Freedom of Science

In Three Roads to Quantum Gravity Lee Smolin writes that
The Universe is made of processes, not things.
I agree with the basic idea. Let’s ignore the processes part and just read this statement as a denial of Newtonian atomic materialism:
The world is not made of things.
Things are conventions. Standard is the thing. The network is the […]

Two comments from Not Even Wrong:
Garbage Says:
“Nima Arkani-Hamed thinks big. He has a theory that our universe is one of an infinite number of universes”

In which part of the landscape did that happen?

“Arkani-Hamed first made a name for himself by suggesting that our universe is five-dimensional.”

They forgot to add he also discovered 3 1 and […]

Unapologetic mathematician wrote that
Newtonian mechanics is a useful mathematical model…
Is this why physicists still keep “Newtonian mechanics?” Or is this what they pretend? Physicists say Newtonian mechanics has been supplanted by Einstein’s General Relativity. Then the same physicists fail to compute orbits with Einstein General Relativity so they fake it by saying
in the Newtonian limit General […]

Joi Ito writes:
Larry [Lessig] is a genius at identifying how complex systems such as law, code and politics influence each other. He’s able to figure out where the balance is and turn murky complex issues into sharp, understandable thoughts around which movements can rally and debates can be won.

This quote reminded me the Vision […]

I saw this interesting initiative called The Lightcone Institute. From the Vision page:
The connection between the social sciences and natural science is still little explored, despite the benefits a better understanding [of this connection] could bring.
It looks like the Institute is trying to break free of the physics box and physics’ absolute enforcement of “physical […]

Carl Brennen wrote:
Physicists obtain tenure by fitting in with the rest of the sheep and extending knowledge using only the techniques built from the current assumptions. … The vast majority of physicists are doing basic engineering using theory that was written by a tiny minority, most of that a long time ago.

I agree with the […]

From an article in New Scientist:
The mysterious cosmic presence called dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe, might be lurking in hidden dimensions of space. … To get the same amount of acceleration seen by astronomers, Greene and Levin calculate that the extra dimensions should have a scale of about 0.01 millimeter.

Comments […]

After reading a summary of Witten’s upcoming paper at Not Even Wrong I posted Witten’s Pyramid of Authority and also wrote about Witten’s toy fiefdom.
People who actually read the paper could not control their sarcasm either: gunpowder&noodles commenting on Not Even Wrong wrote:
For all my admiration for EW, and gratitude to him for the way he […]

Doctors are free content providers for the Big Media. They give away their intellectual property to the Big Media who packages them into ridiculously expensive journals and sells them to Universities where these Doctors work.
The method is familiar from Colonialism. The British colonialist bought raw material on the cheap and packaged it back to the […]

Fliptomato has a great picture:
    
This is an instant classic. I have so many things to comment about his picture.
Let’s start with this. I have been writing for many years that it is now time to establish a kind of separation in physics that is standard in the arts: Physics need to be divided into two […]