern University.
In 2009 he was awarded the Shaw Prize in Mathematics (jointly with Clifford Taubes) for their many brilliant contributions to geometry in 3 and 4 dimensions.

Donaldson's work

A thread running through Donaldson's work is the creative application of mathematical analysis (especially the analysis of elliptic partial differential equations) to problems in geometry. The problems mainly concern 4-manifolds, complex differential geometry and symplectic geometry. The following theorems rank among his most striking achievements:

• The diagonalizability theorem (Donaldson 1983a, 1983b): if the intersection form of a smooth, closed, simply connected 4-manifold is positive- or negative-definite then it is diagonalizable over the integers. (The simple connectivity hypothesis has since been shown to be unnecessary using Seiberg-Witten theory.) This result is sometimes called Donaldson's theorem.

• A smooth h-cobordism between 4-manifolds need not be trivial (Donaldson 1987a). This contrasts with the situation in higher dimensions.

• A stable holomorphic vector bundle over a non-singular projective algebraic variety admits a Hermitian-Einstein metric (Donaldson 1987b). This was proved independently by Karen Uhlenbeck and Shing-Tung Yau (Uhlenbeck & Yau 1986).

• A non-singular, projective algebraic surface can only be diffeomorphic to the connected sum of two oriented 4-manifolds if one of them has negative-definite intersection form (Donaldson 1990). This was an early application of the Donaldson invariants (or instanton invariants).

• Any compact symplectic manifold admits a symplectic Lefschetz pencil (Donaldson 1999).

Donaldson's recent work centers on a difficult problem in complex differential geometry concerning a conjectural relationship between algebro-geometric "stability" conditions for smooth projective varieties and the existence of "optimal" Kähler metrics, typically those with constant scalar curvature. Definitive results have not yet been obtained, but substantial progress has been made (see for example Donaldson 2001).
See also Donaldson theory.

References

• Donaldson, S. K. An application of gauge theory to four-dimensional topology. J. Differential Geom., 18, (1983), 279–315.
• Donaldson, S. K. Self-dual connections and the topology of smooth 4-manifolds. Bull. Amer. Math. Soc.. 8, (1983), 81–83.
• Donaldson, S. K. Irrationality and the h-cobordism conjecture. J. Differential Geom. 26 (1987), no. 1, 141–168.
• Donaldson, S. K. Infinite determinants, stable bundles and curvature. Duke Math. J. 54 (1987), no. 1, 231–247.
• Donaldson, S. K. Polynomial invariants for smooth four-manifolds. Topology 29 (1990), no. 3, 257–315.
• Donaldson, S. K. Lefschetz pencils on symplectic manifolds. J. Differential Geom. 53 (1999), no. 2, 205–236.
• Donaldson, S. K. Scalar curvature and projective embeddings. I. J. Differential Geom. 59 (2001), no. 3, 479–522.
• Donaldson, S. K. and Kronheimer, P. B. The geometry of four-manifolds. Oxford Mathematical Monographs, Oxford University Press, New York, (1990) ISBN 0-19-853553-8.
• Uhlenbeck, K.; Yau, S.-T. On the existence of Hermitian-Yang-Mills connections in stable vector bundles. Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 39 (1986), no. S, suppl., S257–S293.

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Simon Donaldson", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Donaldson.html .
• Simon Donaldson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Home page at Imperial College

Isidor Rabi - Best Quote EVER in Physics

"I know that when I was in my late teens and early twenties the world was just a Roman candle - rockets all the time ... You lose that sort of thing as time goes on ... physics is an otherworld thing. It requires a taste for things unseen, even unheard of - a high degree of abstraction ... These faculties die off somehow when you grow up ... profound curiosity happens when children are young. I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race ... Once you are sophisticated, you know too much - far too much. Pauli once said to me 'I know a great deal. I know too much. I am a quantum ancient.'" - Isidor Rabi

My Reply to Lubos Motl

The picture above is my favorite of Dr. Lubos Motl of Czechia. Looks like a pleasant fellow, yes?

UPDATE : click here to see his video (from 2002). He states he didn't leave Harvard over denied tenure, but rather "I wasn't denied any tenure. I resigned because I couldn't stand the radical left-wing scum that effectively controls Harvard - and the Academia." - Lubos . I can see how disgusted he would be with Harvard. It's not close to what it used to be, they really take Liberalism too far. Lubos of course, is a devotee of  Fox News, which promotes the completely extreme opposite philosophy of Harvard.

For background on what you are about to read, please read Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder's "Interna", and comments, here.

To be called immoral by Motl is a high accolade. ... Aruns [sic]

You mean I'm not not the only one who came to that conclusion? Cool, and high-five.

... Aruns [sic]and Colyers [sic] and similar stuff are far leftists who have purely political reasons to help to defend the indefensible but that can't change the fact that what they're doing is deeply immoral, too. ... Dr. Lubos Motl, Ph.D. (in what?), Rutgers University

What's "immoral", Lubos? Criticizing a criticizer and ad hominem personal attacker such as yourself? In Karl Rove's world, "criticism" should work only one way, and THAT's Politics, baby!

In his world. You should watch the film, "Bush's Brain," in which Rove, on camera, explains his political strategy of shining a light on the opponent to make your guy win an election. Or do your friends at John Birch and at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. tell you not to? Who's "the man" if you don't at least consider the other guy's opinion? Not you if you don't, obviously.

I'm not "a lib", Lubos. I'm a political moderate. It might pleasantly surprise you how many ways I agree with some of your not-extreme thoughts, and even some (but not all) of the extreme ones. But let's talk Lubos, about your favorite subject.

As many have said here and elsewhere, you are an excellent teacher until one comes upon that subject where you toss objectivity in the fireplace: Superstrings Theory. There ARE alternatives, Lubos, but rather than explore them you attack not just the theories, but the theorists themselves.

That's unprofessional, rude, crude, crass, uncouth, and classless. It is also, as stefan stated, entertaining ... but only to a point. Is that why you do it? For hits at your website? Are you that insecure as a person? Isn't it enough that SciAm's George Musser mentions only 4 websites that people should read to understand Superstrings Theory in his book "T.C.I. Guide to String Theory", and those four are BackReAction, Cosmic Variance, The Reference Frame, and Not Even Wrong? Isn't it great to be one of those four? Isn't that sufficient?

As a fellow Scarlet Knight (2 degrees) who is currently indebting/bankrupting himself sending his two oldest children to Rutgers, I humbly beseech you to represent our alma mater better, i.e. and to whit, grow up.

Btw, I mention you at my latest post, here. I  sincerely hope you're not offended. I look forward to further discussion between us. Ski in the high Tatras? Beer in an outdoor cafe in Pilzn? A motor tour of Bell Labs-Murray Hill, Serin Physics Lab, The Hill Center for Mathematical Sciences, Fine Hall and Fuld Hall, lunch with Peter Woit at Times Square's Hard Rock Cafe? All are within 30 miles of my house. All are possible.

To Neil Bates: good points, mate.

Sincerely,
Colyers [sic]