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Todd Suomela

The Bohr paradox - physicsworld.com - 0 views

  • Why? The best explanation I have heard is advanced by the physicist John H Marburger, who is currently science advisor to US President George Bush. By 1930, Marburger points out, physicists had found a perfectly adequate way of representing classical concepts within the quantum framework using Hilbert (infinite-dimensional) space. Quantum systems, he says, “live” in Hilbert space, and the concepts of position and momentum, for instance, are associated with different sets of coordinate axes that do not line up with each other, thereby resulting in the situation captured in ordinary-language terms by complementarity.“It’s a clear, logical and consistent way of framing the complementarity issue,” Marburger explained to me. “It clarifies how quantum phenomena are represented in alternative classical ‘pictures’, and it fits in beautifully with the rest of physics. The clarity of this scheme removes much of the mysticism surrounding complementarity. What happened was like a gestalt-switch, from a struggle to view microscopic nature from a classical point of view to an acceptance of the Hilbert-space picture, from which classical concepts emerged naturally. Bohr brokered that transition.”
  • In his book Niels Bohr’s Times, the physicist Abraham Pais captures a paradox in his subject’s legacy by quoting three conflicting assessments. Pais cites Max Born, of the first generation of quantum physics, and Werner Heisenberg, of the second, as saying that Bohr had a greater influence on physics and physicists than any other scientist. Yet Pais also reports a distinguished younger colleague asking with puzzlement and scepticism “What did Bohr really do?”.
Todd Suomela

Ockham's Razor is Dull « Apperceptual - 0 views

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    For a period of about a decade, extending from my late undergraduate years to my early postdoctoral years, it would be fair to say that I was obsessed with Ockham's razor. I was convinced that it was the key to understanding how we acquire knowledge about the world. I no longer believe in Ockham's razor.
Todd Suomela

Guest Post: Tom Levenson on Isaac Newton as the First Cosmologist | Cosmic Variance - 0 views

  • Newton knew what he had done. He was no accidental writer. A parabola, of course, is a curve that keeps on going – and that meant that at the end of a very long and very dense book, he lifted off again from the hard ground of daily reality and said, in effect, look: All this math and all these physical ideas govern everything we can see, out to and past the point where we can’t see anymore. Most important, he did so with implacable rigor, a demonstration that, he argued, should leave no room for dissent. He wrote “The theory that corresponds exactly to so nonuniform a motion through the greatest part of the heavens, and that observes the same laws as the theory of the planets and that agrees exactly with exact astronomical observations cannot fail to be true.” (Italics added).
  • To make his ambitions absolutely clear Newton used the same phrase for the title of book three. There his readers would discover “The System of the World.” This is where the literary structure of the work really comes into play, in my view. Through book three, Newton takes his audience through a carefully constructed tour of all the places within the grasp of his new physics. It begins with an analysis of the moons of Jupiter, demonstrating that inverse square relationships govern those motions. He went on, to show how the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn would pull each out of a perfect elliptical orbit; the real world, he says here, is messier than a geometer’s dream.
Todd Suomela

Astronomical Data Center Home page - 0 views

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    For 25 years, the ADC was a key center for published astronomy data, catalogs, and journal tables. The ADC made these data sets computer readable and developed new methods, tools, and techniques for their preparation and use.
Todd Suomela

Astronomer's Bazaar - 0 views

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    The CDS Service for astronomical Catalogues
Todd Suomela

Ether Wave Propaganda: Galison's Questions, #1: What is Context? - 0 views

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    Galison's first question is "What is Context?" He observes that the escape from externalist-internalist debates has resulted in an appeal to context. But, to phrase it in a Seinfeldian way: what's the deal with context?
Todd Suomela

Technology Review: Keeping Tabs - 1 views

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    But the tab as an information technology metaphor is everywhere in use. And whether our tabs are cardboard extensions or digital projections, they all date to an invention little more than a hundred years old. The original tab signaled an information storage revolution and helped enable everything from management consulting to electronic data processing.
Todd Suomela

RAND | Research Memoranda | On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distribut... - 0 views

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    One in a series of eleven Memoranda detailing the Distributed Adaptive Message Block Network, a proposed digital data communications system based on a distributed network concept. It introduces the system concept and outlines the requirements for and design considerations of such a system, especially in regard to implications for its use in the 1970s. In particular, the Memorandum is directed toward examining the use of redundancy as one means of building communications systems to withstand heavy enemy attacks.
Todd Suomela

Science Studies | An Interdisciplinary Journal for Science and Technology Studies - 0 views

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    Science Studies is an international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing articles on the study of science and technology studies.
Todd Suomela

Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Choosing Between Graduate Study in a Philosophy Depa... - 0 views

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    Students interested in the philosophy of science, the history of science, and/or logic may face the choice of whether to pursue a graduate degree in a traditional philosophy department, or in a separate department of history and philosophy of science (HPS), or logic and philosophy of science (LPS).
Todd Suomela

Group photo of Werner von Braun and Apollo rocket - 11 views

Group photo from yesterprint flickr photostream. Werner von Braun and Saturn V rocket

sts photo

started by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 no follow-up yet
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