The Grid: Frank Wilczek and Physics

Here is a new book by Frank Wilczek, one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for 2004.

If you ever wanted to ask your college physics professor a bunch of freshman level questions, I'm sure Mr. Wilczek would be the perfect one to have.

This man actually understands what he's talking about, more than I can say for many, many speakers on this topic. What is more, he is quick to tell you what he doesn't understand.

Finally non-mathematicians like me can get past the 'clouds of probability and a little more into symmetry and some of the history behind the math that we are too dense to understand.

Wilczek is not afraid to discuss the 21st century ether, which he has recharacterized and christened 'the grid', a space filling field through which photons, for one example are perpetuated. What is remarkable is the familiarity he brings to the topic of gluons and quarks, making them much more accessible as concepts to the rest of us.

I would rate this book as right up there with the 'Where Mathematics Comes From' for a current library of understandable commentary on Math and Physics.

This Unhistoric Day

On this day, before one of those days that will be written about, perhaps in history books, I thought it would be appropriate to write about something totally unrelated, as usual.

Did you know that 5 is 0% of 1024? That's how much of my storage space I'm using in this blog.

This is the lie that statistics brings you on your computer desktop.

It is a lie of scale. We live in an age when fractal scaling is all important to our survival, but it is ignored. The miracle of humans is that they can comprehend massive scale discrepancies, as between a universe and a pea.

But in a practical sense, we ignore it. For example, just how many organisms are living on your skin right now? We ignore this gracefully.

This is why, when the computer tells us that 5 is 0% of 1024, our brains flash WRONG. And then we go on with life. But, what are the implications?

If 5 is 0% of 1024, then what is 6?

Something tells me that this is the way the bacteria living on our skins, really want it. Scale, scale is the reality that is invisible to us. How many ppm of mercury is in the fish that you ate last week? Is it 0%?

This, on the day before we will be counting numbers and demanding perfect accuracy. It may mean the end of the world.