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filiplig · 3 years

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J. Brody - Quantum Entanglement

p. 0

Indeed, the laboratory is the place where abstract concepts crystallize into palpable significance between your hands. The laboratory is where nature answers the questions posed by theorists. It’s impractical, however, for every interested person to do every interesting experiment.

p. i

Quantum physics describes the behavior (and misbehavior) of tiny things: atoms, photons, and electrons, to name a few. What electrons lack in size, they make up for in importance. Electrons are the glue in chemical bonds, so quantum physics is used to understand the chemical bonds that hold together metals, plastics, skin, and every other material. Electrons are the lifeblood of computer chips, for instance, so engineers use quantum physics to design faster, smaller devices. Wherever quantum physics is applied, it’s unerringly accurate. The most amazing feature of quantum physics isn’t its accuracy or its usefulness, but its brazen defiance of our common sense. Quantum physics challenges our basic understanding of reality itself. And yet, quantum physics started off in a very mundane way, seeking explanations for dry, quantitative data.

p. xvii

Some scientists argue that quantum physics predicts outcomes of measurements and nothing more; we shouldn’t even ask the question “What does it all mean?” At least, we shouldn’t claim to know what particles are doing when we’re not measuring them. This is a form of Bohr’s “Copenhagen interpretation,” though the Copenhagen interpretation itself has been interpreted different ways by different people. People like Einstein were fed up with vagueness, uncertainty, and contradictions. If 1984 had already been written when these physicists were grappling with these qualities of quantum mechanics, Einstein would have accused his opponents of doublethink: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Surely nature itself is not guilty of doublethink. Surely quantum physics can be massaged and refined, retaining its accuracy while eliminating the fuzziness and absurdity. Einstein, uncharacteristically, was wrong.

p. 1

The purpose of this book is to empower you to deeply understand how our common- sense assumptions impose constraints— from which entangled particles burst free. In other words, this book explains what quantum physics is not. Our task is to paint the negative space of quantum physics, a space composed of seemingly plausible theories that cannot account for measured results. I’m using “negative space” the way an artist would, to indicate the space around a subject. Let’s imagine a space full of concepts. If we draw a border around quantum physics, our everyday assumptions occupy the excluded space, the negative space. Surprisingly, irritatingly, or magically— depending on your disposition— our everyday assumptions are contradicted by experiments with entangled particles.Mathematics is a vehicle through which our assump- tions become experimentally testable. We need only logic and arithmetic to understand how our everyday assumptions are contradicted by measurements of entangled particles. This is a relief, and perhaps surprising, since harder math is required to understand rocketry, semiconductor devices, heat conduction, and many other topics. Unlike these technological topics, quantum entanglement addresses the fundamental nature of reality. Perhaps nature’s apology for behaving so strangely at the deepest level is to make its negative space mathematically accessible to all of us.

p. 4

It’s surprising that a philosophical assumption has mathematical consequences, which can be tested experimentally. But local realism isn’t the only philosophical assumption with mathematical consequences. We might characterize geocentrism as a philosophical assumption: “Everything must orbit our planet due to our own preeminence in the universe.” It’s not obvious that this assumption should have mathematical consequences. And yet, ancient and medieval astronomers labored mightily with the mathematical consequences. They had to explain why the other planets occasionally go into retrograde, backing up as if looking for something they dropped. The geocentric astronomers came up with hugely complex and surprisingly accurate mathematical models. Ultimately, however, the preponderance of evidence, and the preference for a simple unifying theory, forced astronomers to abandon the geocentric assumption. Similarly, as we’ll see, experimental evidence forces us to abandon the everyday assumption of local realism.

p. 21

What difference does it make whether the electrons were in the measured state all along, and what’s the big deal if they’re in an undecided state until the last minute? Indeed, I’ve been in an undecided state about what to order in a restaurant, and it’s only the “measurement” taken by the server that forces me to make up my mind. This is the big deal: If the electrons make up their minds at the last minute, they must make opposite decisions. If one chooses northward deflection, the other must choose southward. How can they coordinate this, in defiance of locality, when they’re in different places? If the electrons make up their minds at the last minute and they always make opposite decisions, they’re like twins with a telepathic link, if you’ll forgive the analogy. This is “spooky action at a distance”— and Einstein argued strenuously against its existence. To preserve locality (and avoid spooky action at a distance), we’d better hope for realism, which asserts that the electrons all along have the properties we end up measuring.

p. 24

For decades, physicists assumed that a local hidden variables theory could, in principle, complement quantum physics, filling in missing information and replacing probabilities with certainties. But the issue seemed academic or philosophical, and not subject to experiment: a local hidden variables theory determines the state of an electron before you measure it. Is it possible to measure the state an electron is in, before it’s measured? Seemingly it is not. In 1964, John Bell made a stunning theoretical discovery, called Bell’s theorem. 3 His original paper languished in obscurity for years, but enthusiasm for his discovery swelled over the course of decades. Bell showed that any local hidden variables theory imposes a constraint on measurable quantities. The constraint on measurable quantities is now called a Bell inequality. If the constraint is violated by measurement, then a local hidden variables theory cannot be valid. Moreover, because quantum physics predicts violations of the Bell inequality, quantum physics is fundamentally incompatible with any local hidden variables theory. So Einstein’s hope was in vain: a local hidden variables theory cannot complement quantum mechanics; it can only contradict it. And since measurable quantities determine whether a Bell inequality is violated or not, an experiment can be performed to determine whether the real world is consistent with quantum mechanics, or with a local hidden variables theory; we can’t have both.

p. 51

Our mistake is the assumption that A, A′, B, and B′ all exist at the same time. Alice can only measure either A or A′; Bob can only measure either B or B′. The quantities that aren’t measured don’t have specific values that we can plug into S=AB+A′B– AB′+A′B′. So S doesn’t exist for a single photon pair. Our belief that S should exist for a single photon pair is really our belief that photon properties exist before we measure them. Experiment contradicts this belief: the measured value of average S exceeds the limits

p. 72

We now have explicit expressions for all three terms in our Bell inequality: N(30°,0°) ≤ N(0°,60°) + N(30°, −30°), which becomes 3/8 Ntotal ≤ 1/8 Ntotal + 1/8 Ntotal This simplifies to 3/8 ≤ 2/8, which is clearly untrue.

p. 122

If I claim that the size of my right foot changes when I measure my left foot, we would expect to observe this directly: when I hold a ruler up to my left foot, we should be able to watch my right foot shrink or expand, or perhaps transform from fuzziness to solidity. Similarly, we want to observe Photon B, both before and after Photon A is measured, to see if anything changes. But then, the first observation of Photon B would be a measurement, which may affect the state of Photon A! My claim is that both photons are transformed by the first observation of either photon. Thus this transformation can never be observed; we can’t perform any observation prior to the first observation. So we can never watch one particle change in response to the measurement of its twin. The innermost workings of nature remain forever out of reach. The quest for complete understanding is always an unscratchable itch. The only fact that’s (almost) certain is that local realism cannot account for measured results. Local realism is defeated by violations of Bell inequalities, which is why local realism is the negative space of quantum physics: local realism is the excluded explanation. If we reject local realism, what’s left? Are the only remaining views of reality mystical? Does quantum mechanics, after all, say something mystical about the universe? We can no longer argue that physics is merely a set of formulas for predicting experimental outcomes, disjoint from philosophical considerations: Bell inequalities show that experiment has overruled a plausible philosophical assumption. There are many alternative assumptions, but none are especially plausible, and all have their partisans.

p. 126

The distinction between realism and counterfactual definiteness becomes clearer if we consider the viewpoint of superdeterminism . According to superdeterminism, there’s no free will. The entire universe is a Rube Goldberg device evolving inexorably along its predetermined course. Every future occurrence, down to the minutest detail, was predetermined at the moment of the Big Bang. Free will is an illusion, and if we believe in this illusion, it’s only because we were predestined to do so.

p. 127

Another viewpoint that undermines counterfactual definiteness is the many- worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this view, all possible outcomes of a measurement are real— in parallel universes! When the measurement is performed, the world splits— the photons are vertically polarized in one world, and horizontally polarized in the other. (I believe adherents of this interpretation prefer different terminology: The only reality is the sum of all possible outcomes. So reality itself isn’t splitting; there are just new branches within the single reality, and we’re conscious of only one of the branches.)

p. 135

In another experiment to close the freedom- of- choice loophole, about 100,000 people from around the world generated random numbers. 10 The random numbers were used to set the polarizer angles (or equivalent analyzer settings) in tests of Bell inequalities. Participants generated random numbers by playing a video game online. The Bell inequalities were violated, as usual. We conclude that local realism was defeated: the entangled particles did not have definite properties prior to measurement, or if they did, the measurement of one particle affected the other. Alternatively, a superdeterministic power governed the seemingly random choices of 100,000 people so that their choices corresponded with properties that the entangled particles had prior to measurement. In either case, common sense cannot account for the results.

p. 136

In fact, a favored view among physicists is that reality is a higher-dimensional space. Our ordinary ideas of space and time are inadequate to understand entanglement. To recognize our cognitive limitations, we can imagine a world with fewer dimensions than ours: imagine a society constrained to exist in a flat, geometric plane. The two- dimensional people in this world have no concept of three- dimensional space because they have never experienced it. Now imagine that a three- dimensional titan starts poking the tips of a fork through the two- dimensional world. The fork is poked at random moments through random locations. The two- dimensional people (quivering in terror) perceive the tines of the fork as four isolated, round blobs. They see no possible physical connections among the four blobs; they can completely encircle each blob with a string to prove that it’s isolated from the others. The four blobs always appear at almost the same time, however, and they disappear at almost the same time. Although the two- dimensional scientists can’t predict where or when the blobs will appear, the distance between adjacent blobs is always the same. (Perhaps the blobs expand slightly after they appear, and they shrink before they vanish, but the distance between the centers of the blobs is always the same.) The two- dimensional scientists wonder if the appearance of one blob causes the three other blobs to appear, some distance away. Is this spooky action at a distance? The two- dimensional scientists are scratching their two-dimensional heads. Eventually, an idea forms in their two-dimensional brains. Perhaps the isolation of the blobs is an illusion; perhaps, in an unimaginable higher- dimensional space, the four blobs are part of a unified whole. The properties of one blob don’t influence the properties of any other blob. Instead, the relationships among the blobs exist all along in a higher- dimensional space, which only occasionally intersects the familiar, two- dimensional reality. This is how some physicists explain entanglement: We live in a cross- section of a higher- dimensional reality. Much like the two- dimensional scientists, we cannot intuitively understand causality in the higher dimension. Nicolas Gisin writes, “In a certain sense then, reality is something that happens in another space than our own, and what we perceive of it are just shadows, rather as in Plato’s cave analogy used centuries ago to explain the difficulty in knowing the ‘true reality.’” This is an extraordinary statement. Scientists are stereotyped to equate reality with empirical data, but evidently some scientists equate reality with an invisible higher realm.

p. 144

“Direct observation is the only scientific reality” takes a less extreme, though still brazen, form, in a recent interpretation of quantum mechanics called QBism (pronounced “cubism” to deliberately create a sense of radical departure from established norms). QBism is the abbreviation of “quantum Bayesianism.” In Bayesian statistics, probabilities are updated as new information comes in.

p. 146

QBists refuse (humbly? peevishly?) to assign a cause to the observed correlations between entangled photons. The correlations are a fact of nature, and quantum mechanics gives us the math to accurately predict them. Any speculation as to how the correlations come about is outside the scope of physical science. (This approach is sometimes called “shut up and calculate.”) Since QBist physicists don’t speculate about underlying causality, the speculation and discussion must therefore come from ... philosophers ... or from theologians, poets, or science- fiction writers? I don’t permanently encamp with the QBists. But on occasion, QBism feels like an invigorating breeze that clears away a cloying miasma of confusion. QBism fends off the questions of what a particle’s like before measurement, what constitutes a measurement, and what is the underlying deep reality. QBism ejects these questions from the realm of science because they all inquire about something that can never be scientifically determined: the state of an object before it’s observed. It’s not wrong to speculate about what a particle’s like before it’s measured, or to wonder what invisible mechanism enables one photon to always behave like its twin; it’s just that we step outside of QBist science when we speculate about things that can never be directly observed. What happens to objects that no one’s looking at? Does the seemingly solid world dissolve into the phantasms and mirages of our own assumptions and mental images? The visible universe does not completely blink out of QBist existence when we close our eyes; the lapse in observation is filled in by the subjective judgment that the world is still there. QBism preserves our common sense. Quantum mechanics is classified as a prediction tool, not a gateway to ultimate reality. QBism sweeps the cobwebby spookiness out of quantum physics (and into someone else’s discipline). There’s no action at a distance, and there’s no speculation (within physics) about what particles are doing when we’re not looking at them. But we can push this idea in a direction unintended by QBism’s inventors. If we really believe that direct observation is the only reality, then, looking at the night sky is a single truth; observer and observed cannot be logically separated. And the quest to preserve locality leads to unification with everything we see.

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filiplig · 5 years

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W. Strunk - The Elements of Style

p. 21

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

p. 22

In especial the expression the fact that should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Masaryk, T. G. - Ideály humanitní

s. 42

Utilitarism tvrdí, že každý člověk jde po svém štěstí, po své slasti a jen po své slasti, pesimism to štěstí hledá také, ale dochází poznání, že štěstí nelze najít, poněvadž prý ho není.

Také já myslím, že ho není. Totiž: je po štěstí, jakmile ho někdo tak schválně hledá. Ten, kdo hledá štěstí, již ho ztratil. Člověk každý je rád šťasten - jistě, jakmile však začne štěstí tak usilovně vyhledávat, již ho nenalézá. Velmi pěkně jest to pověděno v pohádce o hloupém Honzovi. Ti dva chytří, vzdělaní páni bratři, kteří jdou za štěstím, nenalézají ho; ten hloupý Honza nehledal štěstí, ale kde bylo třeba, jak dovedl, pracoval, pomáhal a vida - byl šťasten a nakonec musil pomoci oběma bratrům nešťastným. V této pohádce o hloupém Honzovi náš lid největší ethickou moudrost nám pověděl, totiž: nehledat štěstí! To úmyslné, dokonce rafinované hledání štěstí činí nešťastným. Moderní člověk po veliké revoluci nejen hospodářsky a politicky, nýbrž i filosoficky a umělecky honí se po ztraceném štěstí, po ztraceném ráji - ale honbou po štěstí nikdo šťastným se nestal.

s. 55

Mezi náboženstvím a mravností je rozdíl věcný. Mravnost není náboženstvím a náboženství není mravností. Může být člověk nábožensky velice věřící, oddaný své církvi, svým dogmatům i předpisům, a nebude mravný, ba bude třeba nemravný. Nemluvím jen o svatoušství. Ale náboženství je tolik různých forem, že prostě myslit, jako by ten, do má náboženství, proto už měl mravnost, je omyl. Mravnost je poměr člověka k člověku. Potřebujeme mravnosti ve svém styku s bližním. Náboženství vzniká z poměru člověka k celému světu, zvláště k bohu. Náboženství má širší okruh než mravnost; v náboženství je mravnost obsažena.

s. 58

Láska, humanita musí být pozitivní. Často nenávist, například k národu druhému, pokládá se již za lásku k národu svému. Vyšší je nemít té nenávisti, ale positivně milovat. Nebudu se přít o to, lze-li něco cizího tak milovat jako své. Například cizí národ milovat tak jako svůj. Bylo by nepřirozené to žádat; ale zvykejme si národ, rodinu, stranu svou, kohokoli milovat positivně, to jest bez pozadí nenávisti, a docela nový mravní svět se nám rozevře.

s. 68

A všechny tyto prvky dohromady tvoří národnost; totiž jazyk, území, hospodářské a sociální poměry, literatura básnická, věda, filosofie, mravnost a náboženství.

s. 69

Přečteme-li si však a srovnáme-li Kollára, Máchu, Nerudu, Bezruče, vidíme, že nejen si národ jinak představovali, ale také lásku k němu jinak cítili. Cit nezůstává stále týž, mění se stejně jako se mění pojem. V romantice se jinak cítilo, než když začal realism a naturalism. V naší literatuře je romantika u Kollára; Havlíček prošel ruskou školou realistickou. Proto pojímá národ jinak než Kollár, jinak s ním cítí. U Bezruče vidíme již cit sociální, zájem o dělníka. Kde by byl měl Kollár zájem o dělníky?

s. 73

Humanitní myšlenka není kosmopolitism. Humanitní myšlenka má obsah dvojí: 1. Všichni národové tvoří lidstvo. 2. Člověk má dosáhnout ve svém životě čistého člověctví, mravního ideálu člověka. Ten ideál máme na mysli, říkáme-li: To je jednání lidské, to je jednání nelidské. Podle této myšlenky my národnost pojímáme humanitně. Nám musí být národnost otázkou svědomí. Jak praví Havlíček: ,,Napřed bud každý našinec sám přičinlivý, vzdělaný, čestný člověk, a pak teprv vlastenec." Napřed být čestným člověkem, to je národnost - to je vlastenectví. Tak je pojímali Havlíček, Palacký, Kollár.

s. 92

Vídeň myslila, že všichni národové jsou upoutáni, ale duše se upoutat nedá. Toho censor nedovede. Musili by umělce, spisovatele udělat censory. Každá censura je o mnoho myšlenek za spisovateli své doby. To je význam literatury, že dovede pracovat a rozsévat nové myšlenky i v nejhorších dobách.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Sonnenburg, J. - Zdravá střeva

s. 117

Důležitější glykemický index je však glykemická zátěž potraviny. GI vám poví, jak rychle vám daný sacharid v potravině zvýší hladinu krevního cukru. Glykemická zátěž bere v potaz i obsah sacharidu v určitém množství potraviny, například v porci, které zapříčiní zvýšení hladiny krevního cukru. Dýně je jedním příkladů toho, že glykemická zátěž je mnohem víc vypovídající než glykemický index. Vinou druhů sacharidů v ní obsažených má tato zelenina technicky vzato vysoký glykemický index. Ale celkový dopad porce dýně na hladinu krevního cukru je velice malý, což odráží hodnota její glykemické zátěže. Většina zeleniny má nízkou glykemickou zátěž a vysoký obsah MZS. Dušené nebo vařené (nebo dokonce ohřáté v mikrovlnné troubě, když to jinak nejde) lusky edamame, čerstvé ovoce a oříšky v jogurtu a celozrnné pečivo s hummusem patří k našim nejoblíbenějším svačinám s nízkou glykemickou zátěží a vysokým podílem MZS. Internetové zdroje uvádějící jídla a svačiny s nízkou glykemickou zátěží nám pomáhají rozhodnout, co nakoupíme v místním obchodě s potravinami.

s. 138

Je možné, že v budoucnu budeme schopni přeprogramovat mikrobiotu nebo řídit její činnost prostřednictvím diety tak, abychom snížili produkci toxického odpadu a potřebu dialýzy na minimum.

s. 139

Jak vás možná napadlo, v produkci trimethylamin-N-oxidu (TMAO) hraje mikrobiota klíčovou roli. Rizikové faktory srdečních onemocnění jsou známé, takže víme, že strava má také velký význam. Červené maso a další tučná jídla poskytují mikrobiotě zdroje potřebné pro syntézu TMAO. Konkrétně jde o tuk zvaný fosfatidylcholin, který je známější pod názvy lecitin a karnitin. Jde o důležitou součást masa.

s. 142

Co se tedy objevuje jako první? Dochází po stresující příhodě ke škodlivé změně mikrobioty? Nebo nejprve dojde k poruše mikrobioty, která pak vede k úzkosti nebo depresi? Tyto druhy chorob lze pochopit a léčit velice obtížně, protože jednou z jejich součástí je závada v komunikaci mezi nejsložitějším ekosystémem v lidské těle - mikrobiotou - a nejsložitějším orgánem - mozkem.

s. 204

Doporučujeme vám zapojit se do projektu Amarican Gut Project a řídit se podle změn, ke kterým dochází ve vaší mikrobiotě během účasti na něm. (Pro Evropany je dostupnější projekt British Gut. Redakce na základě vlastních zkušeností doporučuje také skvělý uBiome.com. Pozn. red.)

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filiplig · 6 years

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Gleick, James - The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

str. 23

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet’s statistics. In search of data on the letters’ relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of twelve thousand E’s, nine thousand T’s, and only two hundred Z’s. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text.

str. 27

Neither Kele nor English yet had words to say, allocate extra bits for disambiguation and error correction. Yet this is what the drum language did. Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion. It provides second chances. Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.

str. 27

After publishing his book, John Carrington came across a mathematical way to understand this point. A paper by a Bell Labs telephone engineer, Ralph Hartley, even had a relevant-looking formula: H = n log s, where H is the amount of information, n is the number of symbols in the message, and s is the number of symbols available in the language. [...] The formula quantified a simple enough phenomenon (simple, anyway, once it was noticed): the fewer symbols available, the more of them must be transmitted to get across a given amount of information. For the African drummers, messages need to be about eight times as long as their spoken equivalents.

str. 74

In Napier’s mind was an analogy: differences are to ratios as addition is to multiplication. His thinking crossed over from one plane to another, from spatial relationships to pure numbers. Aligning these scales side by side, he gave a calculator a practical means of converting multiplication into addition—downshifting, in effect, from the difficult task to the easier one. In a way, the method is a kind of translation, or encoding. The natural numbers are encoded as logarithms. The calculator looks them up in a table, the code book. In this new language, calculation is easy: addition instead of multiplication, or multiplication instead of exponentiation. When the work is done, the result is translated back into the language of natural numbers. Napier, of course, could not think in terms of encoding.

str. 136

Signs and symbols were not just placeholders; they were operators, like the gears and levers in a machine. Language, after all, is an instrument. It was seen distinctly now as an instrument with two separate functions: expression and thought. Thinking came first, or so people assumed. To Boole, logic was thought—polished and purified.

str. 148

To eliminate Russell’s paradox Russell took drastic measures. The enabling factor seemed to be the peculiar recursion within the offending statement: the idea of sets belonging to sets. Recursion was the oxygen feeding the flame. In the same way, the liar paradox relies on statements about statements. “This statement is false” is meta-language: language about language. Russell’s paradoxical set relies on a meta-set: a set of sets. So the problem was a crossing of levels, or, as Russell termed it, a mixing of types. His solution: declare it illegal, taboo, out of bounds. No mixing different levels of abstraction. No self-reference; no self-containment. The rules of symbolism in Principia Mathematica would not allow the reaching-back-around, snake-eating-its-tail feedback loop that seemed to turn on the possibility of self-contradiction. This was his firewall.

s. 163

It seemed intuitively clear that the amount of information should be proportional to the number of symbols: twice as many symbols, twice as much information. But a dot or dash—a symbol in a set with just two members—carries less information than a letter of the alphabet and much less information than a word chosen from a thousand-word dictionary. The more possible symbols, the more informationeach selection carries.

s. 170

Turing was programming his machine, though he did not yet use that word. From the primitive actions—moving, printing, erasing, changing state, and stopping—larger processes were built up, and these were used again and again: “copying down sequences of symbols, comparing sequences, erasing all symbols of a given form, etc.” The machine can see just one symbol at a time, but can in effect use parts of the tape to store information temporarily. As Turing put it, “Some of the symbols written down … are just rough notes ‘to assist the memory.’ ”The tape, unfurling to the horizon and beyond, provides an unbounded record. In this way all arithmetic lies within the machine’s grasp. Turing showed how to add a pair of numbers—that is, he wrote out the necessary table of states. He showed how to make the machine print out (endlessly) the binary representation of Π. He spent considerable time working out what the machine could do and how it would accomplish particular tasks. He demonstrated that this short list covers everything a person does in computing a number. No other knowledge or intuition is necessary. Anything computable can be computed by this machine. Then came the final flourish. Turing’s machines, stripped down to a finite table of states and a finite set of input, could themselves be represented as numbers. Every possible state table, combined with its initial tape, represents a different machine. Each machine itself, then, can be described by a particular number—a certain state table combined with its initial tape. Turing was encoding his machines just as Gödel had encoded the language of symbolic logic. This obliterated the distinction between data and instructions: in the end they were all numbers. For every computable number, there must be a corresponding machine number.

s. 172

So Turing’s computer—a fanciful, abstract, wholly imaginary machine—led him to a proof parallel to Gödel’s. Turing went further than Gödel by defining the general concept of a formal system. Any mechanical procedure for generating formulas is essentially a Turing machine. Any formal system, therefore, must have undecidable propositions. Mathematics is not decidable. Incompleteness follows from uncomputability.

s. 178

Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy: “Information is closely associated with uncertainty.” Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information.

Some messages may be likelier than others, and information implies surprise. Surprise is a way of talking about probabilities. If the letter following t (in English) is h, not so much information is conveyed, because the probability of h was relatively high.

“What is significant is the difficulty in transmitting the message from one point to another.” Perhaps this seemed backward, or tautological, like defining mass in terms of the force needed to move an object. But then, mass can be defined that way.

Information is entropy. This was the strangest and most powerful notion of all. Entropy—already a difficult and poorly understood concept—is a measure of disorder in thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy.

s. 185

This is where the statistical structure of natural languages reenters the picture. If the thousand-character message is known to be English text, the number of possible messages is smaller—much smaller. Looking at correlations extending over eight letters, Shannon estimated that English has a built-in redundancy of about 50 percent: that each new character of a message conveys not 5 bits but only about 2.3. Considering longer-range statistical effects, at the level of sentences and paragraphs, he raised that estimate to 75 percent [...]

s. 186

Quantifying predictability and redundancy in this way is a backward way of measuring information content. If a letter can be guessed from what comes before, it is redundant; to the extent that it is redundant, it provides no new information. If English is 75 percent redundant, then a thousand-letter message in English carries only 25 percent as much information as one thousand letters chosen at random. Paradoxical though it sounded, random messages carry more information. The implication was that natural-language text could be encoded more efficiently for transmission or storage.

s. 199

There was a difference in emphasis between Shannon and Wiener. For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon, of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same. The more inherent order exists in a sample of English text—order in the form of statistical patterns, known consciously or unconsciously to speakers of the language—the more predictability there is, and in Shannon’s terms, the less information is conveyed by each subsequent letter. When the subject guesses the next letter with confidence, it is redundant, and the arrival of the letter contributes no new information. Information is surprise.

s. 216

A hot stone plunged into cold water can generate work—for example, by creating steam that drives a turbine—but the total heat in the system (stone plus water) remains constant. Eventually, the stone and the water reach the same temperature. No matter how much energy a closed system contains, when everything is the same temperature, no work can be done. It is the unavailability of this energy—its uselessness for work—that Clausius wanted to measure. He came up with the word entropy, formed from Greek to mean “transformation content.”

s. 217

It became a totemic concept. With entropy, the “laws” of thermodynamics could be neatly expressed: First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases. There are many other formulations of these laws, from the mathematical to the whimsical, e.g., “1. You can’t win; 2. You can’t break even either.”

s. 218

Order is subjective—in the eye of the beholder. Order and confusion are not the sorts of things a mathematician would try to define or measure. Or are they? If disorder corresponded to entropy, maybe it was ready for scientific treatment after all.

s. 222

The demon sees what we cannot—because we are so gross and slow—namely, that the second law is statistical, not mechanical. At the level of molecules, it is violated all the time, here and there, purely by chance. The demon replaces chance with purpose. It uses information to reduce entropy.

s. 224

But information is physical. Maxwell’s demon makes the link. The demon performs a conversion between information and energy, one particle at a time. Szilárd—who did not yet use the word information—found that, if he accounted exactly for each measurement and memory, then the conversion could be computed exactly. So he computed it. He calculated that each unit of information brings a corresponding increase in entropy—specifically, by k log 2 units. Every time the demon makes a choice between one particle and another, it costs one bit of information. The payback comes at the end of the cycle, when it has to clear its memory (Szilárd did not specify this last detail in words, but in mathematics). Accounting for this properly is the only way to eliminate the paradox of perpetual motion, to bring the universe back into harmony, to “restore concordance with the Second Law.”

s. 229

The earth is not a closed system, and life feeds upon energy and negative entropy leaking into the earth system.… The cycle reads: first, creation of unstable equilibriums (fuels, food, waterfalls, etc.); then use of these reserves by all living creatures.

Living creatures confound the usual computation of entropy. More generally, so does information. “Take an issue of The New York Times, the book on cybernetics, and an equal weight of scrap paper,” suggested Brillouin. “Do they have the same entropy?” If you are feeding the furnace, yes. But not if you are a reader. There is entropy in the arrangement of the ink spots. For that matter, physicists themselves go around transforming negative entropy into information, said Brillouin. From observations and measurements, the physicist derives scientific laws; with these laws, people create machines never seen in nature, with the most improbable structures.

s. 236

By now the word code was so deeply embedded in the conversation that people seldom paused to notice how extraordinary it was to find such a thing—abstract symbols representing arbitrarily different abstract symbols—at work in chemistry, at the level of molecules. The genetic code performed a function with uncanny similarities to the metamathematical code invented by Gödel for his philosophical purposes. Gödel’s code substitutes plain numbers for mathematical expressions and operations; the genetic code uses triplets of nucleotides to represent amino acids. Douglas Hofstadter was the first to make this connection explicitly, in the 1980s: “between the complex machinery in a living cell that enables a DNA molecule to replicate itself and the clever machinery in a mathematical system that enables a formula to say things about itself.”

s. 256

“Memes have not yet found their Watson and Crick,” said Dawkins; “they even lack their Mendel.”

s. 259

Wheeler said this much, at least: “Probability, like time, is a concept invented by humans, and humans have to bear the responsibility for the obscurities that attend it.”

s. 267

“At each given moment there is only a fine layer between the ‘trivial’ and the impossible,” Kolmogorov mused in his diary.

s. 268

The three are fundamentally equivalent: information, randomness, and complexity—three powerful abstractions, bound all along like secret lovers.

s. 271

It is another recursive, self-looping twist. This was Chaitin’s version of Gödel’s incompleteness. Complexity, defined in terms of program size, is generally uncomputable. Given an arbitrary string of a million digits, a mathematician knows that it is almost certainly random, complex, and patternless—but cannot be absolutely sure.

s. 272

As Chaitin put it, “God not only plays dice in quantum mechanics and nonlinear dynamics, but even in elementary number theory.”

s. 272

Kolmogorov-Chaitin (KC) complexity is to mathematics what entropy is to thermodynamics: the antidote to perfection. Just as we can have no perpetual-motion machines, there can be no complete formal axiomatic systems.

s. 280

According to this measure, a million zeroes and a million coin tosses lie at opposite ends of the spectrum. The empty string is as simple as can be; the random string is maximally complex. The zeroes convey no information; coin tosses produce the most information possible. Yet these extremes have something in common. They are dull. They have no value. If either one were a message from another galaxy, we would attribute no intelligence to the sender. If they were music, they would be equally worthless. Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.

s. 282

The more energy, the faster the bits flip. Earth, air, fire, and water in the end are all made of energy, but the different forms they take are determined by information. To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information. —Seth Lloyd (2006)

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filiplig · 6 years

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Redl, Vlasta - My tři a já

str. 79

A tak opakuji, co mi odpověděl jeden z mých valmezských hudebních idolů (velmi všestranný muzikant, který hrál na mnoho nástrojů a na všechny velice pozoruhodným způsobem), když jsem se ho jako patnáctiletý dychtivě ptal, jak mám cvičit a co vlastně, abych hrál jako on.

Dodnes mi jeho odpověď připadá hodně zvláštní a tehdy mi zněla až trochu neuvěřitelně, ale dnes už můžu potvrdit, že to funguje. Řekl mi, snad to nezkomolím, tehdy zhruba toto - Tak jasně, cvičit se taky musí, ale já bych řek, že mnohem víc než kolik denně cvičíš, záleží na tom, co posloucháš. Když si budeš pouštět kvalitní, promyšlenou muziku a klidně třeba virtuózy, nad kterýma ti teď rozum stojí, časem to ten pomalý mozek začne stíhat, a jak ti to tam v hlavě začne šrotovat, ono to bude postupně chtít zas prstama ven. Mezi tou palicí a pazourama je cosi jako zpětná vazba, a co nacpeš jedním koncem, nějakým záhadným způsobem se po čase objeví i na tom druhém.

str. 91

Myslím si opravdu, že umělec by snad ani žádnou rodinu mít neměl, a skutečný umělec ji obvykle také nemá, k čemu by mu byla, stejně s ním odmalička nikdo nehne a jeho proklatý úděl a nepřekonatelná touha se z něj vykoupit beztak dříve nebo později vyplave z hlubin jeho povrchní duše a vytěsní z jeho povahy vše, co považuje za bytostně nepotřebné či zdržující, a včetně drobných jizviček od marných pokusů vštípit mu alespoň nejnutnější základy mravnosti a slušného vychování.

Co zmůže - byť sebenekonečnější - trpělivost a dobrota matčina, otcova i učitelova s tak neúrodným lánem etického úhoru, kde ani déšť slz a potoky potu nedokážou zavlažit a pohnojit v chorém mozku těch pár akrů sociálně vyprahlé skály, kde nevzklíčí nic než pochybnosti a odpor k autoritám a vůbec ke všemu, co je řádnému občanovi svaté.

A tak ho naučí číst a psát, zavázat si boty, pozdravit, poprosit a poděkovat a tím jejich úloha v jeho životě na dlouhý čas končí, protože naučit jej, aby žil šťastný, skromný a přitom spokojený sám se sebou, to je přece jen úkol nad jejich síly.

str. 145

Rozhodně nepatřím mezi hudebníky, kteří na festivalech procházejí šatnami a v rámci zdvořilostní konverzace ohmatají všechny instrumenty, aby je mohli kolegům pochválit. Nerad hraju na cizí kytary. Nerad se jich vůbec jen dotýkám. A stejně se vždycky najde kamarád, který se chce pochlubit novým nástrojem a cpe mi ten svůj zázrak do ruky, ať si ji taky vyzkouším, ale ani v takovém případě si ji nevezmu na klín, jen jí tak povšechně (znalecky) hrábnu do strun hřbetem ruky a odborně proklepu ozvučnici a luby, avšak přitom pečlivě dbám, abych ji náhodou nechtě nepohladil, asi jako lékař, kterému rodiče přivedli do ordinace krásnou dospívající dceru. Pak stanovím diagnózu a navrhnu způsob léčby (zajímavě stavěná, hezký krk, příjemná barva, hlavně ve spodních středech… možná bych jí obul trochu silnější struny) a víc se o ten případ nezajímám. S cizími kytarami je to totiž jako s cizími ženami. Buďto se vám nelíbí, nebo byste ji taky chtěli. Obojí je špatně.

str. 154

Předtím jsem si myslel, že láska je, když se vám po někom hrozně moc stýská, když cítíte, že bez něj nemůžete být. Ale opravdová láska (připusťme, že něco takového třeba existuje) nám naopak dává pocit úplnosti, lhostejno, zda je opětována, kde a jak daleko se ta pravá, ta chybějící polovina naší bytosti zrovna nachází, zda má s námi také nějaké úmysly, a vlastně i lhostejno, zda k nám vůbec něco cítí, či nikoli.

str. 160

Když síla akce a reakce udrží ve vzduchu čtyřsettunový boeing a zvedne do mraků dva tisíce tun hmoty raketoplánu, není důvod o ni pochybovat, ta síla existuje. Proč by tento velký fyzikální zákon, když platí pro všechna nebeská tělesa - mikrometeority počínaje a gigantickými mlhovinami z myriád galaxií konče - neměl platit i pro naše malé životy, když v nich jinak musíme bez výjimky dodržovat veškeré předpisy nebeské mechaniky ať jsme kdekoli a ať se děje cokoli? A pokud platí i pro nás - proč bychom nemohli pozitivnějším chováním docílit pozitivnější reakce našeho osudu? Pozdravit, poprosit, poděkovat - tři elementy slušného vychování. Nezištně pomoci, rozdělit se s potřebným a zastat se slabšího - tři elementy lidské velikosti. Nelhat, nekrást, nezneužít - tři elementy nepřemožitelné síly člověka. A hlavně si nemyslet, že lidská bytost je něco víc než jakékoli jiné Boží stvoření. Žádná tvář není dost němá, aby k nám nemohla moudře promluvit, a žádný kámen dost neživý, aby nám nedokázal namlátit, když si to vykoledujeme. A to, prosím, platí v této chvíli i o mně! Ani já nejsem, navzdory všemu, co vám o mně kdo nakecal, takové hovado, abych vám neuměl napovědět.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Redl, Vlasta - Kam na to chodím

str. 104

Každý způsob obživy má svoje stinné stránky a i řemeslo komedianta jich má víc než habaděj. Nechci je tady vyjmenovávat, snad jen jednu za všechny - nemá to nikde konec. Žádná siréna to neodhouká. Nelze z toho “blázna z povolání” nikdy úplně setřást, aspoň na chvilku ho vypnout, jako nejde ani na chvilku přestat být zamilovaný.

O tom, že je toho někdy na člověka moc, svědčí dlouhé seznamy těch, kteří se pod tím nákladem složili, zkolabovali, zbláznili se, ze světa sprovodili, nebo se utekli do konejšivé náruče tišících farmaceutických výrobků.

Nedivím se nikomu z nich.

Že neunesli tíhu slávy? Ale kdež. Nikoho takového neznám ani z vyprávění, snad z přihlouplých filmů, mezi skutečnými umělci nikdo takový asi neexistoval, člověk, který ví, co dělá a proč - a opravdový kumštýř to prostě nemůže vědět - s tím musí počítat nebo se tomu musí umět vyhnout.

Nebo si to užívat. Normální člověk tyhle věci přece nemůže brát vážně.

Že neunesli tíhu peněz? K smíchu. To jsou fakt hloupé pověry, nevím o nikom, kdo by se zhroutil jen proto, že vydělal o nějaký ten milion víc, než dovede utratit. Peníze dokonce ani charakter ještě nikomu nezkazily (tedy - pokud nějaký měl), charakter vám může zkazit leda způsob, jakým jste je vydělali.

str. 150

Ale muzika, jak už víme, není běh na sto metrů a už vůbec nejde o to, kdo tam bude dřív, spíš snad o to, kdo jako první dojde někam, kde ještě nikdo nebyl, i kdyby to byla jáma plná zoufalství a špíny, protože i odtud se někdy podaří vylovit něco ryzího, co se jinde najít nedá.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Krauss, L. M. - Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond

page 5 | location 74-77 | Added on Monday, 18 January 2016 23:15:41

These are the luxuries of art and literature: to create imaginary worlds that cause us to reconsider our place within our own world. Science has comparable impact. It, too, unveils different sorts of hidden worlds, but ones that we hope might also actually exist and, most importantly, can be measured. Nevertheless, the net result is the same: In the end we gain new insights into our own standing in the universe.

page 23 | location 353-357 | Added on Sunday, 14 February 2016 21:19:21

In 1856, while still in studying in Cambridge, Maxwell wrote a lengthy paper entitled “On Faraday’s Lines of Force,” in which he attempted to put Faraday’s idea on a solid mathematical footing. This was the first step in his attempts to determine and formulate the laws of electrodynamics in a mathematically consistent fashion, which would culminate in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873). By the time his work was completed, he had taken the geometric crutch of Faraday—the electric and magnetic lines of force, and the “fields” they represented—and turned them into entities as real as you or I.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Greene, Brian - The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

page 8 | location 116-118 | Added on Wednesday, 9 December 2015 23:49:03

In fact, superstring theory shows more: Within this new framework, general relativity and quantum mechanics require one another for the theory to make sense. According to superstring theory, the marriage of the laws of the large and the small is not only happy but inevitable.

page 27 | location 402-403 | Added on Monday, 14 December 2015 23:23:32

Maxwell realized that visible light itself is nothing but a particular kind of electromagnetic wave, one that is now understood to interact with chemicals in the retina, giving rise to the sensation of sight.

page 54 | location 822-825 | Added on Wednesday, 16 December 2015 23:06:48

Einstein found that precisely this idea—the sharing of motion between different dimensions—underlies all of the remarkable physics of special relativity, so long as we realize that not only can spatial dimensions share an object's motion, but the time dimension can share this motion as well. In fact, in the majority of circumstances, most of an object's motion is through time, not space.

page 56 | location 846-851 | Added on Wednesday, 16 December 2015 23:22:26

If an object is sitting still (relative to us) and consequently does not move through space at all, then in analogy to the first runs of the car, all of the object's motion is used to travel through one dimension—in this case, the time dimension. Moreover, all objects that are at rest relative to us and to each other move through time—they age—at exactly the same rate or speed. If an object does move through space, however, this means that some of the previous motion through time must be diverted. Like the car traveling at an angle, this sharing of motion implies that the object will travel more slowly through time than its stationary counterparts, since some of its motion is now being used to move through space.

page 66 | location 1009-1010 | Added on Thursday, 17 December 2015 08:28:11

The recognition that gravity and accelerated motion are profoundly interwoven is the key insight that Einstein had one happy day in the Bern patent office.

page 67 | location 1025-1033 | Added on Thursday, 17 December 2015 08:31:48

This description shows that general relativity finishes a job initiated by special relativity. Through its principle of relativity, the special theory of relativity declares a democracy of observational vantage points: the laws of physics appear identical to all observers undergoing constant-velocity motion. But this is limited democracy indeed, for it excludes an enormous number of other viewpoints—those of individuals who are accelerating. Einstein's 1907 insight now shows us how to embrace all points of view—constant velocity and accelerating—within one egalitarian framework. Since there is no difference between an accelerated vantage point without a gravitational field and a nonaccelerated vantage point with a gravitational field, we can invoke the latter perspective and declare that all observers, regardless of their state of motion, may proclaim that they are stationary and "the rest of the world is moving by them," so long as they include a suitable gravitational field in the description of their own surroundings. In this sense, through the inclusion of gravity, general relativity ensures that all possible observational vantage points are on equal footing.

page 68 | location 1035-1039 | Added on Thursday, 17 December 2015 08:34:32

This deep connection between gravity and accelerated motion is certainly a remarkable realization, but why did it make Einstein so happy? The reason, simply put, is that gravity is mysterious. It is a grand force permeating the life of the cosmos, but it is elusive and ethereal. On the other hand, accelerated motion, although somewhat more complicated than constant-velocity motion, is concrete and tangible. By finding a fundamental link between the two, Einstein realized that he could use his understanding of motion as a powerful tool toward gaining a similar understanding of gravity.

page 73 | location 1119-1121 | Added on Thursday, 17 December 2015 23:06:50

We conclude that to observers on the spinning ride, such as Slim and Jim, the rate of passage of time depends upon their precise position—in this case, their distance from the center of the ride. This is an illustration of what we mean by warped time: Time is warped if its rate of passage differs from one location to another.

page 74 | location 1124-1127 | Added on Thursday, 17 December 2015 23:07:50

These observations took Einstein to the final leap. Since he had already shown gravity and accelerated motion to be effectively indistinguishable, and since he now had shown that accelerated motion is associated with the warping of space and time, he made the following proposal for the innards of the "black box" of gravity—the mechanism by which gravity operates. Gravity, according to Einstein, is the warping of space and time.

page 91 | location 1394-1403 | Added on Thursday, 17 December 2015 23:53:33

No deviations from the predictions of general relativity have been found in experiments performed with our present level of technology. Only time will tell if greater experimental precision will ultimately uncover some, thereby showing this theory, too, to be only an approximate description of how nature actually works. The systematic testing of theories to greater and greater levels of accuracy is, certainly, one of the ways science progresses, but it is not the only way. In fact, we have already seen this: The search for a new theory of gravity was initiated, not by an experimental refutation of Newton's theory, but rather by the conflict of Newtonian gravity with another theory—special relativity. It was only after the discovery of general relativity as a competing theory of gravity that experimental flaws in Newton's theory were identified by seeking out tiny but measurable ways in which the two theories differ. Thus, internal theoretical inconsistencies can play as pivotal a role in driving progress as do experimental data. For the last half century, physics has been faced with still another theoretical conflict whose severity is on par with that between special relativity and Newtonian gravity. General relativity appears to be fundamentally incompatible with another extremely well-tested theory: quantum mechanics.

page 96 | location 1468-1471 | Added on Friday, 18 December 2015 07:35:52

At the beginning of the twentieth century, physicists calculated the total energy carried by all of the electromagnetic radiation inside an oven at a chosen temperature. Using well-established calculational procedures they came up with a ridiculous answer: For any chosen temperature, the total energy in the oven is infinite.

page 100 | location 1533-1536 | Added on Friday, 18 December 2015 07:48:06

And so, just as only a finite number of comrades are able to contribute to the total heat payment—leading to a finite amount of total money—only a finite number of waves are able to contribute to the oven's total energy—again leading to a finite amount of total energy. Be it energy or money the lumpiness of the fundamental units—and the ever increasing size of these lumps as we go to higher frequencies or to larger monetary denominations—changes an infinite answer to one that is finite.3

page 109 | location 1659-1665 | Added on Friday, 18 December 2015 14:52:54

How can a particle perspective account for the interference pattern shown in Figure 4.8? At first blush you might make the following suggestion. Water is composed of H2O molecules—the "particles" of water. Nevertheless, when a lot of these molecules stream along with one another they can produce water waves, with the attendant interference properties illustrated in Figure 4.7. And so, it might seem reasonable to guess that wave properties, such as interference patterns, can arise from a particle picture of light provided a huge number of photons, the particles of light, are involved.

page 117 | location 1782-1786 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 00:19:39

there are many excellent books that espouse one or another way of thinking about quantum theory. But what appears certain is that no matter how you interpret quantum mechanics, it undeniably shows that the universe is founded on principles that, from the standpoint of our day-to-day experiences, are bizarre. The meta-lesson of both relativity and quantum mechanics is that when we deeply probe the fundamental workings of the universe we may come upon aspects that are vastly different from our expectations. The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the answers.

page 130 | location 1990-1992 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 07:42:04

The uncertainty principle, however, reveals that macroscopic averaging obscures a wealth of microscopic activity.3 As we will see shortly, this frenzy is the obstacle to merging general relativity and quantum mechanics.

page 133 | location 2034-2038 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 07:49:39

Nevertheless, Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg showed, in essence, that at high enough energy and temperature—such as occurred a mere fraction of a second after the big bang—electromagnetic and weak force fields dissolve into one another, take on indistinguishable characteristics, and are more accurately called electroweak fields. When the temperature drops, as it has done steadily since the big bang, the electromagnetic and weak forces crystallize out in a different manner from their common high-temperature form—through a process known as symmetry breaking that we will describe later—and therefore appear to be distinct in the cold universe we currently inhabit.

page 135 | location 2063-2066 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 07:53:26

It's as if the photon is not so much the transmitter of the force per se, but rather the transmitter of a message of how the recipient must respond to the force in question. For like-charged particles, the photon carries the message "move apart," while for oppositely charged particles it carries the message "come together." For this reason the photon is sometimes referred to as the messenger particle for the electromagnetic force.

page 136 | location 2075-2080 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 07:55:57

Recall that the gravitational force allows us to declare that all observers—regardless of their state of motion—are on absolutely equal footing. Even those whom we would normally think of as accelerating may claim to be at rest, since they can attribute the force they feel to their being immersed in a gravitational field. In this sense, gravity enforces the symmetry: it ensures the equal validity of all possible observational points of view, all possible frames of reference. The similarity with the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces is that they too are all connected with enforcing symmetries, albeit ones that are significantly more abstract than the one associated with gravity.

page 137 | location 2100-2103 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 09:31:04

This realization shows that, although the gravitational force and the strong force have vastly different properties (recall, for example, that gravity is far feebler than the strong force and operates over enormously larger distances), they do have a somewhat similar heritage: they are each required in order that the universe embody particular symmetries.

page 139 | location 2130-2133 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 09:39:18

The notion of a smooth spatial geometry, the central principle of general relativity, is destroyed by the violent fluctuations of the quantum world on short distance scales. On ultramicroscopic scales, the central feature of quantum mechanics—the uncertainty principle—is in direct conflict with the central feature of general relativity—the smooth geometrical model of space (and of spacetime).

page 419 | location 6414-6418 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 21:51:18

When the motion of a string is quantized, its possible vibrational states are represented by vectors in a Hilbert space, much as for any quantum-mechanical system. These vectors can be labeled by their eigenvalues under a set of commuting hermitian operators. Among these operators are the Hamiltonian, whose eigenvalues give the energy and hence the mass of the vibrational state, as well as operators generating various gauge symmetries that the theory respects. The eigenvalues of these latter operators give the force charges carried by the associated vibrational string state.

page 165 | location 2526-2532 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 22:23:54

But the whole conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics arises from the sub-Planck-length properties of the spatial fabric. If the elementary constituent of the universe cannot probe sub-Planck-scale distances, then neither it nor anything made from it can be affected by the supposedly disastrous short-distance quantum undulations. This is similar to what happens as we draw our hand across a highly polished granite surface. Although at a microscopic level the granite is discrete, grainy, and bumpy, our fingers are unable to detect these short-scale variations and the surface feels perfectly smooth. Our stumpy, extended fingers "smear" out the microscopic discreteness. Similarly, since the string has spatial extent, it also has limits on its short-distance sensitivity.

page 178 | location 2716-2723 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 23:02:46

In our discussions of the special and general theories of relativity, we came upon yet other symmetries of nature. Recall that the principle of relativity, which lies at the heart of special relativity, tells us that all physical laws must be the same regardless of the constant-velocity relative motion that individual observers might experience. This is a symmetry because it means that nature treats all such observers identically—symmetrically. Each such observer is justified in considering himself or herself to be at rest. Again, it's not that observers in relative motion will make identical observations; as we have seen earlier, there are all sorts of stunning differences in their observations. Instead, like the disparate experiences of the pogo-stick enthusiast on the earth and on the moon, the differences in observations reflect environmental details—the observers are in relative motion—even though their observations are governed by identical laws.

page 182 | location 2779-2783 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 23:10:27

just as ordinary rotational motion allows for the symmetry principle of rotational invariance ("physics treats all spatial orientations on an equal footing"), could it be that the more subtle rotational motion associated with spin leads to another possible symmetry of the laws of nature? By 1971 or so, physicists showed that the answer to this question was yes. Although the full story is quite involved, the basic idea is that when spin is considered, there is precisely one more symmetry of the laws of nature that is mathematically possible. It is known as supersymmetry.

page 182 | location 2785-2787 | Added on Sunday, 20 December 2015 23:11:36

But just as spin is "like rotational motion, with a quantum-mechanical twist," supersymmetry can be associated with a change in observational vantage point in a "quantum-mechanical extension of space and time."

page 187 | location 2860-2867 | Added on Tuesday, 22 December 2015 10:49:59

Georgi, Quinn, and Weinberg took this realization and ran with it to a remarkable end. They showed that when these effects of the quantum frenzy are carefully accounted for, the net result is that the strengths of all three nongravitational forces are driven together. Whereas the strengths of these forces are very different on scales accessible to current technology, Georgi, Quinn, and Weinberg argued that this difference is actually due to the different effect that the haze of microscopic quantum activity has on each force. Their calculations showed that if this haze is penetrated by examining the forces not on everyday scales but as they act on distances of about a hundredth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth(10-29) of a centimeter (a mere factor of ten thousand larger than the Planck length), the three nongravitational force strengths appear to become equal.

page 198 | location 3022-3027 | Added on Tuesday, 22 December 2015 22:55:25

The answer, implicit in Kaluza's work and subsequently made explicit and refined by the Swedish mathematician Oskar Klein in 1926, is that the spatial fabric of our universe may have both extended and curled-up dimensions. That is, just like the horizontal extent of the garden hose, our universe has dimensions that are large, extended, and easily visible—the three spatial dimensions of common experience. But like the circular girth of a garden hose, the universe may also have additional spatial dimensions that are tightly curled up into a tiny space—a space so tiny that it has so far eluded detection by even our most refined experimental equipment.

page 205 | location 3142-3146 | Added on Friday, 25 December 2015 23:24:30

Before Kaluza's suggestion, gravity and electromagnetism were thought of as two unrelated forces; nothing had even hinted that there might be a relation between them. By having the bold creativity to imagine that our universe has an additional space dimension, Kaluza suggested that there was a deep connection, indeed. His theory argued that both gravity and electromagnetism are associated with ripples in the fabric of space. Gravity is carried by ripples in the familiar three space dimensions, while electromagnetism is carried by ripples involving the new, curled-up dimension.

page 210 | location 3215-3219 | Added on Saturday, 26 December 2015 06:52:22

For instance, we mentioned earlier that a sign of the grinding incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics in a point-particle framework is that calculations result in infinite probabilities. As we have discussed, string theory cures these infinities. But what we have not as yet mentioned is that a residual, somewhat more subtle problem still remains. In the early days of string theory physicists found that certain calculations yielded negative probabilities, which are also outside of the acceptable range. So, at first sight, string theory appeared to be awash in its own quantum-mechanical hot water.

page 211 | location 3228-3232 | Added on Saturday, 26 December 2015 06:52:47

physicists found that the troublesome calculations were highly sensitive to the number of independent directions in which a string can vibrate. The negative probabilities arose from a mismatch between what the theory required and what reality seemed to impose: The calculations showed that if strings could vibrate in nine independent spatial directions, all of the negative probabilities would cancel out. Well, that's great in theory, but so what? If string theory is meant to describe our world with three spatial dimensions, we still seem to be in trouble.

page 215 | location 3290-3294 | Added on Saturday, 26 December 2015 07:00:19

Since tiny strings vibrate through all of the spatial dimensions, the precise way in which the extra dimensions are twisted up and curled back on each other strongly influences and tightly constrains the possible resonant vibrational patterns. These patterns, largely determined by the extradimensional geometry, constitute the array of possible particle properties observed in the familiar extended dimensions. This means that extradimensional geometry determines fundamental physical attributes like particle masses and charges that we ovserve in the usual three large space dimensions of common experience.

page 221 | location 3382-3385 | Added on Saturday, 26 December 2015 07:11:46

And Howard Georgi, Glashow's eminent Harvard colleague and collaborator, was also a vociferous string critic in the late 1980s: If we allow ourselves to be beguiled by the siren call of the "ultimate" unification at distances so small that our experimental friends cannot help us, then we are in trouble, because we will lose that crucial process of pruning of irrelevant ideas which distinguishes physics from so many other

page 221 | location 3382-3386 | Added on Saturday, 26 December 2015 07:12:04

age 225 | location 3446-3452 | Added on Saturday, 26 December 2015 07:19:34

There is a family of lowest-energy string vibrations associated with each hole in the Calabi-Yau portion of space. Because the familiar elementary particles should correspond to the lowest-energy oscillatory patterns, the existence of multiple holes—somewhat like those in the multidoughnut—means that the patterns of string vibrations will fall into multiple families. If the curled-up Calabi-Yau has three holes, then we will find three families of elementary particles.16 And so, string theory proclaims that the family organization observed experimentally, rather than being some unexplainable feature of either random or divine origin, is a reflection of the number of holes in the geometrical shape comprising the extra dimensions! This is the kind of result that makes a physicist's heart skip a beat.

page 250 | location 3829-3832 | Added on Monday, 28 December 2015 23:34:22

String theory rewrites the laws of short-distance geometry so that what previously appeared to be complete cosmic collapse is now seen to be a cosmic bounce. The circular dimension can shrink to the Planck-length. But because of the winding modes, attempts to shrink further actually result in expansion. Let's see why.

page 251 | location 3838-3841 | Added on Monday, 28 December 2015 23:36:37

Ordinary vibrations refer to the usual oscillations we have discussed repeatedly, such as those illustrated in Figure 6.2; uniform vibrations refer to even simpler motion: the overall motion of string as it slides from one position to another without changing its shape. All string motion is a combination of sliding and oscillating—of uniform and ordinary vibrations—but for the present discussion it is easier to separate them in this manner.

page 287 | location 4399-4405 | Added on Sunday, 3 January 2016 01:34:40

This reflects the large cultural divide between the disciplines of physics and mathematics, and as string theory blurs their borders, the vast differences in language, methods, and styles of each field become increasingly apparent. Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules and brush the edge of acceptability in the search for solutions. Mathematicians are more like classical composers, typically working within a much tighter framework, reluctant to go to the next step until all previous ones have been established with due rigor. Each approach has its advantages as well as drawbacks; each provides a unique outlet for creative discovery. Like modern and classical music, it's not that one approach is right and the other wrong—the methods one chooses to use are largely a matter of taste and training.

page 300 | location 4599-4609 | Added on Sunday, 3 January 2016 23:35:27

By the late 1980s, it appeared to physicists that although string theory came close to providing a unique picture of the universe, it did not quite make the grade. There were two reasons for this. First, as briefly noted in Chapter 7, physicists found that there were actually five different versions of string theory. You may recall that they are called the Type I, Type IIA, Type IIB, Heterotic O(32) (Heterotic-O, for short), and Heterotic E8 × E8 (Heterotic-E, for short) theories. They all share many basic features—their vibrational patterns determine the possible mass and force charges, they require a total of 10 spacetime dimensions, their curled-up dimensions must be in one of the Calabi-Yau shapes, etc.—and for this reason we have not emphasized their differences in previous chapters. Nevertheless, analyses in the 1980s showed that they do differ. You can read more about their properties in the endnotes, but it's enough to know that they differ in how they incorporate supersymmetry as well as in significant details of the vibrational patterns they support.2 (Type I string theory, for example, has open strings with two loose ends in addition to the closed loops we have focused on.) This has been an embarrassment for string theorists because although it's impressive to have a serious proposal for the final unified theory, having five proposals takes significant wind from the sails of each.

page 304 | location 4652-4658 | Added on Sunday, 3 January 2016 23:41:55

Although much work remains to be done, there are two essential features of M-theory that physicists have already uncovered. First, M-theory has eleven dimensions (ten space and one time). Somewhat as Kaluza found that one additional spatial dimension allowed for an unexpected merger of general relativity and electromagnetism, string theorists have realized that one additional spatial dimension in string theory—beyond the nine space and one time dimensions discussed in preceding chapters—allows for a deeply satisfying synthesis of all five versions of the theory. Moreover, this extra spatial dimension is not pulled out of thin air; rather, string theorists have realized that the reasoning of the 1970s and 1980s that led to one time and nine space dimensions was approximate, and that exact calculations, which can now be completed, show that one spatial dimension had hitherto been overlooked.

page 318 | location 4870-4874 | Added on Monday, 4 January 2016 23:35:18

The duality among the five string theories is somewhat similar: Roughly speaking, the string coupling constants play a role analogous to temperature in our desert analogy. Like ice and water, any two of the five string theories, at first sight, appear to be completely distinct. But as we vary their respective coupling constants, the theories transmute among themselves. Just as ice transmutes into water as we raise its temperature, one string theory can transmute into another as we increase the value of its coupling constant.

page 331 | location 5066-5069 | Added on Tuesday, 5 January 2016 00:03:34

But beyond a hodgepodge of properties, no one knows what this eleven-dimensional theory is. Are membranes its fundamental ingredients? What are its defining properties? How does it purport to make contact with physics as we know it? If the respective coupling constants are small, our best current answers to these questions are described in previous chapters, since at small coupling constants we are led back to the theory of strings. But if the coupling constants are not small, no one currently knows the answers.

page 338 | location 5183-5186 | Added on Tuesday, 5 January 2016 00:17:24

Like the cartographer, the string theorist can now claim with guarded optimism that the spectrum of logically sound theories incorporating the essential discoveries of the past century—special and general relativity; quantum mechanics; gauge theories of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces; supersymmetry; extra dimensions of Kaluza and Klein—is fully mapped out by Figure 12.11.

page 340 | location 5204-5209 | Added on Tuesday, 5 January 2016 00:26:32

The distinguishing features? One, of course, is the black hole's mass. What are the others? Research has revealed that they are the electric and certain other force charges a black hole can carry, as well as the rate at which it spins. And that's it. Any two black holes with the same mass, force charges, and spin are completely identical. Black holes do not have fancy "hairdos"—that is, other intrinsic traits—that distinguish one from another. This should ring a loud bell. Recall that it is precisely such properties—mass, force charges, and spin—that distinguish one elementary particle from another. The similarity of the defining traits has led a number of physicists over the years to the strange speculation that black holes might actually be gigantic elementary particles.

page 373 | location 5719-5724 | Added on Wednesday, 6 January 2016 00:06:25

Whereas liquid water looks the same regardless of the angle from which it is viewed—it appears to be rotationally symmetric—solid ice is different. It has a crystalline block structure, which means that if you examine it with adequate precision, it will, like any crystal, look different from different angles. The phase transition has resulted in a decrease in the amount of rotational symmetry that is manifest. Although we have discussed only one familiar example, the point is true more generally: as we lower the temperature of many physical systems, at some point they undergo a phase transition that typically results in a decrease or a "breaking" of some of their previous symmetries.

page 389 | location 5963-5965 | Added on Sunday, 10 January 2016 21:25:47

plane: We don't know whether the question of determining the initial conditions is one that is even sensible to ask or whether—like asking general relativity to give insight into how hard you happened to toss a ball in the air—it is a question that lies forever beyond the grasp of any theory.

page 396 | location 6070-6074 | Added on Sunday, 10 January 2016 21:38:13

One overarching lesson we have learned during the past hundred years is that the known laws of physics are associated with principles of symmetry. Special relativity is based on the symmetry embodied in the principle of relativity—the symmetry between all constant-velocity vantage points. The gravitational force, as embodied in the general theory of relativity, is based on the equivalence principle—the extension of the principle of relativity to embrace all possible vantage points regardless of the complexity of their states of motion. And the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces are based on the more abstract gauge symmetry principles.

page 400 | location 6121-6123 | Added on Monday, 11 January 2016 00:03:15

Gottfried Leibniz and others vociferously disagreed, claiming that space and time are merely bookkeeping devices for conveniently summarizing relationships between objects and events within the universe. The location of an object in space and in time has meaning only in comparison with another. Space and time are the vocabulary of these relations, but nothing more.

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filiplig · 6 years

Text

Moalem, Sharon - Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

page 2 | location 23-30 | Added on Monday, 5 October 2015 22:47:35

Ever since Gregor Mendel’s mid-nineteenth-century* investigations into the inherited traits of pea plants were used to set the foundations for our understanding of genetics, we’ve been taught that who we are is a resolutely predictable matter of the genes we’ve inherited from previous generations. A little from Mom. A little from Dad. Whip it up, and there’s you. That calcified view of genetic inheritance is what students in middle school classrooms are still studying to this day when they map out pedigree charts in an effort to make sense of their fellow students’ eye color, curly hair, tongue rolling, or hairy fingers. And the lesson, delivered as though on stone tablets from Mendel himself, is that we don’t have much of a choice in the matter of what we get or what we give, because our genetic legacy was completely fixed when our parents conceived us. But that’s all wrong.

page 4 | location 47-50 | Added on Monday, 5 October 2015 22:50:12

War, peace, feast, famine, diaspora, disease—if our ancestors went through it and survived, we’ve inherited it. And once we’ve got it, we’re that much more likely to pass it on to the next generation in one way or another. That might mean cancer. It might mean Alzheimer’s disease. It might mean obesity. But it might also mean longevity. It might mean grace under fire. And it might just mean happiness itself.

page 34 | location 512-516 | Added on Tuesday, 6 October 2015 22:48:23

All of which prompts us to ask, why the difference in expression? Because our genes do not respond to our lives in a binary fashion. As we will come to learn, and contrary to Mendel’s findings, even if our inherited genes seem set in stone, the way they express themselves can be anything but. Whereas our inheritance may have been initially understood through a black-and-white Mendelian lens, today we’re starting to understand the power of seeing things in full and genetically expressive color.

page 223 | location 3415-3417 | Added on Wednesday, 7 October 2015 21:52:58

Doucleff (2012, Feb. 11). Anatomy of a tear-jerker: Why does Adele’s “Someone Like You” make everyone cry? Science has found the formula. The Wall Street Journal.

page 40 | location 603-607 | Added on Wednesday, 7 October 2015 21:56:16

But there is plenty of room for improvisation built into our lives. Timing. Timbre. Tone. Volume. Dynamics. Through tiny chemical processes, your body is using each gene you carry like a musician uses an instrument. It can be played loudly or softly. It can be played quickly or slowly. And it can even be played in different ways, as needed, in much the way that the incomparable Yo-Yo Ma can make his 1712 Stradivarius cello play everything from Brahms to bluegrass. That’s genetic expression.

page 132 | location 2013-2017 | Added on Thursday, 15 October 2015 23:08:46

To understand ciliopathies, it’s important to understand cilia and the genetics that are behind them. And to do that, first you must know that cilia are everywhere—and I mean absolutely everywhere. While you might never have heard of them, they’ve been looking out for you and your well-being since before you were born. Like a modified form of touch, some of your cells even use cilia to physically sense their way around their microscopic world. However, there are other compelling examples of the importance of using touch to make sense of the world around us.

page 205 | location 3138-3142 | Added on Wednesday, 21 October 2015 22:55:02

A good way to visualize this is to picture a football stadium in which almost everyone is wearing a white shirt, save for every single person in every tenth row—those people are all wearing red. Look around the stadium. What do you see? A sea of red. Now imagine that everyone wearing a red shirt is also holding an envelope. And imagine that in every envelope there is a piece of paper with a sentence on it. And imagine that all of those sentences, put together, tell a story about everyone else in the stadium. That’s how genetic research into rare diseases works.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Morozov, Evgeny - To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

page 18 | location 272-276 | Added on Tuesday, 9 June 2015 17:06:07

It’s also that what many solutionists presume to be “problems” in need of solving are not problems at all; a deeper investigation into the very nature of these “problems” would reveal that the inefficiency, ambiguity, and opacity—whether in politics or everyday life—that the newly empowered geeks and solutionists are rallying against are not in any sense problematic. Quite the opposite: these vices are often virtues in disguise. That, thanks to innovative technologies, the modern-day solutionist has an easy way to eliminate them does not make them any less virtuous.

page 21 | location 314-315 | Added on Tuesday, 9 June 2015 17:11:42

Pamela Hieronymi, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), points out in an important essay on the myths of online learning, “Education

page 27 | location 400-405 | Added on Sunday, 14 June 2015 17:14:26

As the molecular gastronomy example illustrates, to reject solutionism is not to reject technology. Nor is it to abandon all hope that the world around us can be ameliorated; technology could and should be part of this project. To reject solutionism is to transcend the narrow-minded rationalistic mind-set that recasts every instance of an efficiency deficit—like the lack of perfect, comprehensive instructions in the kitchen—as an obstacle that needs to be overcome. There are other, more fruitful, more humanistic, and more responsible ways to think about technology’s role in enabling human flourishing, but solutionists are unlikely to grasp them unless they complicate their dangerously reductionist account of the human condition.

page 42 | location 638-640 | Added on Sunday, 21 June 2015 17:43:14

Thus, while Kickstarter might give us the illusion of more efficient distribution of arts funding than the NEA, it would be naïve and very shortsighted not to take note of the fact that we’ll also get—and this is much more important than the efficiency of the platform—very different art.

page 50 | location 755-757 | Added on Monday, 22 June 2015 18:08:51

Hence the greatest irony of all: one day we are told that “the Internet” is here to stay, and we should reshape our institutions to match its demands; another day, we are told that it’s so fragile that almost anyone or anything could deal it a lethal blow.

page 61 | location 922-929 | Added on Sunday, 28 June 2015 20:08:48

It’s not that history books are not consulted because our Internet theorists are lazy; rather, it’s that history itself is deemed irrelevant, for “the Internet” is seen as representing a distinct rupture with everything that has come before—a previously unreachable high point of civilization. Such “rupture talk”—an essential ingredient without which epochalism would be impossible—itself has a history. For example, University of Michigan historian Gabrielle Hecht sees similar themes and undertones in debates surrounding the advent of nuclear weapons and nuclear electric power in the 1950s, adding that both epochal discoveries were seen as marking “a historical break, the dawn of a new era—here, ‘the nuclear age’—in which everything, everywhere, was forever different.” Under closer scrutiny, “rupture talk” appears everywhere in our Internet discourse.

page 67 | location 1020-1023 | Added on Monday, 29 June 2015 18:20:27

As historian Marshall Poe puts it: “It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Internet is a post office, newsstand, video store, shopping mall, game arcade, reference room, record outlet, adult book shop and casino rolled into one. Let’s be honest: that’s amazing. But it’s amazing in the same way a dishwasher is amazing—it enables you to do something you have always done a little easier than before.”

page 88 | location 1342-1346 | Added on Tuesday, 30 June 2015 08:37:32

No serious philosopher would ever proclaim that either transparency or openness is an unquestionable good or absolute value to which human societies should aspire. There is no good reason why we should suddenly accept the totalizing philosophy of “the Internet” and embrace the supremacy of its associated values just because its cheerleaders believe that “the network is not going away.” Digital technologies contain no ready-made answers to the social and political dilemmas they create, even if “the Internet” convinces us otherwise.

page 110 | location 1673-1677 | Added on Sunday, 26 July 2015 21:54:03

In reality, alas, information uncovered by various transparency inquisitions rarely exists in the objective, virgin state that information reductionists imagine. Thus, as Fenster argues, “any ‘message’ that government information comprises is produced and only exists within a political and regulatory framework that shapes its creation and only circulates within a mediated environment that reshapes it in the process of making it available.” The flawless and perfect communication process assumed by cybernetics simply doesn’t exist.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Hamming, R. W. - You and Your Research

location 136-139 | Added on Sunday, 31 May 2015 16:57:57

"Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate.

location 179-181 | Added on Tuesday, 2 June 2015 17:01:30

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them.

location 207-209 | Added on Tuesday, 2 June 2015 17:05:17

The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it and they pursue it. They drop all other things. They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through. Their minds are prepared;

location 247-250 | Added on Wednesday, 3 June 2015 16:56:28

Selling' to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you've done, read it, and come back and say, ``Yes, that was good.''

location 371-372 | Added on Wednesday, 3 June 2015 17:14:08

What it comes down to basically is that you cannot be original in one area without having originality in others. Originality is being different. You can't be an original scientist without having some other original characteristics.

location 438-443 | Added on Thursday, 4 June 2015 17:24:13

but a session of brainstorming is seldom worthwhile. I do go in to strictly talk to somebody and say, ``Look, I think there has to be something here. Here's what I think I see ...'' and then begin talking back and forth. But you want to pick capable people. To use another analogy, you know the idea called the `critical mass.' If you have enough stuff you have critical mass. There is also the idea I used to call `sound absorbers'. When you get too many sound absorbers, you give out an idea and they merely say, ``Yes, yes, yes.'' What you want to do is get that critical mass in action; ``Yes, that reminds me of so and so,'' or, ``Have you thought about that or this?'' When you talk to other people, you want to get rid of those sound absorbers who are nice people but merely say, ``Oh yes,'' and to find those who will stimulate you right back.

location 461-463 | Added on Thursday, 4 June 2015 17:30:09

You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. So I'll give you two answers. You read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts.

location 492-494 | Added on Thursday, 4 June 2015 17:33:23

What happens to the old fellows is that they get a technique going; they keep on using it. They were marching in that direction which was right then, but the world changes. There's the new direction; but the old fellows are still marching in their former direction.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Kuo, Kaiser - Why do many people feel that Chinese can't possibly be basically ok with their government or society? (Answer to Quora question)

location 90-93 | Added on Monday, 1 June 2015 17:13:13

It must be understood that liberalism and nationalism developed in China in lockstep, with one, in a sense, serving as means to the other. That is, liberalism was a means to serve national ends—the wealth and power of the country. And so when means and end came into conflict, as they inevitably did, the end won out. Nationalism trumped liberalism. Unity, sovereignty, and the means to preserve both were ultimately more important even to those who espoused republicanism and the franchise.

location 106-107 | Added on Monday, 1 June 2015 17:15:28

The fear of the liberty-loving American, he implied, is of a surfeit of authoritarianism. What of the Chinese? The Chinese nightmare is of chaos—of an absence of authority.

location 123-126 | Added on Monday, 1 June 2015 17:19:34

And what was on the minds of Americans—who had watched the Berlin Wall come down, Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel assume the Polish and Czech presidencies, Yeltsin defend the Russian parliament and Gorbachev declare the Soviet Union’s end—what was on their minds as they turned thoughts to China? Tiananmen, of course, with its incredibly potent imagery: a million people in the Square, Tank Man, and the Goddess of Democracy.

location 193-195 | Added on Monday, 1 June 2015 17:30:03

The grand unofficial compromise, in a kind of updated Hobbesian social contract, that the Party made with the Chinese people—“You stay out of politics, we’ll create conditions in which you can prosper and enjoy many personal freedoms”—has been, on balance (and to date), a success.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Osnos, Evan - Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

page 4 | location 54-58 | Added on Thursday, 14 May 2015 15:50:31

Above all, it is a time of plenty—the crest of a transformation one hundred times the scale, and ten times the speed, of the first Industrial Revolution, which created modern Britain. The Chinese people no longer want for food—the average citizen eats six times as much meat as in 1976—but this is a ravenous era of a different kind, a period when people have awoken with a hunger for new sensations, ideas, and respect. China is the world’s largest consumer of energy, movies, beer, and platinum; it is building more high-speed railroads and airports than the rest of the world combined.

page 6 | location 85-88 | Added on Thursday, 14 May 2015 15:54:42

China today is riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Louis Vuitton, second only to the United States in its purchases of Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, yet ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party that seeks to ban the word luxury from billboards. The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana.

page 8 | location 115-117 | Added on Thursday, 14 May 2015 15:58:25

The longer I lived in China, the more I sensed that the Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The Party has unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history—and spawned, perhaps, the greatest threat to its own survival.

page 39 | location 591-594 | Added on Friday, 15 May 2015 17:03:15

“To survive in China you must reveal nothing to others. Or it could be used against you … That’s why I’ve come to think the deepest part of the self is best left unclear. Like mist and clouds in a Chinese landscape painting, hide the private part behind your social persona. Let your public self be like rice in a dinner: bland and inconspicuous, taking on the flavors of its surroundings while giving off no flavor of its own.”

page 69 | location 1050-1052 | Added on Saturday, 16 May 2015 17:49:28

The size of China’s population made college admissions so brutally competitive that people compared it to “ten thousand horses crossing a river on a single log.” To create more opportunities, the government doubled the number of colleges and universities, in just ten years, to 2,409. Even so, only one in every four aspiring college students was able to earn a place.

page 98 | location 1496-1498 | Added on Tuesday, 19 May 2015 16:58:22

By 2007, when Siu Yun-Ping hit his streak in Macau, the China scholar Minxin Pei noted that nearly half of all Chinese provinces had sent their chief of transportation to jail. Pei calculated that corruption of one kind or another was costing China 3 percent of its gross domestic product—more than the national budget for education.

page 104 | location 1595-1596 | Added on Tuesday, 19 May 2015 17:11:09

“Chinese have never looked at foreigners as human beings,” Lu Xun wrote. “We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals.”

page 106 | location 1617-1619 | Added on Tuesday, 19 May 2015 17:13:31

When the Chinese travel industry surveyed the public on its dream destinations, no place scored higher than Europe. Asked what they liked about it, the Chinese put “culture” at the top of the list. (On the negative side, respondents complained of “arrogance” and “poor-quality Chinese food.”)

page 120 | location 1837-1839 | Added on Tuesday, 19 May 2015 17:37:45

“Analysts overseas can never understand why the Chinese economy has grown so fast,” he said. “Yes, it’s a one-party state, but the administrators are selected from among the elites, and elites picked from one-point-three billion people might as well be called super-elites.”

page 157 | location 2393-2395 | Added on Saturday, 23 May 2015 17:58:20

“Chinese people have begun to think, ‘One part is the good life, another part is democracy,’” Liu went on. “If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But without democracy, if we can still have the good life, why should we choose democracy?”

page 186 | location 2849-2851 | Added on Sunday, 24 May 2015 18:10:53

“I don’t believe anyone who truly loves literature can also love Mao Zedong,” he told me. “These two things are incompatible. Even putting aside his political performance, or how many bad things he did, or how many people starved to death because of him, or how many people he killed, there is one thing for sure: Mao Zedong was the enemy of writers.”

page 210 | location 3211-3213 | Added on Monday, 25 May 2015 16:55:20

His contacts overseas and his embrace of the Internet merged two of the Party’s most neuralgic issues: the threat of a foreign-backed “color revolution” and the organizing potential of the Web. The previous year, President Hu Jintao told the Politburo, “Whether we can cope with the Internet” will determine “the stability of the state.”

page 221 | location 3387-3392 | Added on Monday, 25 May 2015 17:13:40

Two days after Liu won the prize, his wife, Liu Xia, visited him at Jinzhou Prison in the province of Liaoning. “This is for the lost souls of June Fourth,” he told her. Returning to Beijing, she was placed under house arrest. The government barred her, and anyone else, from going to Oslo to pick up the award; the only previous time this had happened was in 1935, when Hitler prevented relatives from going on behalf of Carl von Ossietzky, the German writer and pacifist, who was in a guarded hospital bed after having been in a concentration camp. Liu Xia’s telephone and Internet connections were severed, and she was barred from contact with anyone but her mother—the beginning of a campaign of isolation that would last for years.

page 222 | location 3399-3404 | Added on Monday, 25 May 2015 17:15:37

Decades ago, the black screen had been a fair reflection of China’s blinkered view of the world, its backwardness and seclusion. But now the instinct to shield the public from unflattering facts was absurdly at odds with the openness and sophistication in other parts of Chinese life, and it seemed to cheapen what ordinary Chinese people had worked so hard to achieve. China was not Hitler’s Germany, but Chinese leaders were willing to let themselves be lumped beside the Nazis in the history of the Nobel Prize. Either the strongest forces in the Chinese government were not wise enough to realize the cost, or the wisest forces were not strong enough to persuade the others.

page 245 | location 3748-3753 | Added on Tuesday, 26 May 2015 18:04:36

The truth was that I struggled with the question of how much to write about Ai Weiwei—or, for that matter, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng or the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. How much did their ordeals really tell us about China? If the average news consumer in the West read (or watched or heard) no more than one China story a week, should it be about people with dramatic lives or typical lives? The hardest part about writing from China was not navigating the authoritarian bureaucracy or the occasional stint in a police station. It was the problem of proportions: How much of the drama was light and how much was dark? How much was about opportunity and how much was about repression? From far away it was difficult for outsiders to judge, but I found that up close it wasn’t much easier, because it depended on where you were looking.

page 264 | location 4047-4049 | Added on Wednesday, 27 May 2015 17:44:23

In 2011 the central bank posted to the Web an internal report estimating that, since 1990, eighteen thousand corrupt officials had fled the country, having stolen $120 billion—a sum large enough to buy Disney or Amazon. (The report was promptly removed.)

page 293 | location 4484-4486 | Added on Thursday, 28 May 2015 18:05:26

The longer I lived in China, the more it seemed that people had come to see the economic boom as a train with a limited number of seats. For those who found a seat—because they arrived early, they had the right family, they paid the right bribe—progress was beyond their imagination. Everyone else could run as far and fast as their legs would carry them, but they would only be able to watch the caboose shrink into the distance.

page 335 | location 5133-5134 | Added on Friday, 5 June 2015 16:32:37

“Of the various countries I’ve visited,” Sandel told me the next day, “the free-market assumptions and convictions are more present in China among young people than anywhere, with the possible exception of the United States.”

page 366 | location 5607-5608 | Added on Sunday, 7 June 2015 16:57:40

It was impossible to know what “most Chinese” believed because the state media and the political system were designed not to amplify public opinion but to impose a shape upon it.

page 397 | location 6079-6085 | Added on Monday, 8 June 2015 17:38:54

Chinese leaders were facing a choice: to continue growing, they could adopt a more democratic form of government, as South Korea did in the 1980s, or they could recommit themselves to authoritarianism. Historically, the latter approach was risky. Over the long term, authoritarian states do not grow as reliably as democracies; they are fragile, and they tend to thrive only in the hands of visionary individual leaders. “For every Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, there are many like Mobutu Sese Seko, of the Congo,” according to the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik. In the short term, the Party could succeed at silencing its critics, but in the long term, that was less clear, especially if segments within the Party recalculated their own risks and rewards for loyalty and decided that they had more to gain by siding with the people.

page 398 | location 6092-6096 | Added on Monday, 8 June 2015 17:40:55

In many countries, a more educated and entrepreneurial middle class has demanded greater control over its affairs. China had already passed the threshold into what political scientists call the “zone of democratic transition”—when a country’s per capita income exceeds four thousand dollars, and the correlation with regime change rises sharply. By 2013, China was at a level of eight thousand five hundred dollars. The China scholar Minxin Pei examined the twenty-five autocracies with higher levels of income and a resistance to democratization. He found that twenty-one of them were oil states. China was not.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Graeber, David - Debt: The First 5,000 Years

page 7 | location 103-105 | Added on Tuesday, 14 April 2015 16:50:23

Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation-states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.

page 19 | location 285-286 | Added on Wednesday, 15 April 2015 15:33:26

the crucial factor, and a topic that will be explored at length in these pages, is money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene.

page 20 | location 294-296 | Added on Wednesday, 15 April 2015 15:34:47

The way violence, or the threat of violence, turns human relations into mathematics will crop up again and again over the course of this book. It is the ultimate source of the moral confusion that seems to float around everything surrounding the topic of debt. The resulting dilemmas appear to be as old as civilization itself.

page 36 | location 549-554 | Added on Wednesday, 15 April 2015 16:52:40

page 37 | location 554-557 | Added on Wednesday, 15 April 2015 16:53:06

The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

page 36 | location 549-560 | Added on Wednesday, 15 April 2015 16:54:03

Stanley Jevons, for example, who in 1871 wrote what has come to be considered the classic book on the origins of money, took his examples straight from Smith, with Indians swapping venison for elk and beaver hides, and made no use of actual descriptions of Indian life that made it clear that Smith had simply made this up. Around that same time, missionaries, adventurers, and colonial administrators were fanning out across the world, many bringing copies of Smith’s book with them, expecting to find the land of barter. None ever did. They discovered an almost endless variety of economic systems. But to this day, no one has been able to locate a part of the world where the ordinary mode of economic transaction between neighbors takes the form of “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”16 Now, all this hardly means that barter does not exist—or even that it’s never practiced by the sort of people that Smith would refer to as “savages.” It just means that it’s almost never employed, as Smith imagined, between fellow villagers. Ordinarily, it takes place between strangers, even enemies.

page 51 | location 779-783 | Added on Wednesday, 15 April 2015 17:17:12

In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money: historically, it has mainly been what people who are used to cash transactions do when for one reason or another they have no access to currency.

page 64 | location 975-983 | Added on Saturday, 18 April 2015 17:25:35

Anthropologists have been complaining about the Myth of Barter for almost a century. Occasionally, economists point out with slight exasperation that there’s a fairly simple reason why they’re still telling the same story despite all the evidence against it: anthropologists have never come up with a better one.20 This is an understandable objection, but there’s a simple answer to it. The reasons why anthropologists haven’t been able to come up with a simple, compelling story for the origins of money is because there’s no reason to believe there could be one. Money was no more ever “invented” than music or mathematics or jewelry. What we call “money” isn’t a “thing” at all, it’s a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y. As such it is probably as old as human thought. The moment we try to get any more specific, we discover that there are any number of different habits and practices that have converged in the stuff we now call “money,” and this is precisely the reason why economists, historians, and the rest have found it so difficult to come up with a single definition.

page 73 | location 1119-1121 | Added on Sunday, 19 April 2015 17:05:54

In all Indo-European languages, words for “debt” are synonymous with those for “sin” or “guilt”, illustrating the links between religion, payment and the mediation of the sacred and profane realms by “money.” For example, there is a connection between money (German Geld), indemnity or sacrifice (Old English Geild), tax (Gothic Gild) and, of course, guilt.

page 75 | location 1146-1149 | Added on Sunday, 19 April 2015 17:09:58

The reason that this literature tends to be ignored by economists is simple: “primitive currencies” of this sort is only rarely used to buy and sell things, and even when they are, never primarily to buy and sell everyday items such as chickens or eggs or shoes or potatoes. Rather than being employed to acquire things, they are mainly used to rearrange relations between people. Above all, to arrange marriages and to settle disputes, particularly those arising from murders or personal injury.

page 78 | location 1186-1190 | Added on Sunday, 19 April 2015 17:14:45

After all, we do owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions—all of this, we learned from other people, most of them long dead. If we were to imagine what we owe them as a debt, it could only be infinite. The question is: Does it really make sense to think of this as a debt?

page 114 | location 1735-1738 | Added on Tuesday, 21 April 2015 16:40:48

Squaring accounts means that the two parties have the ability to walk away from each other. By presenting it, his father suggested he’d just as soon have nothing further to do with him. In other words, while most of us can imagine what we owe to our parents as a kind of debt, few of us can imagine being able to actually pay it—or even that such a debt ever should be paid. Yet if it can’t be paid, in what sense is it a “debt” at all? And if it is not a debt, what is it?

page 121 | location 1843-1845 | Added on Tuesday, 21 April 2015 16:59:18

I will call this “baseline communism”: the understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” will be assumed to apply.

page 122 | location 1870-1873 | Added on Tuesday, 21 April 2015 17:03:11

As with society at large, the shared conviviality could be seen as a kind of communistic base on top of which everything else is constructed. It also helps to emphasize that sharing is not simply about morality, but also about pleasure. Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a certain communism of the senses at the root of most things we consider fun.

page 142 | location 2172-2175 | Added on Saturday, 25 April 2015 17:04:22

I should underline again that we are not talking about different types of society here (as we’ve seen, the very idea that we’ve ever been organized into discrete “societies” is dubious) but moral principles that always coexist everywhere. We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where

page 144 | location 2195-2199 | Added on Saturday, 25 April 2015 17:08:08

Economists are aware that reality is always more complicated; but they are also aware that to come up with a mathematical model, one always has to make the world into a bit of a cartoon. There’s nothing wrong with this. The problem comes when it enables some (often these same economists) to declare that anyone who ignores the dictates of the market shall surely be punished—or that since we live in a market system, everything (except government interference) is based on principles of justice: that our economic system is one vast network of reciprocal relations in which, in the end, the accounts balance and all debts are paid.

page 151 | location 2310-2313 | Added on Saturday, 25 April 2015 17:21:04

Debt is a very specific thing, and it arises from very specific situations. It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, who are equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight.

page 172 | location 2636-2642 | Added on Tuesday, 28 April 2015 17:09:56

All of this merely serves to underline Rospabé’s basic point, which is that money can be seen, in human economies, as first and foremost the acknowledgment of the existence of a debt that cannot be paid. In a way, it’s all very reminiscent of primordial-debt theory: money emerges from the recognition of an absolute debt to that which has given you life. The difference is that instead of imagining such debts as between an individual and society, or perhaps the cosmos, here they are imagined as a kind of network of dyadic relations: almost everyone in such societies was in a relation of absolute debt to someone else. It’s not that we owe “society.” If there is any notion of “society” here—and it’s not clear that there is—society is our debts.

page 185 | location 2822-2825 | Added on Thursday, 30 April 2015 16:56:29

We have perhaps a general principle: to make something saleable, in a human economy, one needs to first rip it from its context. That’s what slaves are: people stolen from the community that made them what they are. As strangers to their new communities, slaves no longer had mothers, fathers, kin of any sort. This is why they could be bought and sold or even killed: because the only relation they had was to their owners.

page 208 | location 3176-3179 | Added on Friday, 1 May 2015 16:41:38

owing to its historical role, slavery has shaped our basic assumptions and institutions in ways that we are no longer aware of and whose influence we would probably never wish to acknowledge if we were. If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away. It’s still there, lodged in our most intimate conceptions of honor, property, even freedom. It’s just that we can no longer see that it’s there.

page 265 | location 4050-4053 | Added on Wednesday, 6 May 2015 17:21:36

Thomas Hobbes was the first to really develop this argument in the seventeenth century, but it soon became commonplace. Government was essentially a contract, a kind of business arrangement, whereby citizens had voluntarily given up some of their natural liberties to the sovereign. Finally, similar ideas have become the basis of that most basic, dominant institution of our present economic life: wage labor, which is, effectively, the renting of our freedom in the same way that slavery can be conceived as its sale.

page 274 | location 4188-4190 | Added on Friday, 8 May 2015 18:05:53

while credit systems tend to dominate in periods of relative social peace, or across networks of trust (whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions like merchant guilds or communities of faith), in periods characterized by widespread war and plunder, they tend to be replaced by precious metal.

page 285 | location 4365-4368 | Added on Monday, 11 May 2015 17:26:37

Let us define the Axial Age, then, as running from 800 bc to 600 ad.3 This makes the Axial Age the period that saw the birth not only of all the world’s major philosophical tendencies, but also, all of today’s major world religions: Zoroastrianism, Prophetic Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, and Islam.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Heiss, Mary Lou - The Tea Enthusiast’s Handbook: A Guide to the World's Best Teas

page 16 | location 243-245 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 17:03:58

It is not possible to love every tea one tastes, but there is as much to learn from tasting tea that you don’t like as there is from tea that you do like.

page 25 | location 380-381 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 17:10:45

Chinese tea masters refer to water as a friend to tea: water heated to the right temperature for a tea will yield a cup that reveals the subtle flavors and character of that tea.

page 25 | location 382-385 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 17:11:05

the three most common mistakes of tea steeping: • Using too much or not enough tea • Improper water temperature • Oversteeping

page 28 | location 417-420 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 17:14:00

The most common sizes for English teapots are six cups (thirty-six ounces) or eight cups (forty-eight ounces); in Asia, teapots are often designed to steep six ounces of tea or less. The need to drink a quantity of tea from a large cup or mug is strictly a Western habit. Large cups require more tea to fill them, and that means bigger teapots.

page 34 | location 512-514 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 17:22:06

The easiest way to measure leaf tea is to weigh it on a small inexpensive kitchen scale that is calibrated in grams. The ideal ratio of leaf to water for most tea is two to three grams of tea leaf for six ounces of water.

page 38 | location 579-583 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 17:26:52

When tasting a tea that is new to you, start with a two-minute steep, taste it, and taste it again every thirty seconds. Jot down the results. Green, yellow, and white teas are rarely left in the water for longer than two minutes (and often less). Oolong teas can steep from one to five minutes, depending on whether the leaf is a semiball-rolled style or a long, strip-style leaf, and whether the tea is being steeped Asian or Western style. Green, yellow, white, and oolong teas can always be steeped again, at least once but sometimes three times or more, depending on the tea.

page 39 | location 588-590 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 17:27:51

Always cover your tea when steeping; the tea leaves will unfurl more uniformly and the finished tea will taste better if the teapot or gaiwan has been covered.

page 40 | location 613-615 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 17:30:11

Green tea offers many different leaf styles and singular flavor characteristics. In the cup, a sip of green tea can be reminiscent of honey, a lightly salty sea spray, a gentle breeze passing through a stand of pines, or pure water washed over stones in a stream. These transitory tastes are accompanied by sweet-smelling aromas that are refreshing, delicious, and uncomplicated.

page 56 | location 849-852 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 17:36:17

Without clear and consistent grades, it can be difficult for a tea enthusiast to know whether a certain tea is more expensive than another because it is overpriced or because it is a higher grade. There will be no resolution of this because the tea industry cannot possibly codify the thousands of green teas available, so it is necessary to cultivate a relationship with a tea vendor whom you trust.

page 63 | location 959-962 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 17:41:11

In 2007, China produced 1,165 metric tons of tea, surpassing the production of India for the first time in many years. Of this, approximately 70 percent of China’s yearly output of tea was green tea. And of this, only 10 to 12 percent was premium, artisan, spring-plucked green tea. It is believed that there are almost ten thousand distinctions of green tea produced in China’s eastern provinces of Anhui, Henan, Hunan, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang and the western provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan.

page 73 | location 1109-1112 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 17:49:42

When the fresh leaf reaches the tea factory, workers quickly shape and dry the leaf. The leaf is put into a cylindrical machine (de-enzymer) that lightly heats the leaf (or it is put into a tea-firing pan) to drive off some initial moisture. This heat is only enough to dry the surface of the leaf so that it becomes pliable, and it kills any bacteria on the leaf that might encourage the development of mold. Most important, this process destroys oxidative enzymes in the leaf that would allow oxidation to begin.

page 91 | location 1392-1394 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 18:04:27

The flavor of white tea is not as sweet or astringent as a green tea’s variously can be, nor does it have the vegetal flavors often associated with green tea. Rather, white tea is soft and rich, with subdued aromas and flavors that suggest honey, chestnuts, toast, apricots, and brown rice.

page 92 | location 1407-1408 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 18:05:37

Chinese and Taiwanese tea experts say that Pu-erh tea is the most complicated tea to study and learn (but relatively straightforward to manufacture), but that oolong tea is the most intricate and complex tea to manufacture.

page 92 | location 1408-1411 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 18:06:04

This is due to the fact that oolong teas are partially oxidized and can be made within a range of 12 to 80 percent oxidation that will vary with the type of oolong tea being manufactured. To put these percentages into perspective, green tea has zero oxidation, and black tea is 100 percent oxidized. This difference encompasses a big swing, and within it lies all of the complexity, nuance, and enticing flavor and aroma that has made oolong tea so enduringly popular.

page 93 | location 1413-1415 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 18:06:29

Production time for oolong tea can be as long as thirty-six to forty hours, making these teas both labor-intensive and challenging for tea makers. The reward for this work is strikingly flavorful tea with aromas that are redolent of melons, apricots, honey, leather, wood, spice, and orchids.

page 115 | location 1759-1760 | Added on Thursday, 19 March 2015 18:13:54

The most complicated tea manufacture is oolong. While green tea can be made in one day, oolongs, properly and carefully made, can take as many as four days to be completed.

page 177 | location 2704-2709 | Added on Saturday, 21 March 2015 18:07:43

Tea, like freshly roasted coffee and aromatic spices, possesses delicate aromatics that will deteriorate when exposed to the flavor-robbing influences of air, heat, and humidity. For the best protection, store tea in a clean glass or tin container to preserve its flavor and soundness. Depending on the type of tea, most properly stored tea will keep for a minimum of one year; the same tea stored carelessly may lose its goodness in just two or three months. Of course, some oolong, black, and Pu-erh teas store well for longer than one year, but for the majority of green, yellow, and white teas, it is best to replenish with fresh tea once the seasonal harvest brings new tea to market.

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