Binary Oasis

Well, I only had to renew the book four or five times (from Chandler Public Library), but I finally made it through Brian Greene’s “The Fabric of the Cosmos.” I strongly recommend it to those looking for an overview of string theory, though it is a relatively small portion of the book that is devoted to string theory. Even if you read just the first half of the book (before it touches on string theory), it’s a good read, and it feels like it can stand alone. There’s some great history in here as well. The historical overview ends up being perhaps the best part of the book.

Most of the topics are fleshed out with analogies, and he shies away from even the simplest math (though I understand he hits on the hard math in “The Elegant Universe”). Most of the time, his analogies and analysis are very good, but there were a few times that I felt his intermediate analysis (that is, not his final analysis) was not sound (or at least I didn’t follow him), particularly with respect to entropy increasing toward the past. He seems to be leading into the philosophical question of “How could things have begun?”, but he doesn’t actually phrase it that way, and he mostly ignores some of the philosophical questions (or at least lack of answers) that a beginning highlights.

The chapters on general relativity are good. It turns out that “spacetime” is absolute according to the general theory of relativity. Time is relative, and space is relative, but spacetime is absolute. So not everything is relative, even in our postmodern world.
The most important thing that I got from the book is that the motivation for string theory is not just a desire for a “beautiful unification” of the four forces. Instead, the primary motivation is that nonsense results when we try to combine quantum theory with general relativity theory. Both of those theories have ample theoretical and experimental support, but they break each other. That’s not a problem for just about all of our regions of interest, but it’s a huge problem for small, massive things like black holes and like the assumed early condition of the universe. We’ve always found that nature follows rules, so to have nonsensical or unspecified rules is a huge irritant for scientists.

String theory holds the hope of addressing some other questions such as “How is it that the universe seems to be designed for life?” Certain values and ratios and characteristics of things just “are,” and they are “just right” (see the anthropic principle for some more discussion). Greene thinks that string theory could help to address this issue from a scientific, not philosophical, perspective.

This book has certainly changed my perspective on string theory. I used to have some animosity toward the theory; now I am just one part indifferent and one part curious.
It will be interesting to follow some of the upcoming experiments that have the (small) possibility of providing support for string theory.

The word “ideological” is in our modern language and debate in the context of the support that George Bush gives for the war in Iraq. Most of the time that I hear it, “ideological” is used with a negative connotation to describe the President. Yet President Bush uses the the same word (or variants thereof) in positive contexts. In particular, he talks of the “ideology of freedom and democracy.”

So it is bad to to ideological? Merriam Webster gives one definition as “a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture,” and Wikipedia describes ideology as “an organized collection of ideas.” Truth be told then, we all have groups of ideas, or sets of principles, or paradigms, or perspectives. To say otherwise is nonsensical in my opinion. Though there is disagreement as to how or if we should impress these ideas on others. Some would favor “principled” leadership and policies, while others give more emphasis to pragmatism (roughly, the end result of a policy/action/etc. is given more weight than the process or the set of principles to get to an end result).

I believe that there is a healthy debate taking place in certain circles, but most people are not defining what the debate actually is. The debate is not “ideology vs. non-ideology;” instead, we can perhaps describe the debate more accurately and constructively (at a very high level) with the question “What set of principles should apply to the situation, and how should we apply those principles?”

Nevertheless, in politics, pragmatism (i.e. the ideology of pragmatism?) almost always seems to win in the long run.

Gartner predicts that blogging will peak in 2007. I’m not sure I believe that the absolute number of bloggers will peak next year, but perhaps the percentage of people blogging will peak.

It is interesting to think about why people blog:

• To make money (i.e. “monetizing” a blog)
• To explore new technology
• To relieve stress (yes, a blog is a good outlet for people; many people “cry out” to the abyss, and it’s almost always enjoyable to make new connections online)
• To transmit ideas or further an agenda

I’m sure there are other reasons. For me, the strongest benefit is the intellectual outlet. 

So why would blogging lose momentum? Well, it’s easy enough to have enough interest in something new, but over the long term, we usually only stick to those things that we are passionate about. Is blogging deserving of passion? It definitely can be if we are contributing to the “Great Conversation.” If not, then it is probably worth while to focus on other things.

So if the number of bloggers does decrease or if I end up abandoning this blog, that’s just fine. I will be focusing on better things.