DAKOTA from Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Just not to forget.
A publication system needs to provide two basic functions
“The current system of publishing in the biological sciences is notable for its redundancy, inconsistency, sluggishness, and opacity. These problems persist, and grow worse, because the peer review system remains focused on deciding whether or not to publish a paper in a particular journal rather than providing (1) a high-quality evaluation of scientific merit and (2) the information necessary to organize and prioritize the literature. Online access has eliminated the need for journals as distribution channels, so their primary current role is to provide authors with feedback prior to publication and a quick way for other researchers to prioritize the literature based on which journal publishes a paper. However, the feedback provided by reviewers is not focused on scientific merit but on whether to publish in a particular journal, which is generally of little use to authors and an opaque and noisy basis for prioritizing the literature. Further, each submission of a rejected manuscript requires the entire machinery of peer review to creak to life anew. This redundancy incurs delays, inconsistency, and increased burdens on authors, reviewers, and editors. Finally, reviewers have no real incentive to review well or quickly, as their performance is not tracked, let alone rewarded. One of the consistent suggestions for modifying the current peer review system is the introduction of some form of post-publication reception, and the development of a marketplace where the priority of a paper rises and falls based on its reception from the field (see other articles in this special topics). However, the information that accompanies a paper into the marketplace is as important as the marketplace’s mechanics. Beyond suggestions concerning the mechanisms of reception, we propose an update to the system of publishing in which publication is guaranteed, but pre-publication peer review still occurs, giving the authors the opportunity to revise their work following a mini pre-reception from the field. This step also provides a consistent set of rankings and reviews to the marketplace, allowing for early prioritization and stabilizing its early dynamics. We further propose to improve the general quality of reviewing by providing tangible rewards to those who do it well.”
Toward a new model of scientific publishing: discussion and a proposal
Horizon Field by Antony Gormley.
In future news, “Restless thoughts, like a deadly swarm of hornets arm’d, no sooner found alone, but rush upon me thronging.”
Quick update from Penn GRASP Laboratory.
Results of a category theory exam:
Topos theory in a nutshell by John Baez.
Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.
- Hermann Weyl
A topos theory for the foundations of physics. (Part 1) - Doering and Isham
A mixed (superpositioned?) state of buzz among those working in quantum foundations over a new paper by Matt Pusey asserting that quantum states are real physical objects and not simply statistical probability distributions. Matt Leifer does a balanced contextualization and explication. A giddy article in nature news and David Wallace support and summarize.
This type of reasoning, seeking to develop experimental tests to rule out certain interpretations (and accompanying metaphysical baggage) of quantum theory, follows in the footsteps of the famous Bell’s Theorem, which rules out certain kinds of hidden-variable theories. This new paper by Pusey, et. al. asserts that what is commonly referred to as the Copenhagen interpretation (i.e. quantum mechanics is merely a way of describing the things in our head that we know about the system) is untenable.
Here are some more rapidly developing encapsulations and generalizations to the original Pusey, et. al. result. Grain of salt reminder: terms like “physically real”, “physical property”, and “statistical property” need to be read carefully within how they are defined (or not well defined) within each paper. On-going discussion at shetl-optimized.
Grace Needlman Recent Graduate of Yale University and a Cleveland Native
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Time Lapse view from the ISS.
Suggested: fullscreen in 720p.
“Enough of symbolism and these escapist themes of purity and innocence.”
And every science, when we understand it not as an instrument of power and domination but as an adventure in knowledge pursued by our species across the ages, is nothing but this harmony, more or less vast, more or less rich from one epoch to another, which unfurls over the course of generations and centuries, by the delicate counterpoint of all the themes appearing in turn, as if summoned from the void.
- Alexandre Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles, pg. 20
If there is one thing in mathematics that fascinates me more than anything else (and doubtless always has), it neither “number” or “size”, but always form. And among the thousand-and-one faces whereby form chooses to reveal itself to us, the one that fascinates me more than any other and continues to fascinate me, is the structure hidden in mathematical things.
- Alexandre Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles, pg. 27
Grothendieck suggested, “All right, take 57.”
He likens his approach to mathematics to as sea: “The sea advances imperceptibly and without sound, nothing seems to happen and nothing is disturbed, the water is so far off one hardly hears it. But it ends up surrounding the stubborn peninsula, then an island, then an islet, which itself it submerged, as if dissolved by the ocean stretching away as far as the eye can sea.”
- Alexandre Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles, pg. 553
Today I am no longer, as I once was, the prisoner of interminable tasks, which so often prevented me from leaping into the unknown, mathematical or otherwise. The time of tasks for me is over. If age has brought me anything, it is lightness.
- Alexandre Grothendieck, Esquisse d’un Programme
As if summoned from the Void: The Life of Alexandre Grothendieck:
Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world—qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them. At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no as- pect of life. It was as if no one could escape the inexorable stare of Medusa. The only hero able to cut off Medusa’s head is Perseus, who flies with winged sandals; Perseus, who does not turn his gaze upon the face of the Gorgon but only upon her image reflected in his bronze shield.
- Italo Calvino, Lightness, Six Memos
Related n-category cafe discussion, and what is a meter?
“The secret of the story lies in its economy: the events, however long they last, become punctiform, connected by rectilinear segments, in a zigzag pattern that suggests incessant motion…Mental speed is valuable for its own sake, for the pleasure it gives to anyone who is sensitive to such a thing, and not for the practical use that can be made of it…it communicates something special that is derived simply from its very swiftness.”
- Italo Calvino, Quickness
“Discoursing is like coursing.”
- Galileo
Who said it isn’t still seriously playful?
A theory on the arxiv of Gravity’s Rainbow by Lee Smolin as reminder.
“In the static space of the architect, he might’ve used a double integral now and then, early in his career, to find volumes under surfaces whose equations are known — masses, moments, centers of gravity. But it has been years since he’s had to do with anything that basic…in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled….’Meters per second’ will integrate to ‘meters’. The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall.”
-Pynchon
awesomepeoplehangingouttogether:
Famous Physicists hanging out together:
A. Piccard, E. Henriot, P. Ehrenfest, Ed. Herzen, Th. De Donder, E. Schrödinger, J.E. Verschaffelt, W. Pauli, W. Heisenberg, R.H. Fowler, L. Brillouin;
P. Debye, M. Knudsen, W.L. Bragg, H.A. Kramers, P.A.M. Dirac, A.H. Compton, L. de Broglie, M. Born, N. Bohr;
I. Langmuir, M. Planck, M. Curie, H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, P. Langevin, Ch. E. Guye, C.T.R. Wilson, O.W. Richardson
“The withdrawal of philosophy into a “professional” shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth — and this is the fault of the very same idea of professionalism which you are now defending”
-Paul Feyerabend
“As the day progressed Feyerabend told us his story. He had been a physics prodigy as a teenager in Vienna, but his studies were curtailed when he was drafted to fight in World War II. He was wounded on the Russian front and later ended up in Berlin, where he found work after the war as an actor. After a time, he tired of the theater world and returned to the study of physics in Vienna. He joined the philosophy club, where he discovered that he could win on any side of a philosophical debate simply by using the skills he had learned in the acting profession.”
-Lee Smolin
anyone spotted him in Der Prozeß?
Drawing with Code. Jean-Pierre Hebert
(Source: jeanpierrehebert.com)
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