Letters to the Editor
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this is the BEST thread
"raymundohpl", i love your style! but can't you come up with a handle i can remember? same goes for "galanolwe" who reads so fast it's a pleasure. you can read it for the meter you can read it for the content. very different styles, both real poetry.
that's the *foreshortened* version, gherstein? here's a thought. economics is seen as like physics - a few general principles with everything made consistently of smaller parts. bottom up analysis. - but it perhaps is more like ecology. no first principles to explain everything. the parts interacting. top down synthesis. as for shockley, were you referring to his racism? to my mind, dyson too. though more antisemitic than antiblack. He's a Piece of Shit! (sorry, i've been trying to be more reasoned, but i really really don't like him)
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I'll regret replying -- I know I will
Grubert – as it happen’s I do know that Physics was known as natural philosophy, it’s why I received a BA and not a BSc.
There really is nothing odd about Freeman Dyson not having a PhD – I noticed that one ranter against him cited his PhD as part of why he was part of the deluded [patriarchy.] The PhD was a largely German credential pre-WW II – I had very eminent lecturers of Dyson’s generation, albeit elderly, who did not have PhD’s, indeed there Nobels in that category. Quite a few scientists in the 20s-50s never got around to doing a PhD thesis. Dyson has done serious work throughout his career, and few good physicists think he is a bullshitter. His comments about
As for anyone who says he is not a serious scientist – well hmmmmmmm. FRS is not handed out to bullshit artists. Why don’t people check out his biography before pontificating in ways that make every [informed] reader scratch their head … Dyson has done serious work throughout his career, and few good physicists think he is a bullshitter.
Grubert: “But physics isn't about math, the math must be verified by reality. Dyson is not a typical first-rate physicist, I'm not even sure he would be considered first-rate.” What came first, the chicken and the egg … a lot of say quantum mechanics couldn’t be verified for a very long time – indeed some of it seem to contradict reality when first hypothesised – and observationally even say a ptolomaeic view of the cosmos was more consistent with observed reality than the Copernicus model, until opotics and measurement technology caught up. By the way, few physicists regard Dyson as anything other than fist rate.
As for David Sugerman’s post “when people see "Norman Borlaug" (the Green Revolution) they think "Glenn Seaborg" (plutonium) and they have a point” and that point would be??? The mind boggles, please, explain the connection? Ignorance – you know there was once an interesting survey where people were asked to identify the most dangerous item to hold in the palm of their hand:
(a) a new nuclear fuel rod
(b) a used nucler fuel rod
(c) 50g of metallic plutonium
Guess which was the right answer – guess which one people picked?
Finally, I do not (and I am at best an agnostic) find his criticism of Richard Dawkins unfair – Dawkins is being as much of a jerk as the Christians who stick it up your nose.
By the way, have fun with preachers – when you see one heading towards you getting ready to say “have I told you about Jesus and how he loves you” the trick is to hold out hand first as say “have I about Satan and how he wants you – here look at the this contract, you won’t regret signing it AS LONG AS YOU LIVE" – then whip out a fountain pen and start jabbing your arm saying– "gotta get some bloooood”
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"Foreshortened"
Um, Mr. Sugarman, the *URL* is foreshortened in the "TINYURL" version. Both URL's point to exactly the same page.
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The ugly fact is...
that Dyson became famous writing papers in the period 1947-48 on Feynman's ideas, which Feynman was reluctant to publish. Dyson, being an elegant mathematical physicist, produced some elegant work that was, initially, much easier for fellow physicists to use than the complex muck that Julian Schwinger was producing at Harvard on quantum electrodynamics, and would be replaced by the Feynman Diagram technique after about 1950. Dyson was able to parlay these few, well-written and formally elegant papers and his impeccable English manners along with the cultivation of that uber-snob Oppenheimer into a sinecure at the Center for Advanced Study at Princeton which he held for 50 years. Dyson's entire reputation rests largely on those papers, a few nutty ideas (Dyson Spheres et al.) and the prestige of his position at Princeton, plus having an airy writing style, a big mouth, and a megaphone at the NY Review of Books. He is five decades past his intellectual prime and a blowhard to boot.
His intellectual curiosity can be summed up in an observation he made reviewing a bio of Teller in the NYRB: he had worked on a panel with Teller for a few weeks in 1959 and found him a very pleasant chap and a good physicist, so the bio that showed him to be a right-wing weasel and an intellectual charlatan (he had stolen the key insights that made an H-bomb feasible from another scientist then used government secrecy to hide that fact for years) must be wrong! You see, Dyson had met Teller once, and since HIS impression was different, how could this guy who had spent years researching the man be right! What an asshole.
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you're going to regret this, MacK.!
"“when people see "Norman Borlaug" (the Green Revolution) they think "Glenn Seaborg" (plutonium) and they have a point” and that point would be???" had you ended it there, i just would have told you.it's a snotty question, but not insufferably so. but you continue, "The mind boggles, please, explain the connection?" ok, here it is: for one, the sound ("borlaug", "seaborg"), that's tacit, poetic. but more important in this context is the explicit, ideational. it's NEW STUFF that scientists come up with. you don't know what you are going to get - and how many years later you will have cause to regret it. to you the Green Revolution was nothing but good. by extension, genetic engineering. but you don't know what will happen, overpopulation dependent on a monoculture can easily go wrong. you then give a snotty test, introduced by, "Ignorance – you know there was once an interesting survey where people were asked to identify the most dangerous item to hold in the palm of their hand:
(a) a new nuclear fuel rod
(b) a used nuclear fuel rod
(c) 50g of metallic plutonium
(thanks SusanMc(from another thread), for trying to help, but blockquote didn't work; i used Jim White's suggestion of br's instead.) MacK, you intimate i should pick (b) because it's the most highly radioactive. HOWEVER, a mere *speck* of plutonium, gotten into your lungs will kill you - i'll take my chances on the radioactivity. if the plutonium were finely powdered there would be no question whatsoever. you could hold in your hand polonium 210 all day, but ask Litvinenko what happens if you swallow it. it was a snotty trick question from a snotty trick person. finally, you show you are not living in reality at all - at least reality as most people experience it. "Finally, I do not (and I am at best an agnostic) find his criticism of Richard Dawkins unfair – Dawkins is being as much of a jerk as the Christians who stick it up your nose." DAWKINS WRITES BOOKS. that's it. he doesn't make fatwas, he doesn't drive jihads, he doesn't lobby to make In Dawkins We Trust on dollar bills, he doesn't join school boards to force indoctrinated in atheism to schoolchildren, he isn't interested in packing the supreme court to force the majority of americans to act on his beliefs. to you, living in your bubble brain, ideas are all alike. outside your bubble brain, ideas have consequences. in that you and dyson are alike - Too Rich and Too Self-Convinced.