{"id":249,"date":"2003-09-02T10:47:57","date_gmt":"2003-09-02T17:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=249"},"modified":"2003-09-02T10:47:57","modified_gmt":"2003-09-02T17:47:57","slug":"extreme-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2003\/09\/extreme-physics\/","title":{"rendered":"Extreme physics"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m a sucker for popular literature on mathematics and evolutionary biology, and were it not for RyanAir’s grossly unfair 15kg luggage allowance I would now be finishing this book<\/a> on the Riemann Hypothesis<\/a> instead of leaving it in my parents’ library in Dublin. Or maybe not. I felt it wasn’t well written, and now Amazon reviewers are finding all kinds of faults with it, so perhaps I will start again with Prime Obsession<\/em><\/a>, which incidentally would be a good brand name if anyone ever decides to market perfume to geeks.<\/p>\n

Extreme physics is another topic I lap upThis link to a New York Times article should be permanent, courtesy of a pact with Userland<\/a> and the NYT. It’s an officially sanctioned back door, of sorts, the result of a NYT keenly aware that bloggers’ links are great publicity, yet wanting to charge for its archives.<\/span>. The New York Times updates us<\/a> on the latest in string theory in today’s science section, and it makes for some mind-blowing paragraphs:<\/p>\n

“In the long run,” he said, “the universe doesn’t want to be four-dimensional. It wants to be 10 dimensions.”<\/p>\n

So sooner or later, the loops will unravel like a tangle of rubber bands, passing through a succession of configurations that take less and less energy to maintain, until finally the other dimensions expand and the cosmological constant is gone.<\/p>\n

The decay of the cosmological constant will be fatal, astronomers agree. At that moment a bubble of 10-dimensional space will sweep out at the speed of light, rearranging physics and the prospects of atoms and planets, not to mention biological creatures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So all of you hoping for everlasting fame or immortality, don’t waste your energy. Literally.<\/p>\n

Yep, if I won the lottery, I’d go straight back to university, paying brilliant but hungry PhD candidates to stay patiently by my side as I stumble through mathematical foothills, up to physics base camp, then making the ascent into the rarified air of quantum physics, hoping for a glimpse of the Theory of Everything at the summit. So far, nobody’s made it all the way up, or at least come back alive.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, because I have a modicum of numeracy, I will never play the lottery. Catch-22.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a sucker for popular literature on mathematics and evolutionary biology, and were it not for RyanAir’s grossly unfair 15kg luggage allowance I would now be finishing this book on the Riemann Hypothesis instead of leaving it in my parents’ … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-41","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}