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Confused at a Higher Level
1. Confused at a Higher Level
• "Before I came here I was
confused about this
subject. Having listened
to your lecture I am still
confused. But on a higher
level." - Enrico Fermi
2. Two clouds on horizon
Black body
radiation Properties of
light
15. Paradox #2: Infinite means
zero
Quantum electrodynamics continuously
tosses up quantities which are:
1) Infinite
2) Really small (but o*en measurable)
21. Infinite and tiny
• ``It appears therefore that the theory
as it stands now must be strangely
near to the final solution, yet it cannot
possibly be correct, as the
mathematical procedure used to
extract these results is plainly
unacceptable.'' - Heitler
23. Entropic time
time • Time measured by
increasing entropy:
emit
• The direction bombs
explode in, eggs
“Opposite cracks in, people age
thermodynamics in, and the like.
arrows of time”
• Unfortunately,
L. S. Schulman
Schulman has shown
that this can go both
ways!
24. Acme Wormhole Construction
Company
Visser’s recipe for a time
machine:
1. Acquire a traversable
wormhole
2. Induce a “time-shi*”
between the two mouths of
the wormhole
3. Bring the wormhole
mouths together
25. Davies’s How to Build a Time
Machine
How do you go about
constructing a
traversable
wormhole and
turning it into a time
machine?
27. “Time’s Up for the Time
Bandits”
• Cover Story in New
Scientist, 20th of
September 2003
• Forget about coming
back to murder your
great-grandfather. It
never happened, and
there are forces out
there making sure it
never will.
28. Conundrum
For better or for worse, most canonical
quantum field theories are found by starting
with a classical field theory and then
'quantizing' it. To be sure, there is something
intellectually unsatisfactory about this: given
that quantum theory is the more fundamental
theory, we would prefer to work in the other
direction, that is, to recover classical field
theories from quantum starting points –
Wallace
29. “This is often the way it is in physics – our
mistake is not that we take our theories too
seriously, but that we do not take them
seriously enough. It is always hard to realize
that these numbers and equations we play
with at our desks have something to do with
the real world. Even worse, there often seems
to be a general agreement that certain
phenomena are just not fit subjects for
respectable theoretical and experimental
effort.”
– Steven Weinberg
30. Through the looking glass
I have no doubt that in
reality the future will be
vastly more surprising
than anything I can
imagine. Now my own
suspicion is that the
universe is not only
queerer than we suppose,
but queerer than we can
suppose. – J. B. S. Haldane