Emmy Noether
Like how we all ignore the genius of Emmy Noether, Lisa Randall, Elizabeth Blackburn, Marie Curie, Karen Uhlenbeck, Lise Meitner and Madame Shien-Chiung Wu?
If you want equality as I do, let me say what I would say to any man who made this argument: No. No way. Not even close.
There are many female geniuses. Theyâve fought harder than men to have it recognized. This is an injustice to them to slight what they have done for our species. No one has earned the right to advance the activism of others over their achievements:
@vgr Thatâs adorable. But no. Genius just is. You just kinda know it when you are getting your ass kicked.
I have to deal with them professionally. They are often insufferable. Just like their male counterparts. And, just like their male counterparts, I thank god they are here.
In essence this is happening every time âyouâ move. When you see spectators doing âThe Waveâ the spectators are the medium. They donât move with the wave.
You are a wave. You excite a totally different portion of the medium wherever you go. That medium is called a vector bundle.
I donât think this Ship of Theseus thought experiment is doing what it sets out to do. In some sense a new atom in the same location & state *is* the same atom. It is re-exciting the same medium to the same excited state. Planks & joints on a ship have mildly different character.
But you could imagine a physics in which there were failures of conservation laws and you would have splitting events. I may hold an MP4 of you on video, but if I copy it, you have the logical equivalent. Well, this gets into multiverse territory. Are we splitting like the video?
What makes you âyouâ? Well, state, conservation laws, continuity, uniqueness. State means you have your memories & neural connections. But the others are sort of like a double-spend problem. When you transfer a Bitcoin. Is it the same one? Iâd say it continues the earlier token.
So conservation laws ensure that anything too complex to construct is a unique continuation of its earlier selves until it dissolves into entropy. And what generates conservation laws? Symmetry. In a way, we all have Prof. Emmy Noether to thank for identity.
But for another day.
@TomkowTerrance Sigh. So sad, so sad.
@CreatedInTheD The atom moves through space. But as a wave. If a wave moves through a small oil slick, the oil slick doesnât move with the wave. It briefly rises & falls in place when excited. The medium doesnât move. The thing that moves is the atom. The thing that stays is the Vector bundle.
It is an interesting question as to who inspires us in physics. Here is a list of 20th century giants whose work inspired me that might work as protagonists with interesting stories that deserve to be considered along with the best known Einstein/Hawking/Oppenheimer/Etc.:
CN Yang (with Lee and Simons)
Paul Dirac
Ernst Stueckelberg
Madame Wu
David Bohm
Abdus Salam
Ken Wilson
Emmy Noether
Ettore Majorana
Carlo Rubio
Shin'ichirĆ Tomonaga
Lev Landau
Simon Van der Meer
Freeman Dyson
Julian Schwinger
Paul Ehrenfest
John VonNeumann
Feza Gursey
Wolfgang Pauli
Louis and Edward Witten
Hans Bethe
George Sudarshan
Vera Rubin
Gerard 't Hooft
Not all of those stories areâŠuhâŠsimple.
Would be curious to hear names from others.
i was hoping that the oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists but it really missed the mark on that.
let's get that movie made!
(i think the social network managed to do this for startup founders.)
But letâs face facts: inspiration is not the issue. Fundamental Physics needs to be a good life. What is holding us back is:
A) Terrible Pay.
B) Worse Odds of Survival
C) Decoupling of Success at Physics from Success in Physics
D) The Matthew Effect.
E) Math and Physics Pricks
F) Tyranny of large programs over individuals.
G) Multi Decade Stagnation
H) Un Scientific And even Anti-scientific behavior.
I) The Matilde Effect
J) The Sudarshan Effect
K) Ethics Collapse
L) Needlessly long pedagogical sequence (e.g. intro physics -> Classical Mechanics -> Grad Classical Mechanics -> Symplectic Geometry) driven by history.
M) Socializing physics into a team sport in areas dominated by individuals and iconoclasts.
N) Tolerance for Program level failure (e.g. *obsessive* use of toy model physics to evade a reckoning).
O) Intolerance for individual error and failure by those in programs.
P) Failure to reward early contributions (e.g. *Abelian* Chern Simons QFT).
Q) Atrocious MSM journalism distorting the public understanding.
R) Relentless discussion of woo physics in public and 3-5 real topics (e.g. somebodies cat).
S) Learned Helplessness coming from over-learning Ken Wilson.
T) Inability to support motherhood of female physicists.
U) Inability to keep physics marriages easily together with jobs.
V) DEI loyalty oaths and loss of autonomy.
W) Flooding of markets with disposable labor and abuse apprenticeship as labor.
X) Kicking up on attribution.
Y) Overpaying for cherry topping.
Z) Fetishizing the quantum when innovation in classical field theory remains the heart of QFT.
But lastly, if outsiders want to fund and fix movies, you will find that going to the âLeading physicistsâ wonât work. Peer review canât work when the leadership *is* the problem. You get more failure.
You need to hold meetings where you get disagreement. So choose the leaders and iconoclasts with great care. Patrick Collison isnât terrible at this. B+. Best I have ever seen. Start there. Good luck. đ
So you have my list. It is incomplete and idiosyncratic. Iâd love to have your corrections and additions.
SoâŠ.Where is yours? Thanks again.
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