The title was suggested by a recent New Yorker poem.
Related material: The remarks of Mysterio in "Spider-Man: Far From Home."
Thursday, October 3, 2019
The Overbye Metaphors
(For Harlan Kane)
"Once Mr. Overbye identifies a story, he said, the work is
in putting it in terms people can understand. 'Metaphors
are very important to the way I write,' he said. The results
are vivid descriptions that surpass mere translation."
— Raillan Brooks in The New York Times on a Times
science writer, October 17, 2017. Also on that date —
"There is such a thing as a 4-set."
— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel.
See as well The Black List (Log24, September 27).
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Friday, September 27, 2019
The Black List
"… Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out
how 'perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with
algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have
been any algebra' …."
— Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962,
page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by
Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25
Metaphor —
Algebra —
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The 16 Dirac matrices form six anticommuting sets of five matrices each (Arfken 1985, p. 214):
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6. SEE ALSO: Pauli Matrices REFERENCES: Arfken, G. Mathematical Methods for Physicists, 3rd ed. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, pp. 211-217, 1985. Berestetskii, V. B.; Lifshitz, E. M.; and Pitaevskii, L. P. "Algebra of Dirac Matrices." §22 in Quantum Electrodynamics, 2nd ed. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press, pp. 80-84, 1982. Bethe, H. A. and Salpeter, E. Quantum Mechanics of One- and Two-Electron Atoms. New York: Plenum, pp. 47-48, 1977. Bjorken, J. D. and Drell, S. D. Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Dirac, P. A. M. Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 4th ed. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1982. Goldstein, H. Classical Mechanics, 2nd ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, p. 580, 1980. Good, R. H. Jr. "Properties of Dirac Matrices." Rev. Mod. Phys. 27, 187-211, 1955. Referenced on Wolfram|Alpha: Dirac Matrices CITE THIS AS: Weisstein, Eric W. "Dirac Matrices."
From MathWorld— A Wolfram Web Resource. |
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Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
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Thursday, September 19, 2019
OOP
"… objects have a notion of 'this' or 'self.' " — Wikipedia
For related notions, see other posts tagged Quark Rock and …
"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Optimus Prime
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Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Toy Problems
The above story's conclusion —
" … the current state of the art in quantum computing is still
not quite ready for solving anything but toy problems and
testing basic algorithms."
From "Annals of Square Space" (Log24, Sept. 3, 2019) —
" 'Before I go somewhere for a story, I have a certain understanding of
what form it will take, and when I get there, it’s always far, far more
complicated,' says the journalist and poet Eliza Griswold, over lunch
in Gramercy Park. 'They begin with a neat little bow' — she pantomimes
tying it, her wide blue eyes growing wider — 'and then: kaboom.' ”
— VOGUE Lives: Eliza Griswold, August 27, 2010, 9:10 AM,
by Megan O'Grady
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The Perpetual Identity Crisis
"There is such a thing as a 4-set." — Saying adapted
from a 1962 young-adult novel.
Midrash — An image posted here on August 6 —
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Unity
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Tuesday, September 17, 2019
For Cambridge 38*
* A reference to a Harvard Crimson article from February 28, 1963.
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The Quarks and the Rock
Excerpt from a long poem by Eliza Griswold
in the current New Yorker —
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Monday, September 16, 2019
Emergence
"Elementary particles are the most fundamental building blocks
of nature, and their study would seem to be an expression of
simplification in its purest form. The essence of complexity
research, by contrast, is the emergence of new kinds of order
that are only manifest when systems are large and messy."
— Sean Carroll in an opinion piece that concludes as follows:
The above plug for Sean Carroll's book
The Big Picture : On the Origins of
Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself suggests…
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