Tuesday 22 February 2011

Talking about Time, Mach and Information


Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of receiving Julian Barbour here at Aston for a seminar. Julian is a singular physicist and I really admire him. Specially for the path he chose after getting his Ph.D. in the University of Cologne, Germany. Instead of finding an academic position, he decided to finance himself by translating Russian texts part-time. He said to me that he knew he could not fit into the publish or perish academic environment. Well, his first published paper took him many years, but was published in Nature. In addition to that, he's a very nice and very polite person.

When I invited him to Aston, he promptly and kindly agreed to give us a seminar about his work on Mach's Principle. As probably most of you know, Mach's Principle is the idea, first expressed by Ernst Mach, that all movement should be relative. Newtonian physics is based on the assumption that a non-accelerated movement is relative, but whenever acceleration comes into play, there must be a sense in which we can talk about absolute movement. For instance, circular movement should be absolutely accelerated, no matter the referential. Mach, and many philosophers including Poincare, did not like that. They thought, as indeed I think as well, that all movement, accelerated or not, should be relative. The problem is that it doesn't seem that the universe agrees with this point of view.

Well, actually that's what I thought was the content of Mach's Principle before Julian gave his talk. What Julian taught us was that this is only part of it. It seems that the relational point of view has problems that appear even before acceleration comes into play

Another thing that Julian showed was how using Mach's Principle you are able to deduce very interesting physics like gauge theories. You should notice, however, that his work until now is just about classical physics, but Julian also works with quantum gravity and one of his objectives is to attack the problem from that perspective.

The details of all of this can be found in this paper, freely available from the arXiv:
Julian has a book on his ideas about time as well, which I should have read before he came. That would have made our discussions much more fun. Yes... I am buying it now and I am eager to read it. I'll try to post some comments when I finish. Julian idea is the one of the block universe and he also shares David Deutch's enthusiasm with the multiverse idea.

After the seminar we had, as it is usual, a lunch on the Business School and afterwards we spend the rest of the afternoon discussing about his new interest on information theory. He was writing his essay for the Foundational Questions Institute contest whose theme was "Is reality digital or analogue?". His essay is quite interesting and can be read here:

Basically, he argues against the present fashionable position that information is a concept more fundamental than others, for instance, fields. "It from bit" is the famous aphorism created by Wheeler in his phase when he thought that everything should be originated from information. It's a quite enjoyable paper and we here already are planning to discuss it. I would recommend it's reading, as the mathematics is not very difficult. You can also vote for him in the contest. ;)


Thursday 17 February 2011

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi


This very illuminating paragraph is a comment to the blog post Bloodbath for Science, posted in the Cosmic Variance blog, that talks about the huge cuts in science funding in the USA:
Understand, John: The people proposing these cuts believe that research scientists and staff are not doing any real work *by definition* unless they are employed by the private sector. If your work doesn’t contribute tangibly to some company’s bottom line, and ultimately to the profit of the CEO and shareholders, then your work produces nothing of actual value. In this view, any job that exists as a result of federal funding is, as a matter of principle, disposable and can be cut with no real loss of productivity. If your work is valuable to the private sector, you’ll be hired by some company anyway. If not, it has no value and you shouldn’t be getting paid to do it.
This is probably the most concise and clear explanation about how the mind of politicians not only in the USA, but also in the rest of the world, think. Very depressing. Most depressing yet is that many people will find that absolutely logical.