Can’t believe you left out his contribution to vacuum technology.

https://www.dyson.com/en.html

In contrast, the giant city of ancient Rome didn’t seem to contribute that much.

Hmm… “What have the Romans ever done for us?” Does that ring a bell by any chance? Law, engineering, sanitation, architecture, roads, literature, public order, education, medicine.

Just off the top of my head, mind you. After the fall of Rome it took humanity over a millennium to recover.

A problem with this genetics reasoning is that he considers only one type of barrier – geographical. There are plenty of others in large cities – class, caste, religion, ethnicity.

Yea, that “cosmic sailboat” stuff of his is mind-blowing.
Of course, Dyson himself was not an “isolated village” type. In DTU he describes his decision to become American after attending a 4th of July gathering where all kinds of people of different races and backgrounds commingled. Just sayin’.

Dyson gave up on nuclear propulsion?

Genetic engineering will be a total game changer. Just remarkable how DNA is a programming language onto itself.

> Freeman Dyson is perhaps the last surviving (or at least still active) physicist or mathematician of the Bohr / Feynman / Turing / Zeldovich / Heisenberg generation

Dyson is probably also the last top physicist who never bothered to get a PhD.

SCALE, eh?

“The effect of genetic isolation is even stronger if the population of the village is divided by barriers of rank or caste or religion. Social snobbery can be as effective as geography in keeping people from spreading their genes widely.”

The unstudied country. If modern science won’t touch race/IQ, they aren’t touching this one with a ten foot pole.

Yet one thing about snobs. In the West at least, my impression is they leave lineage records you just aren’t finding elsewhere.

Seems like you could calculate lots of things with just the British records alone. You know the 14th Duke of Whatever is genetically closer than a 2nd cousin to his wife and so forth.

Be cool to define and calculate an “Inbreeding Coefficient.” Since I’m a troll, I’d rate it by “Toes.” My hypothetical Duke is a “12-toe.” His wife is a “13.”

I’d imagine you could easily do the same with Jews. But while I imagine they know exactly, they ain’t gonna be telling.

The real challenge would be groups like Gypsies.

“A substantial fraction of the population of Europe and the Middle East in the time between 1000 BC and 1800 AD lived in genetically isolated villages, so that genetic drift may have been the most important factor making intellectual revolutions possible.” But the place where the biggest advance happened, perhaps the biggest advance since agriculture, was Britain, an archipelago where everyone lives within 60 miles of the sea. Villages, I suggest, are less genetically isolated on groups of smallish islands.

Add to that the thought that Athens was part of a culture where sea-going was viewed as absolutely natural, as befits a land of islands, isthmuses, bays, and points.

By the way, he’s wrong when he says that Jerusalem around 800 BC was the source of the invention of monotheistic religion. Scholarly opinion attributes that to the Babylonian exile, or shortly thereafter, when the Jews came under Zoroastrian influence.

Were the miniscule hatches designed
With a difficult egress in mind:
In the craft to contain
So they’d stay with the plane,
Good aircraft being so hard to find?

>ancient Jerusalem

>Western culture

Hmm…

PiltdownCousin, in the 1960s, had one of the two offices next to Freeman Dyson’s at the Institute for Advanced Study and is still in touch professionally.

{end open brag}

In the 1950’s, Dyson played a key role in Project Orion, an effort to develop spaceships driven by small nuclear explosions. Such a ship could theoretically deliver large groups of people and material anywhere in the solar system in a short time. But political concerns killed the project.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

Dyson points out that the production of geniuses in the West gave rise to the modern world. I wonder about his speculations as to why the rest of the world didn’t do more earlier. Africa had, what?, 100,000 years of village life with anatomically modern humans without much to show for it compared to the recent West. Was it Neanderthal intrusion? A strong selection for conformity elsewhere?

Barring the invention of faster than light travel, then transport between planets will take months, and between stars decades. This is comparable to long distance travel in 20,000 BC before the domestication of the horse and invention of wheeled vehicles, where it took perhaps months to travel several hundred miles, and years (or generations) to traverse a continent. Humanity’s future offers the prospect of the same level of isolation as that between humans and neanderthals, and may result in similar speciation (ignoring AI, Aliens, bionics and genetic engineering). Communication will be at a ‘brisk’ light speed, however – still that’s about 200,000 years from one side of the Milky Way to the other.

He had to have the Hungarian Martians in mind when he wrote about clusters of outliers emerging from a self-isolating elite.

Didn’t Dyson propose that advanced civilisations could surround a star with a hollow sphere to capture all its energy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

OT, but the Paper of Record says the Toronto killer may have been another Elliott Rodger.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5650489/Who-Alek-Minassian-Toronto-van-attack-suspect.html

“Police have named Alek Minassian, 25, as the man they believe was behind the attack which killed 10 and wounded 15 on Monday.

Shortly before the attack, a Facebook profile with the same name uploaded a post which read: ‘All hail the supreme gentleman Elliot Rodger’.

Rodger killed six people at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2014, before killing himself.

The Facebook post also mentioned ‘incel’, which is a term used to refer to men who have been made ‘involuntarily celibate’ because women continually reject their sexual advances.

The post says: ‘Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161.

‘The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!‘”

The effect of genetic isolation is even stronger if the population of the village is divided by barriers of rank or caste or religion. Social snobbery can be as effective as geography in keeping people from spreading their genes widely…

A substantial fraction of the population of Europe and the Middle East in the time between 1000 BC and 1800 AD lived in genetically isolated villages, so that genetic drift may have been the most important factor making intellectual revolutions possible.
…

But the appearance of a starburst must be to some extent a consequence of genetic drift. The examples that I mentioned all belong to Western cultures. No doubt similar starbursts of genius occurred in other cultures, but I am ignorant of the details of their history.

The question arises (which I assume Mr. Sailer is hinting at, given his earlier posts) as to why such starbursts of genius did not occur in South Asia, over the millennia. The conditions seem perfect—a large society genetically fragmented like a bunch of isolated villages for millennia, thanks to 3,000 endogamous sub-castes.

Or did they? Certainly the early metaphysical and philosophical literature from there is pretty clear evidence of at least one intellectual starburst, perhaps more than three thousand years ago, but what happened to the other IQ explosions that must have occurred (according to this theory) in that extremely genetically segregated society?

Or is it that the South Asia we see has actually been shaped for the better by intellectual explosions along the way, and without them would have been in worse shape than it is today, even though it is hard for us to imagine how they could be worse.

…Sorry, ran out the edit timer. The last sentence should read

“…and without them South Asia would have been in worse shape than it is today, even though it is hard for us to image how things could be worse in that overpopulated and very poor part of the world.

Respect Freeman Dyson for being a freethinker, skeptic and willing to call b.s. on establishment fads.

However, his scifi-ish flights of fancy (nerdbait) are the kinds of things that i had a so-so interest in as an adolescent. But one of things even a nerdy scfi reader should grasp as he matures is that the earth–however prosaically present–is what matters.

Space–even if some things making terrific dramatic pics–is actually mostly cold and boring. The earth in contrast is full of contrast, full of life, full of interest–incredible interest. And unsurprisingly we are terrifically well suited for life on earth–after a couple billion years of evolution coughed us up.

Space may be of some modest–or even great–interest way, way down the road, but what’s absolutely critical is to not screw up planet earth. Not destroying the planet, and preserving and building on the best humanity has achieved. The critically important stuff is … well cue Steve’s “world’s most important graph”.

It would be far easier to colonize Antarctica or the continental shelves than it would be to colonize other planets. So far, nobody seems to be game for that.

Well said. And true.

His thoughts on small isolated populations and genetic drift are very interesting. The great averaging that comes from highly mobile, mixing populations could be the reason for the slow decline in IQ. There’s a Spenglerian quality to it that I like, as well.

His thoughts on space travel are unrealistic. Until man can extend the usable life span to at least a century, interplanetary space travel is not going to happen. When you have about 30 prime working years, you don’t squander it on a project that will take 50 years to achieve. We could get to the moon in a career. We can send probes to the rest of the solar system in a career. Maybe, maybe, we can get to Mars in a career, but that is looking less and less likely.

Throw in the shrinking global smart fraction and, well, we’ll be lucky to avoid another dark age.

I’ve read some 5-6 Dyson’s books. Also, I’ve encountered his scientific work.

As a scientist, Dyson is a great man & should have, probably, won the Nobel for his work in QED (and other areas).

As a futurist thinker, he is among the best & most entertaining.

As a science-oriented philosopher, Dyson is amiable, but clearly lagging behind deep thinkers like Stanislaw Lem (“Summa Technologiae”).

Not to be a stickler for detail, but once again, some one seems to have missed possibly the single greatest explosion of human achievement:

The development of Dutch military, scientific, and artistic achievement immediately upon the end of the Thirty Year’s War. That was a small population achieving an enormous amount.

Practical space travel will require a great deal more than defeating gravity and time managing interstellar travel. Radiation protection, spinning sections to mimic gravity on voyages, some kind of deflector shielding (a grain of sand at relativistic speeds has a whole lot of kinetic energy), enough water and air to keep you alive for ten to twenty years, and a host of other problems……I think any physicist worth his degree realizes we are a long, long, long way from from anything like interstellar travel.

So globalism is responsible for the gradual decline in IQ towards mediocrity? Or is that going too far?

I do hope that space colonization will ultimately defeat leftism by creating new human “tribes” and hierarchies which are too far away for a stifling central authority to regulate. And having an unknown, potentially dangerous frontier seems to dampen nanny state decadence in all societies.

But the appearance of a starburst must be to some extent a consequence of genetic drift.

I doubt “genetic drift” had anything to do with these “starburst” clusters.

Sure extremely local “genetic drift” as in this family and that family together having the genes to toss up this genius at the right time–ok. But that’s it. I doubt there was a “genius town”.

No, these starbursts are because there were particular places and times where the economic, cultural and political conditions were ripe and then we got particularly “genuises” who were able to “make hay”.

But the genetic background story isn’t “genetic drift”, it’s the long process of selection in Europeans that has produced higher IQ and an improved package of other mental traits–ex. conscientiousness, inc. creativity–for maintaining and enhancing civilization.

Take for example the greatest scientist–Isaac Newton. Newton’s from Lincolnshire. A place which doesn’t even whisper “isolation” and “genetic drift”, but screams “well mixed”. Newton is probably a descendant of most of the people alive in eastern England in say the 10th century who had living descendants. One data point, but you could go through a list of great Europeans and find the same thing. In the greatest achievements of man the Western Europeans stand out and they sprawl across the Northern European plain and England and are very well mixed populations.

What has really mattered is selection–and for civilization, selection for civilization.

His idea that Florence, Venice, and Manchester were genetically isolated is pretty bizarre. Ditto, for the other places he mentioned.

And was monotheism really that brilliant? There were already precursors from which to derive it. Atenism and Zoroastrianism.

No other life forms have spread out through the galaxy and universe, and we cannot even detect any light speed transmissions from them. Perhaps not the most persuasive evidence for humanity having a long term future. Either we are unique, which seems rather unlikely, or something the others invented (like the Krell in Forbidden Planet) led to them going extinct before they got off it the launch pad, every single time. We need to stop the time bomb of technology and turn back the clock. The alternative is certain destruction by 2090 at the latest, going by the Lindy effect.

“The high-gravity highway could be a powerful laser beam pointing upward from the ground into space, with spacecraft taking energy from the beam to fly up and down. If the volume of traffic is large enough to keep the beam active, the energy cost per vehicle would be comparable with the energy cost of intercontinental travel by jet planes today.”

Don’t I recall from one of Jerry Pournelle’s columns that per pound the energy required to reach low earth orbit was roughly that expended to fly a plane to Australia, so theoretically there should be a way to get us into orbit for about the same cost as a plane ticket to Sydney?

If we are living in villages because it’s post-apocalyptic then the insights of a WWII physicist barely seem warranted.
If we are living in villages because we’ve overcome the latest reemergence of Hobbes v Mao, survived to tell the tale and figured out how to reconfigure society out of cosmopolitan metropolises and achieved a finer balance of urban/rural accessible to the majority of people who can freely move about and reproduce, then he seems pretty far off the mark.

“genetically isolated villages, so that genetic drift may have been the most important factor making intellectual revolutions possible. ”

Is this historically verifiable? Did anyone else from Issac Newton’s or Tesla’s village make it big in anything?

Places where intellectual revolutions happened include, among many others, Jerusalem around 800 BC (the invention of monotheistic religion), Athens around 500 BC (the invention of drama and philosophy and the beginnings of science), Venice around 1300 AD (the invention of modern commerce), Florence around 1600 (the invention of modern science), and Manchester around 1750 (the invention of modern industry).

In contrast, the giant city of ancient Rome didn’t seem to contribute that much.

Athens was not genetically isolated. The Aegean and East Mediterranian had significant movement of people. Carthage and Rome were colonies from the Eastern Mediterranian.

Jerusalem, tw0 cities Jeru and Salem were probably population centers. Jews did not invent monotheism according to the Torah, monotheism evolves over time. Today’s Judeism may be said to have been invented when the final temple was destroyed by Rome and Jews regroup as a religion not a ethnic nation state. All the other places are population centers that drew from their regional populations possible due to transportation revolutions.

Why are all the places on the list European?

“I’m not sure I believe that, but that’s pretty interesting.”
He’s roughly correct. You can look up the stats on aircraft and work out how much energy they consume. Let’s use a Boeing 767 flying coast to coast. It carries about 20,000 gallons of jet fuel. That much fuel burned in the engines releases 2.3 billion joules of energy in the course of the flight.
If we assume for simplicity that a laser push powered space craft with same carrying capacity has the same 88 metric ton mass as a 767 minus its fuel, then the energy to achieve escape velocity is 5.3 billion joules. About twice as much, so in the ballpark.
(BTW, that Dyson makes a hell of a vacuum cleaner. I wonder if he came up with the idea because he spent so much time thinking about outer space? )

Hey Steve, I have good news and bad news:

The good news; there are a few Chah-Kneez who are not ready to bow down to the power of the black fist!

https://kotaku.com/another-black-panther-statue-destroyed-in-south-korea-1825491958

The bad news; they may not be the race of geniuses I have read here for years…

As tipster Sang points out, the statue even featured a sign that read, “This is not Vibranium. Don’t get on the statue.”

On the “inbreeding is good” stuff, ancient Athens got to whee it was because it was the wealthiest (due to nearby silver mines) and most populous city in ancient Greeks, so smart and ambitious Greeks from other cities, like Aristotle, tended to move there. Most of the big names of ancient Athens were not born there. Of the other examples, Florence was not known for its science, and a backwater by 1600, its contribution came with art in the 14th and 15th centuries. Manchester is the birthplace of the industrial revolution, but pretty much because it had to start somewhere. It wasn’t because 18th century Manchester was some isolated community where geniuses bred exclusively with each other. This is a seriously weird argument.

Humans have also been looking seriously for decades, using very powerful radios and telescopes, for evidence of interplanetary travel and not found it. In fact we have not even found evidence of life on other planets than Earth. The search has been going on long enough and hard enough that its probabl time to make the call that in this universe, the Earth is it as far as intelligent life is concerned.

Oops, sorry I dropped the k from kjoules.

You are correct, and Freeman Dyson might agree with you secretly, but he is not allowed to speak that honestly in a public forum. He might be shamed and disgraced if he spoke that candidly, whereas by calling it genetic drift he keeps his good public reputation and social and academic position.

In re Isolated Villages: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/

“The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.

The coincidences actually pile up beyond this. Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project.”.

The gist is these were all Hungarian Jews who went to school at the same place. Einstein went to a similar school in Vienna. Highly inbred due to their customs. And then most of their kin were killed. Maybe the lesson of Starbursts is everyone can see the Starbursts and may not like the light. Kinda like The Three Body Problem.

I could not agree more. Franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars create a misleading picture of humanity’s future. In reality, humans cannot live or travel very far in space – zero gravity and cosmic rays wreak havoc with human physiology. All the planets in our solar system are uninhabitable. Mars is a freezing, nearly airless desert with high radiation.

Dyson, for all his brilliance — although maybe because of it — seems too often to refuse to master the basics in some areas on which he pontificates.

Richard Dawkins famously embarrassed him on a point in Darwin’s concept of evolution. Dyson claimed that Darwinian evolution was about the survival of species in competition with each other. Dawkins pointed out that it was instead about the survival of individuals in competition with other individuals in the species.

https://www.edge.org/discourse/dawkins_dyson.html

Mistakes like this make reading Dyson frustrating. There are likely few people in the history of the planet who would find it easier to grasp fully a new scientific area than Dyson. And yet he doesn’t expend the effort to do so.

The genetic drift argument is just one more of the same. He doesn’t ask himself the basic question: is this trait — intellectual capacity — more likely to be a product of selection or drift? Why simply assume that it is drift?

The future of the human race? Aren’t we all dead? I was specifically told we were all dead.

http://www.unz.com/proberts/ten-days-before-the-end-of-the-world/

This can’t be ‘fake news’ since Unz.com is against ‘fake news’. Why, oh why are Unz.com writers excluded from the mainstream media.

Anyhow I like this guys’s vacuum cleaners. Lots of physics involved in the design of vacuum cleaners.

Pssst, Steve!:

Black Women, Including York NAACP Head, Allege Discrimination at Grandview Golf Club

Steve, perhaps you aware of Dyson’s eye-witness report of the 1979 encounter between the newly-installed Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, and the Soviet Union’s long-serving Premier, Leonid Brezhnev. This encounter is related in Dyson’s book “Weapons and Hope”, published in 1984. I don’t have the book at hand, so I have to rely on my memory, here.

According to Dyson, Thatcher (through her interpreter) is enthusing to Brezhnev about the then-recent relaxation of tensions (“detente”) between the West and the Soviet bloc. Unbeknownst to both Thatcher and Brezhnev, Dyson is fluent in Russian, and I think I recall him telling us in his book that he is largely self-taught. Brezhnev impatiently cuts off Thatcher. Brezhnev then speaks to her via his interpreter, saying, as far as I can remember, “Madame, the diminution of tensions between the two blocs is all very well, but what is of far greater concern to me is the long-term survival of the white race.”

Wow!

Before delivering Brezhnev’s statement, his somewhat reluctant interpreter asks the Premier, “Do you really want me to tell her that? Brezhnev replies, “Yes. Every word.” The interpreter speaks to Thatcher in perfect English, but Dyson reports that Thatcher seemed both uncomprehending and suddenly uncomfortable. Abruptly excusing herself, she toddled away. I guess she did understand after all.

Within a few weeks of our tragically missed opportunity to have saved the White West, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

The rest is bitter history, and our likely bitter future.

what happened to the other IQ explosions that must have occurred

One also needs a support group, some kind of industry; trade; shipping and transportation that required some smart guys figuring out star charts, calculations and such for navigation and logistics.

Well, its not really like the two concepts are exclusionary of each other. The red kangaroo is an excellent example of highly isolated populations under heavy selective forces; it results in extensive adaptions to the environment in a relatively short period of time. When 50-80% of them die with each drought, this means that small populations of them with advantageous genes rapidly dominate. A single successful male may account for the majority of a progeny within a cline.

In contrast, a larger, non-isolated population such as grey kangaroos tend to absorb any advantageous genes, or do not allow them to dominate as much.

Asinine non sequitur.

Space may be of some modest–or even great–interest way, way down the road, but what’s absolutely critical is to not screw up planet earth.

Having even modest permanent but self-sustaining settlements on the moon and on Mars seems like an excellent precaution precisely to complicate the great hidden project of our age: the subjugation of humanity to a totalitarian, Orwellian dictatorship enhanced by technological capabilities such as mind reading, robotic cops, genetic engineering of humans into customized slave races, etc.

Having multiple, self-sustaining space colonies – the more, and the more distant, the better – would considerably complicate these projects.

Apart from the inherent dynamics of having multiple, physically independent societies, the very effort of seriously building colonies would detract some energy and creativity away from the social engineering and its subservient bullshit artistry that threatens to overwhelm our traditional Western societies.

is this trait — intellectual capacity — more likely to be a product of selection or drift? Why simply assume that it is drift?

Genetic drift is a mechanism that accelerates genetic selection by restricting the number of individuals. This also increases the chance that random genes of no great utility (but no great cost) come to dominate the small group within a much shorter time (3-4 generations) than could occur in larger populations.

In contrast, the giant city of ancient Rome didn’t seem to contribute that much.

Or maybe it’s just that the genius that creates “brutal, totalizing Empire and systems of imperial governance enveloping of the known world while suppressing native populations” isn’t looked upon favorably in the way that genius yielding things like “Athenian democracy” is.

Dyson’s pair of articles about his time working with the RAF are interesting (linked from your link): https://www.technologyreview.com/s/406948/part-ii-a-failure-of-intelligence/

The best reference I saw for the Lancaster escape hatch issue was: https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Avro:_Lancaster
Do you have a better reference? The link in your post was short on detail. From the Grace’s Guide page:

The bomb aimer’s position contained the nose emergency hatch in the floor; at 22 inches by 26.5 inches (two inches narrower than the Halifax escape hatch) it was difficult to exit through while wearing a parachute. Compared with other contemporary aircraft, the Lancaster was not an easy aircraft to escape from; in a Halifax, 25% of downed aircrew bailed out successfully, and in American bombers (albeit in daylight raids) it was as high as a 50% success rate while only 15% of the Lancaster crew were able to bail out. Operational research experts (Freeman Dyson, amongst others) attempted unsuccessfully to have the escape hatch enlarged.

That was sourced from Wikipedia which says “citation needed” for the Dyson part and references Iveson’s 2009 book for some of the rest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Lancaster#Crew_accommodation

For perspective, per this page average male shoulder width is 465 mm = 18.3″ http://www.firstinarchitecture.co.uk/average-male-and-female-dimensions/
Any idea of the dimensions of an airman in a flight suit wearing a parachute?

P.S. West’s Scale book sounds interesting, but the reviews are not particularly encouraging.

I’m still waiting for flying cars.

Were you expecting anything else from him?

Of course isolation of populations allow individual populations to deviate from each other based on differing selection factors. But that isn’t genetic drift; it’s genetic selection.

It is possible of course that in a smaller population elite males may produce a proportionally larger number of the progeny than in a larger population. That’s one way, in principle, in which selection may work better in a smaller population — though, among human beings, depending on social arrangements, it might be the opposite that really holds. That is, it might be in larger societies the elite males have still more wives and are at an even higher end of the distribution.

In small hunter gatherer populations, arrangements were more egalitarian, so that there might be more of an equitable sharing of women than in larger societies in which there was more inequality.

My own theory is that we likely owe most of our cognitive abilities to paternalistic, inequitable societies. Elite males get more of the women, and this is what propels selection.

“Jerusalem around 800 BC (the invention of monotheistic religion), Athens around 500 BC (the invention of drama and philosophy and the beginnings of science), Venice around 1300 AD (the invention of modern commerce), Florence around 1600 (the invention of modern science), and Manchester around 1750 (the invention of modern industry).”

I don’t think any of these are good examples of extreme achievement by a small group of related peoples other than Ancient Greece and possibly Renaissance Italy.

Banking and finance evolved quite slowly. The ancient Greeks had fixed rate interest loans for example. A lot of the developments that did happen somewhat fast in the Italian city states are mostly just fairly obvious extensions on the one big idea of limited liability corporations (meaning business owners are not fully liable for the debts of corporations they own shares in.)

And the Industrial Revolution in England was not about the evolution of a small and partly inbred population, but the large scale eugenic evolution documented by Clarke and Pinker in one of the most populated countries in the world at the time.

South Asia has made numerous, important contributions to mathematics over the centuries/millennia (the decimal point, the number zero, sine and cosine in trigonometry, geometric series, and so on) and the Indus Valley civilization to which you refer was incredibly sophisticated.

Does Dyson therefore not have a point?

Contrary to what Dyson says, Village People never produced anything that great.

Maybe a population isolated inside a Dyson sphere would do better.

Don’t hold your breath.

(In space that will damage your lungs.)

OT: Trump voters driven by fear of losing status

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/us/politics/trump-economic-anxiety.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fpolitics&action=click&contentCollection=politics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront

Zero self-awareness as usual.

Doomsday AI will cause a nuclear war by 2040 that could DESTROY humanity, and there may be no way to prevent it https://tinyurl.com/y7obqsr8

Claims were made by the Rand Corporation a non-profit based in Santa Monica
It offers research and analysis to the United States armed forces on global policy
‘Mutually assured destruction’ maintained an uneasy peace during the Cold War
Rand says killer AIs will have the potential to erode Mad’s underlying conditions
Nations may try to launch nuclear strikes while wiping out retaliatory forces

By Tim Collins For UK Mail
Published: 11:49 EDT, 24 April 2018

I enjoyed his book “A Many Colored Glass,” and particularly his chapter on global warming.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0813926637/

I hope that younger, future Freeman Dysons find the courage to publicly break with our current society’s groupthink.

White misogynist kills 10, injures 15. Gets arrested without violence. Great, I’m not seeing any global pattern here.

https://coed.com/2018/04/23/who-is-alek-minassian-toronto-van-attack-terrorist-information/

Yesterday you guys were screaming about Islam. Where are you now?

Just another white loser who couldn’t get a girlfriend.

I heard that anectode before, but when I read it it mentioned was that it was early to mid 70′s, and it was Wilson, Heath, or Callaghan representing the Brits and Kosigyn representing the Russians. The author of that piece wrote the British PM was shocked by the Russian leader whoever they were. Regarding Dyson, he taught himself to read, write and speak fluent German and French in secondary school and then Russian when he went to Cambridge.

No doubt similar starbursts of genius occurred in other cultures
—
This reminds of something that sticks in my brain from time to time: what was up with the dinosaurs? They rule the earth for a couple hundred million years and never muster up the where-with-all to make anything more complicated than a nest.

Genetic drift is a mechanism that accelerates genetic selection by restricting the number of individuals.

No genetic drift is just that — drift. Change just because of the random nature of genes moving into the next generation in sexual reproduction. The key word is “random”. It neither accelerates nor retards selection. It can just as easily retard the advance of a gene under selection as accelerate it. The key word is “random.” It … drifts.

Genetic selection is … selection. And sure if selective forces are powerful it’s a heck of a lot easier to get from a single mutation to fixation in a small isolated population than in a large one–especially since the large one is more likely to have niches for which a particular allele is not advantageous. But that’s not “drift” it’s just selection and math.

The Jerusalem example is especially weird, religious Jews and Christians would be offended by the (correct but cognitive dissonance-provoking) notion that Judaism evolved from Semitic paganism,* while the non-religious would roll their eyes at the notion that biblical Judah was some kind of Bronze Age intellectual powerhouse.

*Which can be easily reconstructed from the Bible text itself; a tribe or alliance of circumcised El (historically, a major god in the Semitic pagan pantheon) and YHWH (probably a local god in Jerusalem or Samaria)-worshipping Semites defeated (i.e. the conquest of Canaan) a tribe or alliance of uncircumcised Ba’al (another major god)-worshippers, then banned the worship of Ba’al, and resolved the El/YHWH dispute by declaring them one and the same.

… the very effort of seriously building colonies would detract some energy and creativity away from the social engineering and its subservient bullshit artistry that threatens to overwhelm our traditional Western societies.

Or we could marshal some intellectual forces and debunk this minoritarian–minorities are good, majorities are bad!–nonsense that’s been rammed down the throat of white gentiles. And further that by pointing out that evil eugenic ideas are obviously true … *if* you want to live in a decent civilized society, then you need the decent, sane, intelligent, healthy people who actually build and maintain such societies to reproduce in abundance rather than the incompetent, insane and criminal.

Space colonies — capable of being self-sustaining– are very very hard at present. But beating the current recieved “wisdom” intellectually is child’s play. So let’s focus on the achievable goal which is in fact far more valuable.

Or in other words … let’s just win!

OT: Steve’s worlds are colliding.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/golf/black-woman-golfer-it-was-like-we-had-targets-on-our-backs/ar-AAwhI12?ocid=spartanntp

#Golfingwhileblack

The best part of the article:

“JJ Chronister (the club owner) told the newspaper Sunday that she called the women personally to apologize. She said she hopes to meet with them to discuss how the club can use what happened as a learning experience and do better in the future.”

Not only do blacks get to do whatever they want, they get to lecture you afterward.

Black people now feel the right to pretty do whatever they want, anywhere they want. If you call them out for any inappropriate behavior, they pull the race card, the media descends and your life sucks. What a world we’ve created.

American blacks have to be the most spoiled pet in history.

I know Dyson indirectly. I am friends with a professor who knows
him well. And I agree, Dyson’s Disturbing the Universe is an incredible
book, still highly recommended after all these years. It’s interesting
that Dyson never bothered to formally get a Ph.D. even though any
of his 1940s papers on QED would have been enough. After all, he
almost got a Nobel for his contributions to Quantum Electrodynamics,
still the most precise theory in Modern Physics.

Dyson has had a very full life. He had 6 children with two wives (where
did he find the time to do any physics?) One of them, Esther Dyson, was
quite well known 10-15 years ago although she seems to have disappeared
in recent years.

Eustace, Love your limericks, however, planes were easy to replace in WWII, experienced flight crews were not. The US Navy won the war in the Pacific in large part because Japan lost so many experienced pilots at Midway and the “turkey shoot” battle at the Marianas islands. Don’t stop rhyming .

I don’t think I buy that classical Athens and 15th century Florence were a product of genetic drift. Didn’t they attract a lot of talent from elsewhere?

bomag, native Americans had 10,000 years of village life and never produced a wheel and were content with stone tools and weapons. I ask the same question as you. Why?

Dyson keeps referring to “villages,” but then states them as having tens of thousands of people. That’s a town, or even a small city, not a village. Exactly what population size does he have in mind? 10,000s should have a very different genetic dynamic than a settlement with a few hundred people.

link to quotation:

http://scilib-physics.narod.ru/Dyson/Weapons_and_Hope/Weapons_Hope.htm

ctrl-f “white”

“By the way, he’s wrong when he says that Jerusalem around 800 BC was the source of the invention of monotheistic religion. Scholarly opinion attributes that to the Babylonian exile, or shortly thereafter, when the Jews came under Zoroastrian influence.”

Ethical henotheism, not monotheism, was the key concept, and I think there is evidence that that was the innovation of a small tribe of West Semitic nomads who migrated to Palestine sometime in the 2nd Millennium BCE, made possible by two thousand years of historical experience on the fringes of Mesopotamian civilization. In other words, as recounted in the Patriarchal Narratives in the middle parts of Genesis.

The idea that these narratives were written at the same time or after the four other books of the Torah can be ruled out on stylistic grounds alone, which is obvious even in translation. I know this is a minority opinion nowadays, but for details on the sociological background, see here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kWOWh30eyIiqR36w04M_9X3rjQKuBtQuPGwFW9xdYik/edit?usp=sharing

Migration is big.

Engine knock was also a concern.

OT, but remarkable really. I’ve never seen nor heard of anything like this:

http://www.fox2detroit.com/news/local-news/13-semis-line-detroit-freeway-to-help-man-considering-suicide

Auto, I agree 100 percent. I have never had a black woman caddy. And as an aside to those of you who are not familiar with the “Canadian Ballet”, Mints, a gentlemen’s club in nearby Fort Erie, Ont. has a golf outing where your caddy/golf cart mate is totally nude. Well, they wear shoes.

But Dyson is stale, pale and male. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also a physicist but ze is none of those other things. Instead, she is “black, cisfemale, and genderqueer, living with chronic pain and pansexual.” I’ll quote some of zir profound insights from an article linked at “Website” above:

A lesson we can take away from Einstein is that there’s no observer that’s objective relative to other observers. And no one person is more the arbiter of what the laws of physics are than anyone else. I don’t know if that’s what drove Einstein’s anti-racism activism (which almost no one ever talks about), but that’s an important thing to think about.

In the 18th century, astronomy really took off, in part, because governments were really interested in how to ship goods—and people—between Africa’s Ivory Coast, the US and Europe. That’s what really drove astronomical observation, to help calculate distances and improve trade routes. In the 19th century, energy was a really big problem, in part, because of the end of slavery, which was a white supremacist perpetual motion machine.

And an enslaved black child, Edmond Albius, first figured out how to artificially pollinate vanilla plants, in 1841. That revolutionized the entire planet. As far as I’m concerned, he was a child genius. When we think about the foundation of the American economy and American science we should look at un-named figures.

We have a lot going on. A research assistant who is working on her masters in public health (Daysha Gunther) is going to talk to black and native women who have physics PhDs, to see how and why they came up with their dissertation topics. My hypothesis is that we are losing scientific knowledge because of racism and sexism. But my primary hypothesis is that I’m going to be surprised. Another research assistant (Iris Viveros-Avendaño, women’s studies) is creating curricular materials to introduce these topics into university classrooms.

This is a whole new vibrant kind of physics quite unlike Dyson’s!

Berty, Google Auto Car. There was a plane/car developed locally that steered like an automobile. However, the prototype crashed locally here in WNY on the polo fields of the Knox family killing the designer (forgot his name) and J. Hazard Campbell, son-in-law of a very wealthy Buffalo family.

Which can be easily reconstructed from the Bible text itself; a tribe or alliance of circumcised El (historically, a major god in the Semitic pagan pantheon) and YHWH (probably a local god in Jerusalem or Samaria)-worshipping Semites defeated (i.e. the conquest of Canaan) a tribe or alliance of uncircumcised Ba’al (another major god)-worshippers, then banned the worship of Ba’al, and resolved the El/YHWH dispute by declaring them one and the same.

If you want to Rule, control the object of religious worship. First Jews sold “New and Improved! EL/YHWH” and then a millennium later sold “New and Improved! YHWH & SON (Yeshua)”.

And today, millennia later, we have the delicious parodic spectacle of fanatic YHWH/Yeshua worshippers blaming Jewish conspiracies for all of the West’s problems…

Why are all the places on the list European?

Dyson himself explained that he was not familiar with non-European cultures, but expected them to have had their own starbursts.

This is certainly true of China which experienced a brilliant classical age ca. 600 – 100 BCE, with contributions from Chuang-tzu, Confucius, Han Fei-Tzu, Ssu-Ma Ch’ien and many others.

A political precondition of these events seems to be a decentralized political structure. In China, the major intellectual advances coincided with the period when the Chou (Zhou) Dynasty had degenerated into a number of largely independent territories run by competing warlords through caleidoscopic wars, alliances, realignments, etc.

There have been a number of “flying cars” but none yet commercially viable because of the extreme compromises required combined with high prices (several hundred grand minimum). The electric power revolution may change this as we see VTOL four rotor electric powered prototypes from several well-funded shops. Over-simplifying the engineering obviously but just envision quick swap of carbon fiber rotor blades on four rotor drone type design, switching over to ultra-lightweight wheel/tire setup. All that’s missing is rotating the assembly 90 degrees like an azimuth pod on modern marine propulsion systems (which would then also provide four wheel steering). In fact, I’m pretty sure Rinspeed AG built a working submarine/car prototype using a roughly similar design.

We are still very much at the absolute forefront of a tidal wave in material science. Carbon fiber alone is just beginning to show up in non-specialty vehicles and carbon nanotubes are coming along behind CF. Incidentally, Trump’s tariffs on China state subsidized steel and aluminum should help propel more rapid replacement of these materials with newer and better composites..

Another possibility just occurred to me, a shipping container approach where a passenger pod is quickly swapped on/off various locomotory devices much like Tesla builds their cars today.

Either way, you’d have to achieve road performance and aesthetics an order of magnitude better than the crude winged car/plane monstrosities we’ve seen thus far. And I think you’d have to achieve VTOL since general aviation airports aren’t necessarily conveniently located. Anyway, I wouldn’t write this off just yet. Non-flying hypercars are selling at prices well into seven figures and there’s a good supply of capital chasing the “passenger drone” and electric car concepts.

Freeman Dyson is perhaps the last surviving (or at least still active) physicist or mathematician of the Bohr / Feynman / Turing / Zeldovich / Heisenberg generation who were employed to use their huge brains during WWII.

As a teenager, he worked as a statistical analyst for the RAF Bomber Command. He assisted an older colleague in an endless bureaucratic struggle to widen the escape hatches on RAF bombers over Germany from 18″ to 24″ or even just 20″ square.

The Allied Combined Bombing Offensive shows the power of ideas.

The UK and USA decided to build massive strategic bomber forces owing to the influence of Giulio Douhet, who argued that “the bomber will always get through” (ask the 8th Air Force about Regensburg and Schweinfurt on that one) and that strategic bombardment from the air could rapidly reduce enemy nations to rubble.

In “Rivista Aeuronautica” in July 1928, he wrote that he believed that 300 tons of bombs over the most important cities would end a war in less than a month. During World War II however, the Allies dropped over 2.5 million tons of bombs on Europe without decisive effect.[4]

The combined bombing offensive did ultimately cause the economic collapse of Germany–but only did so at the end of 1944, by which time Germany had already been defeated on the ground. And the bombing never caused the political or moral collapse of Germany, though admittedly the Nazi government had something to do with that. The bombing campaign did accelerate Germany’s defeat on the Eastern Front by diverting aircraft, flak cannons (highly suitable as anti-tank guns), manpower, and shells to the Reich.

An interesting alternate history is to consider the course of WW2 if the allies had decided on another strategy than strategic bombing.

A similar scenario is the the naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Would Germany have embarked on its massive naval building program if Mahan had never lived?

“No other life forms have spread out through the galaxy and universe, and we cannot even detect any light speed transmissions from them.”

I guess I could do some reading and answer my own question.

But space is BIG. From wikipedia:

“The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter between 100,000[26] and 180,000 light-years (ly).[27] It is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars.[28][29] There are probably at least 100 billion planets in the Milky Way.[30][31] The Solar System is located within the disk, about 26,000 light-years from the Galactic Center, on the inner edge of the Orion Arm, one of the spiral-shaped concentrations of gas and dust. The stars in the innermost 10,000 light-years form a bulge and one or more bars that radiate from the bulge.”

Just assume there is (or was) another civilization 100,000 years ago on the opposite side of the galaxy. Say they are just like us and broadcasting radio and TV signals with the same power we are.

Just have a hard time believing we could detect a TV station 100,000 light years away. That is going to be one really attenuated signal thanks to the inverse square law after 100,000 years. And you are also assuming you’d recognize what Moopls Florzing with Nucknucks actually was, instead of some wonky natural phenomena.

True. And well said.

I have enormous respect for Freeman Dyson (e.g. his views on “purported” Global Warming / Climate Change) but I unfortunately agree with his being categorized “As the best of the 2nd rate physicists”.

>using number of phone calls to assess happiness
So in other words, only women exist, or men are assumed to be in constant rage.

This is also my explanation. Freedom is a (pseudo-physically not morally) negative void rather than a positive action, a clearing of space to make room for innovation, rather than a cluttering of brainless good intentions and oppressive attention. Europe stumbled into arts, rights and sciences because there was no central imperial bureaucracy to feel threatened by new ideas or preclude them with consistently enforced rules. This explanation also obviates “supremacism” and resolves why IQ has not guaranteed achievement.

Dyson is pretty unusual in that he’s considered a top tier mind in his field as well as a first rate writer for general audiences (Disturbing the Universe in particular is beautifully written.) Most first tier scientists are either mediocre prose stylists (Hawking) or heavily edited by others (Feynman,) while most scientists who write well for a general audience aren’t really the leading lights of their fields (coughcoughGould.) Are there any other top shelf scientists who are first rate writers like Dyson?

That has to be a Sam Hyde level troll. Too pitch perfect. CBC news broadcast a report where they talked about Chads, Staceys and Incels.

On the other hand, Manassian quit/washed out of Canadian Forces basic training after about 2 weeks. CF basic felt like a continuation of high school to my 19 year old self, and I’m sure it’s only gotten easier.

All in all a very fun happening.

Not true regarding Einstein. He was doing badly at gymnasium in Munich and had no chance of entering university so he moved to Switzerland and did his Matura there. I saw Einstein’s gymnasium report last year, his results were (6 being top marks in the Swiss system, still true today): German 5, French 3, English – (apparently he chose to take French instead), Italian 5, History 6, Geography 4, Algebra 6, Geometry 6, Projective Geometry 6, Physics 6 (Heh), Chemistry 5, Natural history 5, Art 4, Technical drawing 4.
Pretty good results and even more impressive is that he was 16-17, today most students finish Gym at 18-19.

The drift alone in a small population will never create anything what does note also exist in a large population.

n isolated villages of populations of sizes k_1, k_2,…,k_n will not produce different population than one large population of k_1+k_2+…+k_n size if drift (no mutations) is the only effect.

Freeman Dyson wrote the most cogent piece on the economics of space colonization with his piece “Pilgrims, Saints, and Spacemen” in August of ’79. In short, he said we’re not going there until the capacity to do so becomes cheap enough such that it is self-financing.

Many years later he wrote about the need for the bio-engineering revolution (“wet” nanotechnology) such that we can “grow” things rather than manufacture them. By “things” I mean stuff like seasteads and space colonies. 3-D printing and robotics assembly are a good step in the right direction. But the bio-engineering revolution is the needed capstone that will make it possible for small, self-interested groups to cost effectively produce the infrastructure that will allow for their autonomy and independence. Note that my definition of self-interested groups include those like alt-right, neo-masculenity, etc.

I know that some of you still have difficulty grasping the concept.

Of course it is desirable to “win” the culture wars in the West. Nevertheless, it is still desirable to go someplace new, regardless of win or loss of the culture wars.

Bardon Kaldian says:

As a scientist, Dyson is a great man & should have, probably, won the Nobel for his work in QED (and other areas).

As a futurist thinker, he is among the best & most entertaining.

When I was a grad student at Stanford, Dyson managed to get the journal Reviews of Modern Physics to publish one of his papers on the very long-term fate of the universe (think of it as one followed by many zeroes years in the future): one of our professors, Helen Quinn, jokingly referred to it as Freeman’s foray into science fiction.

He never won the Nobel because his work was too distant from actual experiments: the Nobel committee has interpreted Nobel’s will to require that theoretical work have clear experimental implications. Dyson’s work, while crucial for the mathematical development of quantum field theory, just did not have any direct connection with experiment.

For the same reason, it is doubtful that Ed Witten will ever get a Nobel, and two of the most brilliant physicists of the late twentieth century, Steve Hawking and Sidney Coleman, also never got Nobels for this reason; similarly for the leading figures in superstring theory (Green, Schwarz, Susskind, Polchinski, et al.): i.e., no one knows how to test string theory experimentally.

Regarding laser powered launch

I’m not sure I believe that, but that’s pretty interesting.

Seawater (for reaction mass) is pretty cheap. Need to worry about salt buildup though. Perhaps launching from the Great Lakes instead.

Hearing the name Dyson makes me think of fictional computer programmer Miles Dyson, who created Skynet in “Terminator 2”. The first example that I can remember of the now ludicrously common “black computer nerd” trope. James Cameron was ahead of his time.

Thank you for this. I spent a few minutes googling this, but your link is good.

It would be far easier to colonize Antarctica or the continental shelves than it would be to colonize other planets. So far, nobody seems to be game for that.

It would be far easier for me to pick my nose too, but that’s not the point. The point is to expand humanity off planet to get our eggs out of one basket. There are many potential and highly probable existential risks to humanity this century. Not the least of which is genetically engineered pathogens, which potentially any competent graduate student could cook up in the future. For a natural example look at the American Chestnut. A billion+ individual trees wiped out. Only a runt population left.

“And was monotheism really that brilliant?”

No, polytheism is superior. All the gods agree, “Diversity Is Our Strength.”

OT: Neocon journalist Lee Smith is now advocating total US withdrawal from the Middle East.

Dr Chanda could have made this point instead:

A lesson we can take away from Einstein is that….

…he was part-african. He didn’t look ashkenazi jewish. Afro from his mother’s side. Take a look:

I’m not sure what Jerry said on the subject, but I recall hearing elsewhere that the energy required is really quite low. This is in absolute, optimized terms – as in the concept of a space elevator. The analogy I recall is that lifting a person would be similar to using the toaster once.

Neocon journalist Lee Smith is now advocating total US withdrawal from the Middle East.

If he was a real neocon it could not be possibly true. So I looked at this article and indeed he advocates a withdrawal form the ME but he really means a withdrawal form the deal with Iran. This guy wants war.

Worldwide IQ is declining rapidly, not slowly. It likely peaked around 1880.

Well, you know, they adapted it all from the Greeks.

Cosmic rays aren’t too big a deal. You just need a little shielding – a few feet of dirt. Gravity is a different matter of course. No one knows if Mars has enough, we never bothered to find out. Terra-forming Mars is probably crazy, but a lot of people could live there in tunnels – if the gravity is enough.

OT Tories unintentinally admit to Most Important Graph, political fighting through demographic replacement; their conclusion is to adopt the Republican stuff about appealing to nonwhites with word tricks

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/amber-rudd-vows-change-of-culture-on-migration-8nsbbhtx5?CMP=Sprkr-_-Editorial-_-thetimes-_-Unspecified-_-TWITTER

>”A senior Conservative strategist sounded the alarm over the party’s declining popularity with non-white voters. Lord Cooper of Windrush said the Tories would find it almost impossible to win in an area with a non-white population above 30 per cent, adding that by the time of the next general election there would be more than 120 seats where that was the case.”

>“Unless something changes, before long there just won’t be enough white voters in the electorate for the Conservative Party to be able to win.”

>the Tories would find it almost impossible to win in an area with a non-white population above 30 per cent.

First paragraph: tribes social classes.= caste

Places where intellectual revolutions happened include, among many others, Jerusalem around 800 BC (the invention of monotheistic religion)

The concept of monotheism has no intellectual component. It’s nothing more than a belief that your god must be destroyed.

Having even modest permanent but self-sustaining settlements on the moon and on Mars seems like an excellent precaution precisely to complicate the great hidden project of our age…

This assumes that somehow only Burkean conservatives will manage to get off the planet. Why wouldn’t it just be a random sample including many of the same ding-a-lings who got us into this mess?

When the English colonized Virginia, even though it was months of dangerous travel away, they pretty much replicated English society in Virginia, with landed gentry, an established church, allegiance to the Crown and so on. It took 150 years for that to break down.

A “thank you” to Buffalo Joe,
A history buff in the know.
One to always be read;
Bright bead on this thread.
I the (Not) Twisted Cross now bestow.

I spoke with Molt Taylor, the inventor of the only reasonably successful flying car, on several occasions. A couple still fly. He was an odd duck, but not stupid.

Probably, a civilization on a planet with an ionosphere will broadcast high power signals that will penetrate that ionosphere only for a limited time. If it continues to progress past the 20th century, low power packet mesh networks will cover the planet, as with our 4G cell phone towers. As analog is replaced by increasingly sophisticated digital modes, the odds that anyone would figure out what is being said become lower and lower too.

There have been a number of “flying cars” but none yet commercially viable because of the extreme compromises required combined with high prices (several hundred grand minimum). The electric power revolution may change this as we see VTOL four rotor electric powered prototypes from several well-funded shops. Over-simplifying the engineering obviously but just envision quick swap of carbon fiber rotor blades on four rotor drone type design, switching over to ultra-lightweight wheel/tire setup. All that’s missing is rotating the assembly 90 degrees like an azimuth pod on modern marine propulsion systems (which would then also provide four wheel steering). In fact, I’m pretty sure Rinspeed AG built a working submarine/car prototype using a roughly similar design.

Carefully studying Molt Taylor’s designs, they weren’t as unworkable as people at first think. You had a light and tinny car that had its wings and tail bolt on to make a quirky but decent light aircraft. He was 75% of the way there.

The vehicle would have to be exempted from today’s car crashworthiness and emissions standards, I think, to make this feasible today.

ben, you should read a few commentaries on the Book of Isaiah.

Then try find anything remotely at that intellectual level from that era.

Good luck, my young friend! May you one day be less arrogant and more wise!

not to be rude, but I know more about those days than almost any scholar you could name. You may be interested in my upcoming review of the paperback version of “Aramaic words in the Septuagint translation of Isaiah”, or you may not be ….

Anyway, Dyson may have phrased it incorrectly, but you did not help by attacking the incorrect phrasing. Let us imagine we are all decent human beings, who usually know at least something about what we are talking about. Given that minimum baseline, let’s not attack incorrect phrasing, that is what secretaries and midwits do. Let us try to understand the arguments of those with whom we disagree!

Read, my young friend, some of the works of Isaiah, who was a smarter fellow than you, and compare such works to the banal midwit folklore “monotheism” that you were thinking about when you thought you were cleverly making a clever point.

Or else describe, in detail that shows you know what you are talking about, why Dyson, who undoubtedly knows a lot about the subject, was “wrong”. Of course he did not really know what he was talking about – who does – but he was on to something. There are a few really smart people who spend their whole lives stupid but Dyson does not seem to be one of them, you probably aren’t either.
The words we use, at the rate of 10 or 20 thousand on a good day, are so disproportionately small to the task of describing everything we should know, given the gifts of knowledge we have been given: right? It is no small thing to be a friend to someone who never had a friend in the world. Teach an animal – a parrot, a dog – to talk: such things have happened: cor ad cor loquitur. Thanks for reading.

OT: A TED talk in support of free speech, featuring hate facts, Charles Murray and John Derbyshire by name

https://www.ted.com/talks/zachary_r_wood_why_it_s_worth_listening_to_people_we_disagree_with/

If the Nobel Prize could be shared by four people rather than just three, wouldn’t Dyson have gotten a share along with Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman?

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/

Most of our modern institutions come from Rome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanda_Prescod-Weinstein

Prescod-Weinstein was born in El Sereno in East Los Angeles, and went to school in the Los Angeles Unified School District.[1][2] they earned a Bachelor’s of Arts in Physics and Astronomy at Harvard College in 2003. Their thesis, “A study of winds in active galactic nuclei”, was completed under the supervision of Martin Elvis.[3] They then earned a Masters in Astronomy at the University of California, Santa Cruz working with Anthony Aguirre.[4] In 2010, Prescod-Weinstein completed their Ph.D. dissertation titled “Acceleration as Quantum Gravity Phenomenology” under the supervision of Lee Smolin and Niayesh Afshordi at University of Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.[1][5] In doing so, they became the 63rd African American woman in history to earn a Ph.D. in Physics.[1][6]

They, they, they. Is this the “They” who was never going to let Hillary become President?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanda_Prescod-Weinstein#Personal_life

Prescod-Weinstein identifies as queer and agender.[2]

https://www.unz.com/isteve/it-cant-be-hate-speech-against-white-men-because-you-deserve-it/

wwebd said: Great stylists of the English language who were ( or are ) also top tier scientists – Julian Barbour and Peter Medawar, in Great Britian.

Robert Laughlin and, although I have zero respect for the little fellow, Carl Sagan in America.

Nabokov (lepidoptery) could easily have been a top-tier scientist (he was a little lazy on the statistics side of his allegedly beloved science of lepidoptery, too sad), ditto Mark Helprin (Nicomachean Ethics) and Franzen (ornithology).

Goethe and Poe contributed to the scientific advances of their day (Goethe – horticulture and natural evolution, Poe, God help him, cosmology).

Oh, I forgot to start my comment with this. There are no top shelf scientists. Never have been, never will be. Science is hard, and, if you have normal human feelings and know that it is no big deal to be a “big brain” in science, you always feel sorry for the talented tenth who work hard (Newton) and even sorrier for the guys with great insights who would have been better off just enjoying life while someone else did the sloppy work that they sadly wasted their best years on (come on nobody who knows anything about it really thinks that Einstein discovered anything that other scientists would not have discovered five or ten years later – and for what ?- so he could have his picture with his stupid sad gray crazy haircut reproduced a few billion times, so people could feel some weird admiration for the guy, at the same time that every single person looking at that picture felt profoundly sorry for the poor sap who wasted his life in a laboratory, trying to figure things out that someone else would have figured out anyway? – come on, you know it is sad. Nobody wants their son to be the next Einstein if the alternative is just to be a decent likable human being, and God knows there is no a single human being on this earth who would want their daughter to be married to the next Einstein. Think about it).

Well the results from AZ08 are mostly in, and it’s not looking too hot for the GOP. They’ll win, but not by much. This is not looking good for November.

I’ve never seen a good response to the many string theory critics, such as

https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/string-theory-and-the-no-alternatives-argument/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/02/what-does-it-mean-for-string-theory.html

Why wouldn’t we send criminals (at first)?

Cypress Point. I may be able to work that. It is through very, very old people with uge families who wanna go there – take selfies there – so, is September/October (after school starts) good? – Most of these people are often away, hanging out with their families across the world. I will brag: we Nordics love the ocean. Golf, introduced by the Scots, was a natural sport for cold climate people.

If we lose the “culture” war you can rest easy about all that other stuff.

Hey Steve, make a thread about the election in Arizona.

When can we make “they” go away?

What do Kanye West and Scott Adams think about WW2 physicists tho?

I predict my son will be the first good-lookin’ guy, physicist, in the world. He will also have that wife that screams ” I take no prisoners,” but that has more to do with house work, even if she is also, a physicist. There is a growing group of young adults who do not buy into cultural Marxism: all the censorship, schmaltzy diversity bs. It is very state-by-state, currently. That is why: most HS students are applying to America’s South, West, Southwest and Mountain States and the Pacific coast, big schools, so they can be free - small schools are lame. All, full of left-wing conformists…super boring people you are just gonna hate in the long run.

MEH 0910 asked:

If the Nobel Prize could be shared by four people rather than just three, wouldn’t Dyson have gotten a share along with Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman?

Yeah, I think so. Dyson is one of those cases where it is possible to understand the decision of the Nobel committee, but it is easy to see him right in line behind Schwinger.

Of course, as this discussion shows, Freeman Dyson is more famous, both among the public and among physicists, than many Nobel laureates (the same is obviously true for Hawking). So, perhaps sometimes it is okay to not get a Nobel prize!

Dave

Earl Lemongrab:

I nominate Fred Hoyle as both a top-notch scientist and writer of science-fact and science-fiction.

Hoyle certainly deserved but never received a Nobel Laureate for his path-breaking work on stellar nucleoynthesis.

He may have been deprived of his Nobel because of his speculations that pansperma was the origin of earth’s life. His later anthropogenesis work would certainly have black-balled him.

A lesson we can take away from Einstein is that…

… he was gender-queer.

That clearly is a picture of young Albert zherself in drag.

Either zher or a young Babe Ruth.

PhysicistDave,

Could not Dyson be depreciated since his main contribution was to synthesize the works of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman? I defer to your judgement.

‘Cause they had plenty meat and spent their evenings ’round the fire, talkin’ smack. Same as you and I.

Lot wrote to me:

I’ve never seen a good response to the many string theory critics…

Well, the response is basically that strings/superstrings are very, very appealing in terms of the underlying physical ideas, the mathematical structures, and various ideas that have come out of the work on string theory: indeed, the ideas are so appealing that it is hard for a lot of us to imagine that Nature did not somehow make use of these possibilities. And, maybe it will turn out eventually that somehow strings are real.

By the way, it is hard to explain to non-physicists what is intuitively appealing about strings. To put it as clearly as I can in a brief comment, the basic idea is that the string tension and the string energy counter-balance each other in such a way as to look the same in any frame of reference. I.e., it fits nicely in a really cute way with relativity. And, that in turn translates into quantum mechanics into what is called “reparametrization invariance,” which is also cool in a somewhat different way, and that in turn feeds into the need for extra dimensions. And, those are just at the simplest level: the further physicists got into the subject, the more one cool surprise after another (many beyond my own level of understanding) popped up: “mirror symmetry,” “D-branes,” AdS/CFT correspondence (which maps what goes on inside a volume to what is happening on the surface), etc.

And, yet, no one can actually solve mathematically any interesting string theory to even see what it predicts experimentally. That’s the problem.

Probably the most prominent advocate for string theory in the blogosphere is Lubos Motl, who is a bit of an Alt-Right fellow, Czech version (Lubos’ blog actually links to Sailer’s, though I just noticed that the link is outdated — I need to mention that to Lubos). Peter Woit is the most prominent critic in the blogosphere of string theory. (The two guys can’t stand each other!)

As for myself, personally, in my student days I knew some of the leading figures in string theory — John Schwarz (I took a class from John), Lenny Susskind (who was on my thesis committee), and Joe Polchinski (who was a fellow student at Caltech) — and I would like to see string theory work out.

On the other hand, Woit, Smolin, Bee Hossenfelder, et al. score some real points: in the end, physics has to be about experiment.

So, I’m just waiting to see how it all comes out in the end.

Dave

I personally think-not that my opinion matters a fart’s worth-proving the equivalence between the operator and path integral methods combined was worth a Nobel Prize on its own merit, even before you get to his other contributions. (I remember seeing the Dyson series for the first time in Sakurai and being blown away. A lot of things about time evolution in QM that seemed mysterious starting clicking around that time.) That said, you could make the argument that both lie more in the realms of mathematical innovation than physics. My knowledge is a little hazy, so correct me if I’m wrong, but Dirac didn’t get his Nobel Prize for proving the equivalence of matrix mechanics and wave mechanics, right? But he was awarded it in conjunction with Schroedinger. The wording on the Nobel Prize site is a little ambiguous. It says they got it for creating “new productive forms of atomic theory.”

For what it is worth, Dyson himself doesn’t seem to be too bothered by it. Apart from saying that Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga deserved precedence (accurate), he has commented that his research interests and his nature don’t lend themselves to Nobel Prize winning. Modern Nobel Prize winners typically sit down with a huge single problem for decades and solve it. That’s just not his style.

Dyson actually strikes me as being quite similar to J. Robert Oppenheimer in his relative lack of Sitzfleisch and myriad interests. Oppenheimer’s physics career, pre-Manhattan Project, was a series of brilliant little pinpricks across different fields. He just was too easily interested in everything to sit down for too long.

>The two guys can’t stand each other!

Heh, his vehemence was truly something else. I felt like a horrible human being for studying Woit’s paper on quantum mechanics for mathematicians (not intended for this purpose, but great resource for physicists wishing to upgrade their group theory knowledge) and thinking it was great when first going onto his blog. Those wacky uber-theorists…

Why String Theory Is Still Not Even Wrong
Physicist, mathematician and blogger Peter Woit whacks strings, multiverses, simulated universes and “fake physics”

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/why-string-theory-is-still-not-even-wrong/

It would be far easier for me to pick my nose too, but that’s not the point. The point is to expand humanity off planet to get our eggs out of one basket. There are many potential and highly probable existential risks to humanity this century. Not the least of which is genetically engineered pathogens, which potentially any competent graduate student could cook up in the future.

The point was this: colonizing Antarctica or the ocean floor is hard. Really hard. And yet, it is orders of magnitude easier than colonizing space. People vastly underestimate the difficulties of living off-world.

Moreover, why would it protect us from pathogens? Do you imagine that the Martian Republic will be a hermit kingdom – a planetary analog of Enver Hoxha’s Albania? Deadly pathogens could spread via spaceship just as easily as by airplane.

To clarify, I’m completely agnostic about string theory. I don’t know the first thing about it. It’s way beyond my mental capacity, let alone my mathematical toolbox. Whether I’ll be able to upgrade both in the upcoming decades to get to that point, we’ll see-probably not, but I’ll give it a whirl. But it isn’t really my field of interest anyway, so, I’m all good.

So, I’m just gonna lean back, cook some popcorn, and wait to see how the game ends while sitting back. If there’s one great thing about accepting your new identity of “complete idiot”, as I alluded to, it does nothing if not take the pressure off you.

By the way, Motl’s critique on things like making the big fuss in distinguishing between Lie algebras and groups and complexification at the expense of hammering home the essential physical points in Woit’s paper does have some merit to it, IMO. (The paper was written for math students, and for all I know, that might be the reason.) But, hey, I’m a manque. As long as I can fish out what’s important, I’ll get infinitesimally less stupid, and that’s the point.

Baby *stepppppppps…*

https://motls.blogspot.com/2017/04/physicists-smart-folks-use-same-symbols.html

If the Nobel Prize could be shared by four people rather than just three, wouldn’t Dyson have gotten a share along with Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman?

I don’t imagine so. His work was one of explanation; he showed Schwingers and Fenymans (seemingly different) theories to be equivalent. bit he did not himself create a theory of electrodynamics. That isn’t to detract from Mr. Dyson’s accomplishments. What he did was valuable and there weren’t many people at the time who could have done it. And, of course, he worked on lots of other neat things too (Triga, Orion, etc.).

Not only is Dyson the last survivor of that generation, amazingly he’s still producing important new work. A few years ago William Press asked Dyson, aged 89, to help him think about game theory. With no background in it, and after one day’s thought, he developed a mathematical insight that overthrew a thirty year old consensus. Unbelievable.

As Wren and others have pointed out, Dyson is also courageous, going against lefty dogma like the Church of Global Warming. We need that. We may be losing that. I don’t know Dyson’s views on Steve-ish topics, but I bet he’s brave enough that he might utter forbidden thoughts if he thought they were the truth.

Dyson actually strikes me as being quite similar to J. Robert Oppenheimer in his relative lack of Sitzfleisch and myriad interests.

In some ways, Freeman Dyson reminds me of George Gamow, perhaps the best example of a first-rank physicist from the golden age who didn’t win a Nobel. Gamow was an excellent popular science writer, and his mind settled on more than one big area of inquiry.

If, as Steve noted a couple of months ago, the Nobel Committee would honor more than three scientists at a time, Gamow would certainly have received a Nobel for at least one of the problems he solved in nucleocomsogenesis. He might have won a Nobel in more than one field, given his role in recognizing and identifying the DNA/RNA set of problems and initiating the project to figure out the structure of DNA.

Oh thank goodness! So it looks like we’ll be getting to Mars and moonbases pretty soon after all!

… Or at least the “black, genderqueer and pansexual” among us will be.

Maybe zhe could benefit from the experience of these space veterans of color (NSFW).

she is “black, cisfemale, and genderqueer, living with chronic pain and pansexual.”

Well, at least there’s some justice squeezed in there among the tripe.

I wonder if that blackstronats video has ever been “accidentrally” shown to middle school students in class.

Clever to repurpose an old black song about heroin as a space song: “He’s Shooting Up.”

nebulafox wrote to me:

I personally think-not that my opinion matters a fart’s worth-proving the equivalence between the operator and path integral methods combined was worth a Nobel Prize on its own merit, even before you get to his other contributions.

Well… despite having taken quantum field theory from Weinberg (he took a year sabbatical at Stanford when I was a grad student), I’m pretty sure I don’t really understand renormalization (I’m not entirely sure anyone really understands renormalization — dimensional regularization vs. real-space renormalization group, etc. etc.)

So, maybe all this cannot really be adjudicated until a few more generations of physicists have fully absorbed it.

Anyway, I think Freeman Dyson has had more fun being Freeman Dyson than most people get out of their lives. And, I suppose that’s enough.

a planetary analog of Enver Hoxha’s Albania

Mars is red planet after all.

Wittgenstein and Hitler went to school together. Some starburst.