Dialogos of Eide/Home

  • Boltzmann’s Brain

    There is a new article by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times called, Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science. If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some…

  • The Perfect Sphere

    Before I begin I had to mention the following two entries below that I wanted to do but was short on time. This recording was produced by converting into audible sounds some of the radar echoes received by Huygens during the last few kilometres of its descent onto Titan. As the probe approaches the ground,…

  • Pattern Recognition

    Strominger: That was the problem we had to solve. In order to count microstates, you need a microscopic theory. Boltzmann had one–the theory of molecules. We needed a microscopic theory for black holes that had to have three characteristics: One, it had to include quantum mechanics. Two, it obviously had to include gravity, because black…

  • Collapse of the Blackhole

    String theory grew out of attempts to find a simple and elegant way to account for the diversity of particles and forces observed in our universe. The starting point was to assume that there might be a way to account for that diversity in terms of a single fundamental physical entity (string) that can exist…

  • What are those Quantum Microstates

    Now two points occupy my mind that hold questions as to what and how such counting can be done in terms of geometric propensity, that would allow these geometries into topological states. First point is: Lubos Motl said: We need to get closer to the “theory of everything”, regardless of the question whether the destination…

  • Microstates and Gravity

    Strominger: That was the problem we had to solve. In order to count microstates, you need a microscopic theory. Boltzmann had one–the theory of molecules. We needed a microscopic theory for black holes that had to have three characteristics: One, it had to include quantum mechanics. Two, it obviously had to include gravity, because black…

  • Blaise Pascal

    Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662) Born in Clermont-Ferrand (France), the young Pascal was introduced to mathematics and physics by his father. So precocious was his talent in these disciplines that he published his innovative Essai pour les coniques [Essay on conics] in 1632, at only sixteen. In 1631, he moved to…

  • Emergence= Phase Transitions of Symmetry?

    Witten said: One thing I can tell you, though, is that most string theorist’s suspect that spacetime is a emergent Phenomena in the language of condensed matter physics. Part of the difficulty was realizing that the end result of a current depiction of the universe, and the reality around us now, had led us to…

  • Quantum Microstates: Gas Molecules in the Presence of a Gravitational Field

    Andy Strominger: This was a field theory that lived on a circle, which means it has one spatial dimension and one time dimension. We derived the fact that the quantum states of the black hole could be represented as the quantum states of this one-plus-one dimensional quantum field theory, and then we counted the states…

  • Fool’s Gold

    Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) In 1877 Boltzmann used statistical ideas to gain valuable insight into the meaning of entropy. He realized that entropy could be thought of as a measure of disorder, and that the second law of thermodynamics expressed the fact that disorder tends to increase. You have probably noticed this tendency in everyday life!…