Re: Tackling John Baez Head-On

>>From Osher Doctorow

Saunders MacLane would have us run around looking for "Objects" ("Hey,
ma, there's an Object - can I name it?"), looking for commutative
diagrams ("Hey, pa, there's a commutative diagram, can I save it?"),
looking for functors ("Hey, uncle, there a functor, can I add it to my
list?"), looking for isomorphisms or even morphisms with iso- ("Hey
world, show me your isomorphisms or even morphisms - I won't ask for
clues.").

Pierre De Fermat had no such "advantages", but there were all these
gamblers in society in those days, and so he discovered Probability
with Pascal. Did he look for an object, a commutative diagram, a
functor, a morphism? Don't mess me with, boy :>)

Albert Einstein had no such "advantages", but his geometer Professor
friend Marcel Grossman knew about Ricci and Levi-Civita's
analytic-geometic Absolute Differential Calculus and his Chair
Minkowski had Geometry (Minkowski space, etc.), and there were physics
anomalies like the advance of perihelion of Mercury, and here we are
today.

Erwin Schrodinger and Prince Louis De Broglie had no such "advantages",
but Erwin had Differential Equations which aren't Algebra, and so did
Prince Louis, and here we are today. Erwin also happened to leave
Austria in protest against Hitler and spent WWII in Ireland.
Heisenberg, whose Matrix Mechanics is alleged by some to have started
QM (well, delete a few people like Prince Louis and Einstein and Planck
and even Schrodinger's early work, and you never know what you come up
with), spent WWII as Hitler's top scientist (Head of Nazi Science,
although the Physics Protectionist League as one might call them tear
their hair out at the thought) and couldn't come up with an atomic bomb
much less a WMD.

Superstring Theory has so many different authors that it's hard to keep
track. John Schwarz of CalTech (who wasn't first, but came in fast
afterward) and Michael Green of London U. and later Edward Witten of
the Princeton Institute who kept one foot in Topological Quantum Field
Theory (TQFT) and one foot in Superstring/Brane/M-Theory, couldn't come
up with an equation if it fell on their heads, and certainly nothing to
compare with the Schrodinger equation, but they get plenty of
publications and do advance the field (at what price?). Of course,
their methods: Algebraic Geometry and Algebraic Topology, with by
coincidence Physics thrown in (as an afterthought?).

Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) may be the most farcical thing to hit
physics since the Zeppelins. Claiming to be heirs of Einstein more or
less (Lee Smolin, Abhay Ashtekar, Carl Rovelli), they now have the
universe discretized which is the road that the Quantum Logic people
went down in the early 1970s before they totally collapsed (they were
recently reborn) in complete imitation of Werner Heisenberg. They use
the "Generalized Hamiltonian" and "Lagrangian" which are really tools
from Analysis, Differential Equations, and Physics, but in their
obsession with Algebraic Geometry and later Algebraic Topology, they
won't rest until we are all cut up into little pieces. Actually, I
think that part of the universe may be resisting being cut up, but
perhaps they have a contingency plan for that :>) Smolin and his
colleague claim to have discovered one of their key insights in a
British Pub in the process of falling asleep or watching the other fall
asleep, which is the only thing that rings true. The colleague, whose
name I have "sadly" forgotten although I think the initials are J. M.,
has written a popular book that differs slightly from Greene's Elegant
Universe in containing more profanity and other-blaming than physics
(well, minus the episodic narrations of personal experiences).

Osher Doctorow

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