Higgs events in Erice 1990

In an earlier post I mentioned meeting Peter Higgs at Erice in 1990. An alert reader sent me the picture below, which was taken at the School of Subnuclear Physics in Erice that year. (Click for larger image.)

Seated in the first row are (I think) Dokshitzer, Ferrara, Weisskopf, Zichichi, Higgs (blue socks and sandals), a woman I don't recognize, Glashow, ?? , Ringwald. I am in a maroon shirt sort of behind Glashow.

Digging around in my photo album, I came up with the following scans from that week in Sicily.


On the beach in Trapani, with two French girls we met -- apparently their names were Sandine and Geraldine, but I had forgotten.

The Dirac operator acts on my Berkeley office mate. He's now a quant hedge fund manager.

The view from Erice.

Information loss and energy nonconservation

Bill Unruh's KITP seminar on information loss and energy non-conservation stimulates a vigorous discussion of one of the key aspects of the black hole information problem.

The question is whether pure states can evolve into mixed states (decohere) without energy loss. The answer is of course yes, but many (perhaps most) black hole researchers are under the impression that a famous paper by Banks, Peskin and Susskind showed that information loss due to black hole evaporation must lead to observable (even catastrophic) energy non-conservation. (Theorists who accept the BPS argument all believe that the information is somehow encoded in the outgoing Hawking radiation, which may indeed be true, but it doesn't follow from BPS!) Unruh and Wald refuted this claim (to my satisfaction) years ago, but the subject is still controversial. The video at the link is entertaining even if you're not an expert on this topic. Bill's counterexamples are quite elementary.

Unfortunately, I missed this talk as I was giving a colloquium at UC Irvine the same day. At lunch the day before I urged Bill to "lay down the law" ;-)

Some related posts:

Spacetime topology change and black hole information

Black holes and decoherence

Crete talk: black hole information and decoherence

L'oeuvre des enfants

The iphone is our main method of preserving the flood of creative works generated by the kids :-)

The boy is starting to learn algebra at age 6. I wish I had had someone around to teach it to me. My dad the professor spent very little time on that sort of thing. I grew up like the Draper kids in Mad Men.

UC Irvine colloquum

I should have put this up earlier in case anyone in the LA area wanted to attend. But I was too busy at KITP and forgot. UCI Physics Colloquium (slides).

Genetics of Intelligence and Other Quantitative Traits

Date: Thu, 04/26/2012 Time: 3:30 pm Location: RH 101

How do genes affect cognitive ability or other quantitative traits such as height? I begin with a brief review of psychometric measurements of intelligence, introducing the idea of a "general factor" or IQ score. The main results concern the stability, validity (predictive power), and heritability of adult IQ. Next, I discuss ongoing Genome Wide Association Studies which investigate the genetic basis of intelligence. Due mainly to the rapidly decreasing cost of sequencing, it is likely that within the next 5-10 years we will identify genes which account for a significant fraction of total IQ variation.

Afghanistan is lost

Listen to this interview.

[In contrast to the Russians ...] "We thought because we had good intentions, and if we treated people nicely, we could succeed. After 10-11 years and so many civilian casualties, most accidental -- there's only so many times you can say 'sorry we killed your family, but we're here to help you'. We've passed that point a long time ago ..."

Journalist and documentary-maker Ben Anderson discusses the war in Afghanistan, and his experience reporting on front lines in Helmand province. His book No Worse Enemy: The Inside Story of the Chaotic Struggle for Afghanistan is based on five years of unrivalled access to the US Marines and UK Forces, often for months at a time and amidst the worst violence the conflict has seen. It details the daily struggles facing U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and raises urgent questions about our strategies in there.

"Compounding returns of intelligence"

This is from Stanford's CS183 course on startups. The lecturers include Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Stephen Cohen of Palantir.

Stephen Cohen: We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall. So, run your prospective engineering hires through that narrative. Then show them the alternative: working at your startup.

This is a good argument, although for some personality types the security and comfort level at Google might lead to more learning than at a stressful startup. Maximizing intellectual growth is one of the main reasons I chose theoretical physics over finance or (exclusively working on) startups.

How the Higgs boson became the Higgs boson

IIRC, I met Peter Higgs in Erice in 1990. He was quite a nice fellow, but the story below by Steve Weinberg illustrates how capricious is the allocation of credit in science.

NYBooks: (Footnote 1) In his recent book, The Infinity Puzzle (Basic Books, 2011), Frank Close points out that a mistake of mine was in part responsible for the term “Higgs boson.” In my 1967 paper on the unification of weak and electromagnetic forces, I cited 1964 work by Peter Higgs and two other sets of theorists. This was because they had all explored the mathematics of symmetry-breaking in general theories with force-carrying particles, though they did not apply it to weak and electromagnetic forces. As known since 1961, a typical consequence of theories of symmetry-breaking is the appearance of new particles, as a sort of debris. A specific particle of this general class was predicted in my 1967 paper; this is the Higgs boson now being sought at the LHC. [ Higgs boson != Goldstone boson ? I suppose "general class" means any new particle associated with symmetry breaking ... ]

As to my responsibility for the name “Higgs boson,” because of a mistake in reading the dates on these three earlier papers, I thought that the earliest was the one by Higgs, so in my 1967 paper I cited Higgs first, and have done so since then. Other physicists apparently have followed my lead. But as Close points out, the earliest paper of the three I cited was actually the one by Robert Brout and François Englert. In extenuation of my mistake, I should note that Higgs and Brout and Englert did their work independently and at about the same time, as also did the third group (Gerald Guralnik, C.R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble). But the name “Higgs boson” seems to have stuck.

California dreamin'

Joel Kotkin, writing in the WSJ, says California is headed in the same direction as Greece.

WSJ: ... Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation's premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas' iconic "California Dreamin'" and the Beach Boys' "California Girls." But it also attracted young, ambitious people "who had a lot of dreams, wanted to build big companies." Think Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

Now, however, the Golden State's fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn't Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.

Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.

The scruffy-looking urban studies professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has been studying and writing on demographic and geographic trends for 30 years. Part of California's dysfunction, he says, stems from state and local government restrictions on development. These policies have artificially limited housing supply and put a premium on real estate in coastal regions.

"Basically, if you don't own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven't robbed a bank and don't have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak," says Mr. Kotkin.

I dunno ... still looks pretty good here to me :-)

Science and Engineering PhDs per hundred graduates

Interesting NSF data showing which undergraduate institutions' students are most likely to go on to earn science and engineering PhDs. (Click for larger graphic.)



Which institution produces the largest number US PhDs in absolute terms? See here.

Science 11 July 2008: A new study has found that the most likely undergraduate alma mater for those who earned a Ph.D. in 2006 from a U.S. university was … Tsinghua University. Peking University, its neighbor in the Chinese capital, ranks second. Between 2004 and 2006, those two schools overtook the University of California, Berkeley, as the most fertile training ground for U.S. Ph.D.s (see graph). South Korea's Seoul National University occupies fourth place behind Berkeley, followed by Cornell University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

The normalized figure for Berkeley is about 6% -- six times lower than Caltech.

Brain volume genes

I received many emails about this Nature paper: Common variants at 12q14 and 12q24 are associated with hippocampal volume, which purports to find an IQ gene. I had seen the paper before it went public.

The gene they found satisfies the genome wide significance threshold for correlation to brain volume, but not for IQ. If you adopt a Bayesian point of view that the gene is already interesting because of the volume association, and *then* test it for IQ association, you get a significant result (p < 0.05, or whatever). But it still needs to be replicated on larger samples.

The whole topic of the statistics of GWAS needs in-depth discussion but I don't have time right now. The genome wide significance threshold of around 1E-8 which has been adopted by the community and by journals is not entirely justifiable, but at least it has a good track record: results of this significance tend to replicate. On the other hand, from a Bayesian perspective we are throwing away a lot of information to ensure that the list of "hits" is nearly 100% bona fide. A hedge fund manager might be happy with a larger list of hits with, say, a 20% error rate. Homework problem: what is the right balance to produce the best black box phenotype predictor?

Monsters in AdS

Slides I used for the workshop discussion yesterday: What Part of the Asymptotically AdS Gravitational Phase Space is Dual to a CFT?

In classical general relativity one can construct configurations with fixed ADM mass but arbitrarily large entropy. These objects collapse into black holes but have more entropy than the area of the resulting black hole. Their interpretation in quantum gravity and in the AdS/CFT duality is an open question.

This topic is also nicely discussed by Don Marolf here and here.

It was great to have Bill Unruh in the audience, whom I had never met in person before.

Sony is toast

See my post Sell Sony, buy Samsung from 2005 for comparison. Where is Ken Kutagari these days? Younger people today probably can't remember a time when Sony was a technology leader.

In 2005 it was clear to me that Sony was in trouble and Samsung on the rise. I also knew OS X and the iPod were going to be very successful, but I had been conditioned by MSFT's success to think that mediocrity would continue to rule in PCs and other computer products. So I certainly didn't think Apple's market cap would reach its current value.

NYTimes: Sony ... is now in the fight of its life.

In fact, it is in a fight for its life — a development that exemplifies the stunning decline of Japan’s industrialized economy. Once upon a time, Japan Inc., not to mention Sony itself, seemed invulnerable. Today, Sony and many other Japanese manufacturers are pressed on all sides: by rising Asian rivals, a punishingly strong Japanese yen and, in Sony’s case, an astonishing lack of ideas.

... Sony’s market value is now one-ninth that of Samsung Electronics, and just one-thirtieth of Apple’s.

Even in Japan, where many consumers remain loyal to the brand, some people seem to be giving up on the company.

“It’s almost game over at Sony,” said Yoshiaki Sakito, a former Sony executive who has worked for Walt Disney, Bain & Company, Apple and a start-up focused on innovation training. “I don’t see how Sony’s going to bounce back now.”

... Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers “have lost their technology leadership in many areas,” Steve Durose, head of Asia Pacific telecommunications, media and technology ratings at Fitch Ratings, said in a recent industry commentary.

“Ten years ago, these companies were major technology innovators, the creators or leading developers of many electronic products and trendsetting devices such as televisions, digital cameras, portable music players and games consoles,” Mr. Durose said. “Today, however, the number of products remaining where they can boast undisputed global leadership has narrowed significantly, having being usurped or equaled by the likes of Apple and Samsung Electronics.”

... Sony’s woes hurt not just Sony, but also Japan. In the United States, new technologies are often developed by young companies not held back by their past. These upstarts eventually replace slow-to-adapt giants. But in Japan, no major electronics manufacturer has joined the industry’s top ranks for over a half-century. [Unbelievable! But isn't this also true for other sectors in most European countries?] And, though struggling, companies like Sony continue to lure some of the country’s top talent.

... Some analysts wonder if Mr. Hirai — who previously ran the money-losing games and TV businesses — is the right man to lead Sony. A protégé of Mr. Stringer, he appears to have been appointed as much for his ease in English as his management skills, analysts say.

“The bottom line is: if you want to be perceived as a creator of cool tech, you have to create cool tech. The challenge for Sony is that those examples have not been there, and they haven’t been there now for a number of years,” said Steve Beck, founder and managing partner at cg42, a management consulting firm that focuses on brand vulnerabilities at top tech companies. “The tarnish on their brand has definitely begun.”

Rethinking Finance

Mark Thoma points me to an interesting conference: Rethinking Finance.

Burton Malkiel's paper defines EMH to mean (roughly) "it's hard to beat the market, but of course prices could be way off at any particular time" (yes, Virginia, there are bubbles). This is what I refer to as a weak version of EMH.

Arnold Kling highlights the following talks (click through for links):

Foote, Girardi, and Willen ask whether, given expectations for ever-rising house prices, the institutional and regulatory details make any difference. If people expect house prices to rise faster than the rate of interest, then that creates in their minds a profit opportunity. One way or the other, the market will develop the financial instruments that allow people to exploit that apparent opportunity. I do not think I can endorse this view, but it is interesting.

Thomas Philippon asks how the financial sector came to be as large and profitable as it did. He argues that it is not because finance became more efficient or added more value to the economy. [ "In the absence of evidence that increased trading led to either better prices or better risk sharing, we would have to conclude that the finance industry's share of GDP is about 2 percentage points higher than it needs to be and this would represent an annual misallocation of resources of about $280 billions for the U.S. alone." ]

Brad DeLong asks why economists could not predict and explain the economic downturn. He argues that financial panics, in which the market's assessment of the safety of financial assets changes sharply and suddenly, are rare events that are outside the realm of typical theoretical models and statistical analysis. I am left with further questions. Which is abnormal, the faith that people had in financial assets before the crisis, or the lack of faith that people had after the crisis? And does government intervention to try to supply safe assets constitute the solution or the problem?

The Instagram story

I was shocked at the $1B Instagram acquisition, but then again I'm not exactly up to speed on the latest in iPhone apps or social networking. This Times article gives some background. Although the article stresses founder Kevin Systrom's Stanford connections, it seems like the go to guy was really a Caltecher ;-)

NYTimes: Past midnight, in a dimly lighted warehouse jutting into the San Francisco Bay, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger introduced something they had been working on for weeks: a photo-sharing iPhone application called Instagram. What happened next was crazier than they could have imagined.

In a matter of hours, thousands downloaded it. The computer systems handling the photos kept crashing. Neither of them knew what to do.

“Who’s, like, the smartest person I know who I can call up?” Mr. Systrom remembered thinking. He scrolled through his phone and found his man: Adam D’Angelo, a former chief technology officer at Facebook. They had met at a party seven years earlier, over beers in red plastic cups, at the Sigma Nu fraternity at Stanford University. That night in October 2010, Mr. D’Angelo became Instagram’s lifeline.

... For Mr. Systrom, the connections forged at Stanford were crucial.

Mr. D’Angelo, a 2006 graduate of the California Institute of Technology, helped him find engineers, set up databases and flesh out features. Soon after Instagram came out of the box, he put his money into it.

Bits, Branes, Black Holes

Greetings from Santa Barbara! I'm here at KITP for three weeks of Bits, Branes, Black Holes.

Theoretical physics action video and slides. (Opening session of the workshop: an overview of the black hole information problem. Highly recommended if you have the right background.)

Higgs bosons, information and black holes

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been a bit busy with this Higgs data meeting. It's fun to have people from both CMS and ATLAS (the two detector collaborations at LHC) together in an informal setting :-)

Next week (and for two more weeks after that) I will be at KITP Santa Barbara at the Bits, Branes, Black Holes workshop.

From the Sky Down: the moment of creation

 

From the Sky Down documents the creation of the U2 album Achtung Baby at Hansa Studios in Berlin. The moment of inspiration for the song One, while working on Mysterious Ways. 

Achtung Baby is one of my favorite albums. I bought it at Tower Records in Harvard Square, and must have listened to it a million times in my Dunster House apartment overlooking the Charles. Songs from the album bring me back to the cold grey Cambridge and Boston of winter 1991. Nothing like the warm Berkeley sunshine I had left behind.

Crossfit Lullaby

Crossfit competitor Blair Morrison does a brutal but very basic workout. AMRAP = As Many Reps As Possible.

Morrison was a wide receiver for Princeton and it's interesting to hear him in other videos talk about mental toughness and overcoming challenges.

How good is Morrison? In earlier years he qualified for and placed highly overall in the Crossfit Games, but as the talent pool deepens that's getting much harder. At the end of the open competition (anyone can compete by submitting video of their performance on the 5 workouts), he's ranked 12th in the NorCal region and 125th overall in the world.

Go figure

The journal made me replace my crude but hopefully charming hand drawn figures with computer-generated ones. Which are better?

(Paper previously discussed here ; http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.0549.)

Unfortunately I have no artistic talent, and even less when using a drawing program. My daughter must have gotten her abilities from mom :-)

FIG1: However, if the combined system S' = S + M evolves unitarily (in particular, linearly) as in (1), we obtain a superposition of measurement device states (see figure 1) ... At first, this seems counter to actual experience: properly executed measurements produce a single outcome, not a superposition state. But how do we know for sure? In fact, an observer described by the state M+ might be unaware of the second branch of the wave function in state M- for dynamical reasons related to a phenomenon called decoherence...

FIG2: We emphasize again that universal Schrodinger evolution only admits subjective, but not objective, randomness and probability. Just before the measurement depicted in figure 2, all of the observers are in identical states. ... The first line of the equation has been written to emphasize that in the m basis it appears as if there are 2^N identical observers, each of whom is destined to evolve into a particular one of the O_m. Of course, the observer does not know which of the O_m they will evolve into, because they do not (yet) know the spin state |m> on their branch. But this is a subjective uncertainty because, indeed, the outcome is already pre-determined. This perspective may appear more natural if one considers the time reversal of the final state ...

Time machines, robots and silicon gods

The NY Times has a great profile of Gil Elbaz, founder of the startup which eventually became Google AdSense.

Elbaz's early aspirations sound like those of other Caltechers, except perhaps the part about being rich :-)

NYTimes: AT 7 years old, Gilad Elbaz wrote, “I want to be a rich mathematician and very smart.” That, he figured, would help him “discover things like time machines, robots and machines that can answer any question.”

He is old enough to have experienced the horribly dull pre-internet technology world. Young people these days can't imagine how much more limited opportunities were then for people with math/sci/engineering ability. From the article, Elbaz definitely had an entrepreneurial bent already as a kid.

... At Caltech, Mr. Elbaz majored in applied science and economics. Interested in the subject of monopolies, he won an award for a paper that determined that companies would take financial losses to corner their markets.

He worked for I.B.M. for two years, looking at the use of computers in problems of manufacturing, then went to Sybase, a database company. This was in the early 1990s, when I.B.M. was stumbling in the transition from mainframe computers to servers and PCs.

His younger brother says he thinks that the experience changed him. Many employees were “just trying to hold on to their jobs, not working together for the company,” Eytan says. He recalls how Gil, concerned about how employees were hoarding their data, “started talking about how much better it would be if people shared data.”

Mr. Elbaz then joined a semiconductor start-up called Microunity and became a consultant, saving money and playing the stock market to help finance his own first business. His father gave him $10,000 to invest for him, which Mr. Elbaz tripled in 18 months. When Mr. Elbaz and a Caltech friend decided to form a company in 1998 — it became Applied Semantics — his father told him to put the stock winnings into it.

Applied Semantics software quickly scanned thousands of Web pages for their meaning. By parsing content, it could tell businesses what kind of ads would work well on a particular page. It had 45 employees and was profitable when Google acquired it in 2003 for $102 million in cash and pre-I.P.O. stock.

While Mr. Elbaz would not say how much he made from the deal, his father’s $30,000 from the stock investments was eventually worth $18 million. “He certainly changed my retirement,” Nissim Elbaz says.

When I met Elbaz a few years ago, I have to admit I thought the business model for his current startup Factual was kind of shaky. Although I'm a proponent of Big Data, doing stuff that is technically cool is not the same as creating economic value. My understanding from someone at WolframAlpha is that cleaning and "curating" data is a lot of work!

... His mental and financial assets, he says, are like gifts he needs to deploy so the world works better.

“If all data was clear, a lot fewer people would subtract value from the world,” he says. “A lot more people would add value.”

Creating clear, reliable data could also make Factual a very big company.

“Gil is pretty far ahead of the rest of us, the one entrepreneur where it takes a few meetings before I really understand everything he is talking about,” says Ben Horowitz, a venture capitalist who backed Factual through his firm, Andreessen Horowitz. “Three years ago, he thought Factual was his biggest chance to change the world. Over time, the world has moved his way.”

... Factual’s plan, outlined in a big orange room with a few tables and walled with whiteboards, is to build the world’s chief reference point for thousands of interconnected supercomputing clouds. The digital world is expected to hold a collective 2.7 zettabytes of data by year-end, an amount roughly equivalent to 700 billion DVDs. Factual, which now has 50 employees, could prove immensely valuable as this world grows and these databases begin to interact.

Evolution and self-transcendence

Jonathan Haidt argues that self-transcendence is an evolutionary consequence of group selection, and not merely a side-effect of our brain wiring.


Podcast interview. Thanks to Arnold Kling for recommending Haidt's book The Righteous Mind.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife.

... intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post-hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

... human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.

But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups. As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin’s ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play, and the implications are profound. We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.

Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion. I’ll show that our “higher nature” allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our groups. I’ll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or parasite, as some scientists (the “new atheists”) have argued in recent years. And I’ll use this perspective to explain why some people are conservative, others are liberal (or progressive), and still others become libertarians. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.

An essay by Haidt from 2010 that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Chronicle: ... When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, the prevailing view was that evolution was so slow that there could be no meaningful genetic differences among human groups. The genetic "blueprint" was assumed to have been finalized during the Pleistocene era, the two million years during which our ancestors lived as relatively egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Modern humans all draw cards from the same deck, the same population of genes, except for some trivial variations related to adaptations for cold weather (such as lighter skin and smaller noses).

But now that we can examine partial genetic maps from thousands of people around the world, the old view is crumbling. Genetic evolution is not slow, and it certainly did not stop around 50,000 years ago, when people began leaving Africa and filling every continent save Antarctica. In fact, it now appears that the human diaspora greatly increased the pace of genetic change. When people exposed themselves to new climates, pathogens, diets, technologies, and social structures, they exposed their genes to new selection pressures. You don't need 50 millennia to get big changes. Some Russian fox breeders created what was essentially a new species of tame, doglike foxes in just 30 generations.

Over the next 10 years, therefore, we'll be hearing less about the Pleistocene and more about the Holocene—the 12,000 years since the beginning of agriculture. We've accepted findings that some ethnic groups adapted during the Holocene to digest milk as adults or to breathe more easily at high altitudes. But what will happen when findings come in about personality traits? Nearly all traits are heritable, and some traits surely paid off more handsomely in commercial cultures than in agricultural ones, or on peaceful islands than on raid-prone steppes. Such findings will be among the greatest threats to political correctness ever to emerge from the natural sciences.

Misner, Everett, Feynman

In his PhD dissertation, Charles Misner, following a suggestion from his advisor John Wheeler, formulates quantum gravity in terms of the path integral. This article has a very clear explanation for why the Hamiltonian operator in GR is zero.

Rev. Mod. Phys. 29, 497–509 (1957): Feynman Quantization of General Relativity

Of course, in this kind of formulation the "wavefunction of the universe" plays a central role, and the universe is necessarily a closed system. There is no appealing to outside "observers" for help!

Misner was a contemporary of Everett, and played a role in the development of many worlds quantum mechanics. See here for Dieter Zeh's discussion of the 1957 Chapel Hill meeting where Everett's interpretation and quantum gravity were both discussed.

Feynman presents a thought experiment in which a macroscopic mass (source for the gravitational field) is placed in a superposition state. One of the central points is necessarily whether the wavefunction describing the macroscopic system must collapse, and if so exactly when. The discussion sheds some light on Feynman's (early) thoughts on many worlds and his exposure to Everett's ideas, which apparently occurred even before their publication (see below).

Intuition and the two brains

Albert Einstein:

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Wigner on Einstein and von Neumann:

... But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.

From Schwinger's Feynman eulogy:

"An honest man, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum."

Feynman:

"We know a lot more than we can prove."

Click the button below for great interview with Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. (Podcast available via iTunes: Leonard Lopate Show; see also this transcript of another interview.)

Wikipedia: ..."if the brain is all about making connections, why is it that it's evolved with this whopping divide down the middle?"

... chicks which use the eye connected to the left hemisphere to attend to the fine detail of picking seeds from amongst grit, whilst the other eye attends to the broader threat from predators. According to the author, "The left hemisphere has its own agenda, to manipulate and use the world"; its world view is essentially that of a mechanism. The right has a broader outlook, "has no preconceptions, and simply looks out to the world for whatever might be. In other words it does not have any allegiance to any particular set of values."

... "The right hemisphere sees a great deal, but in order to refine it, and to make sense of it in certain ways---in order to be able to use what it understands of the world and to be able to manipulate the world---it needs to delegate the job of simplifying it and turning it into a usable form to another part of the brain" [the left hemisphere]. Though he sees this as an essential "double act", McGilchrist points to the problem that the left hemisphere has a "narrow, decontextualised and theoretically based model of the world which is self consistent and is therefore quite powerful" and to the problem of the left hemisphere's lack of awareness of its own shortcomings; whilst in contrast, the right hemisphere is aware that it is in a symbiotic relationship.[8] The neuroscientists Deglin and Kinsbourne, for example, conducted experiments which involved temporarily deactivating one of the brain's hemispheres. In their research they found that "when completely false propositions are put to the left hemisphere it accepts them as valid because the internal structure of the argument is valid." However, the right hemisphere knows from experience that the propositions are false.

I've followed this area a bit since learning about Roger Sperry's breakthrough experiments, done at Caltech:

Roger Sperry: ... In his Nobel-winning work, Sperry and Gazzaniga tested four out of ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen, a neurosurgeon in Rochester, NY.[6] The surgery, designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures, involves severing the corpus callosum, the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres. Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness. In his words, each hemisphere is "indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and . . . both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel."

A problem we face in psychometrics is that it is much easier to measure left-brain ability than right-brain ability ...

Whit Stillman returns with Damsels in Distress

A big profile in the NYTimes magazine. Very few things are harder than a career as an auteur in independent film.

An earlier post (2009) on this blog, with an interview.

Whit Stillman wrote and directed the trilogy Metropolitan, Barcelona and Last Days of Disco, three of my favorite movies. It's been 10 years since his last film and I've often wondered what became of him.

This Stillman fan echoes Charles Murray on WASP morality:

Whit Stillman primer: ... For the few that might identify with the characters in any of these films, it might be easy to view the Stillman catalogue with nostalgia. But to accept that these are just love letters to some young white kids with lots of money and east coast pedigrees is to miss the larger point. Our soap operas tend to treat the wealthy as deviants, yet the morality we see here is usually reserved for middle class social climbers with prudish attitudes towards sex and a protestant work ethic. It’s a fascinating counter-narrative to the hi-jinks of the Gossip Girl kids and does make you wonder whether or not the obsession with purity and virtue is part of the joke for Stillman. The three movies have also become portraits of a different time and are illustrative of the consistent anxiety and paranoia present for those at the top. Ultimately, we don’t have to feel sad for our protagonists (what would the 99% think after all?), but we can enjoy the dialogue and wonder whether or not types like these really existed. And they’re still funny too.

Revenge of the muppets?

No. This guy will probably regret writing a bitter resignation op-ed.

NYTimes: ... It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

Already, the vampire squid is on the counterattack:

WSJ: ... Mr. Smith described himself as an executive director and head of Goldman’s U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

A person familiar with the matter said Mr. Smith’s role is actually vice president, a relatively junior position held by thousands of Goldman employees around the world. And Mr. Smith is the only employee in the derivatives business that he heads, this person said.

More fun at the Times Dealbook blog:

Former Goldman trader, quit last year

This guy might as well have had a microphone in the room with me during my exit interview…took the words right out of my mouth. To add to one thing he said, I had never heard the term “rip someone’s face off” until I started working at Goldman Sachs. Unfortunately, that phrase was all too often used in the context of client transactions.

Matt Levine, former Goldman employee, now an editor at Dealbreaker:

Maybe if he’d gotten the Rhodes, or won a gold medal for regular tennis at the goyish Olympics, he’d have made MD and would still have a job.