CambridgeBlog's blog
The New York Times this week has pointed out the growing popularity of “patient centered” practices in the city. These doctors make house calls, give their cell phone number to patients for after-hours consultations, and handle many patient issues without the help of a specialist. Doctors of the “patient centered” movement are redefining the doctor-patient relationship and recreating the personalized attention given by country doctors decades ago.
But how, in our age of overcrowded doctors’ offices and an overburdened healthcare system, are doctors able to give more attention to patients?
200 years ago today, Charles Darwin was born.
Who better to wish him a happy birthday than his own sister? There’s more family news [omitted] in the letter, but I was especially charmed by a middle-section about the only thing a certain young “Parky” remembers about uncle Charles.
From Susan Darwin 12 February 1836
Shrewsbury
February 12th. 1836
Shahn Majid
This will be my last regular post for a while because of Christmas and teaching three courses next term at my University. These past eleven posts, see here and here, have been my personal take on many of the topics covered in On Space and Time and its now time in this twelfth post to address the larger picture of the volume itself.
After last week's imaginative speculation, I'd better tell you something concrete. How about the solution to quantum gravity that has been eluding us for some 90 years? Here it is ... er ... with one minor catch. We'll have to suppose that spacetime is 3 dimensional, i.e. one time and only two space directions rather than three.
This deepest and most long-standing of all problems in fundamental physics still needs a revolutionary new idea or two for which we are still grasping. More revolutionary even than time-reversal. Far more revolutionary and imaginative than string theory. In this post I’ll take a personal shot at an idea — a new kind of duality principle that I think might ultimately relate gravity and information.
After last week's speculations on time I would like to ask an even deeper question: why is there time?
So far in these blogs I have focussed on hard science verifiable by experiment. But it is also part of the background to my multiauthored volume On Space and Time that to proceed further with fundamental science may need revolutionary new ideas for which science is still grasping. So this week we are going to let our hair down and extrapolate from what is understood into what is definitely, well, speculative.
If the real world, at its base, is quantum, then should we not think with quantum logic?
Shahn Majid discusses how the notion of quantum symmetry coming out of modern ideas on space and time could provide clues to the workings of a truly quantum computer.
Is it impossible to pin down both where and when an event takes place, due to quantum gravity effects?
Shahn Majid explains why this may be.
In my recent posts I have emphasized ideas on the cutting edge of fundamental science which have testable predictions or other contact with experiment, rather than being merely fashionable. Now, up until recently it was widely assumed that ideas for the ‘Mount Everest’ challenge of quantum gravity, as Martin Rees puts it in his review of the multi-authored book On Space and Time, could never be tested experimentally.
Some of Fields medalist Alain Connes‘ revolutionary ideas shed light on how to understand the ‘zoo’ of elementary particles thrown up by accelerators like the LHC. If Connes is right, the key to the fundamental nature of matter lies in graffiti carved on a bridge in Dublin in 1843.
Shahn Majid looks at dark energy. Will it herald a revolution in our understanding of fundamental physics?
Three years ago, Martin Gardner’s good friend, MAA Editorial Director Don Albers interviewed him at length about his childhood, the roots of his fascination with math, and about his career. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting the interview in chunks, because his story is absolutely fascinating.
There is more subtlety to the evolution/creationism debate than many of the loudest voices tend to employ.
Continuing his exploration of space and time, Shahn Majid argues that science and religion have entirely opposite methodologies and illustrates his views in the context of fundamental physics.
