The Anthropic Principle (Again)

Apparently Ed Witten has abandoned all rational thought about the fundamentals of the Universe and embraced a version of gasp! the Anthropic Principle. At least that's how Peter Woit sees it.

The Anthropic Principle is an answer to the question why are the fundamental laws of physics, and the values of electron mass, charge and the other fundamental constants, so nicely tuned to make it possible for human life to appear?.

The Anthropic Principle says, very crudely, that if they weren't, we wouldn't be here. To stop that being a tautology, it is taken to mean that the values of the physical constants are not compulsory. There are many values the fundamental constants could take, and most of them lead to a Universe that would be hostile to human life. We might be able to show more, which is that a Universe that started off with one or more fundamental constants that were very different would somehow never really get started: it might never cool down enough to become transparent, or it might fly apart because the force of gravity was too weak... there are all sorts of reasons. This would show is that if the Universe was stable at all, it would have to be life-friendly.

The Non-Anthropists want the Laws of Physics to be such that only Universes fit for human life can and must form. and only those Universes.

There are seventeen or so fundamental parameters in the Standard Model, and none can be derived from any of the others. The Non-Anthropists are claiming there is a set of as yet unknown Laws of Nature / Fields / Particles, without any arbitrary numerical parameters, that in turn determine the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model. After decades of work by some of the smartest people ever to walk the planet, we are nowhere near such a theory.

Suppose we did find such a set of fundamental-constant-determining laws. Would this answer the Non-Anthropists' question?

It might. But some ten-year-old would perk up and ask: why those laws? Why not others? .

The infinite regress of ten-year old's questions.

So there has to be a point at which we say "ENOUGH" about explanation, even in physics. I can safely say that any phenomenon that requires 10,000 engineers, a 13 TeV, 27-km accelerator, plus hundreds of hours of statistical analysis to find, will not be used by any medical equipment manufacturer. Or anyone else. For all practical purposes, the Dirac equation and its associated particles are "ENOUGH".

This is really the Non-Anthropists's problem. They want mo' research: to abandon smashing ever-higher energy beams of hadrons and finding no "new physics" year after year would be some kind of abandonment of the Human Project. Like not subsidising contemporary composers whose music is read more than it is performed. (Apparently actually performing one's work is passe. The Kool Kids pass around their latest compositions as MIDI files by e-mail.)

Hope springs eternal in the Non-Anthropists' breast. Next year someone may discover the Missing Laws / Fields / Particles.

I'm not saying they aren't there to be found. I don't know.

I am saying that, if we did find them, it would not help us reduce our carbon emissions, or whatever Liberal causes Non-Anthropists espouse. It would not cure cancer, or create a universal vaccine.

I guess I'm saying we know ENOUGH fundamental physics to work on all the other problems we need to solve.

Free Music Streaming - Some Thoughts

British people of a certain age have an instinctive belief that music, documentaries, news and entertainment should be free and of good quality. This is because the BBC spoiled at least two or three generations by providing a lot of good music without advertising and without a subscription charge. The TV license is for broadcast television, there is still no charge for listening to the radio.

The BBC has to be navigated carefully, because you might fall into some Metropolitan Goodthink, and it takes a good few washes to get those stains out. As for the commercial stations, I can't stand advertisements, so commercial radio is a no-go. It didn't used to be, but it is now.

The full-bore streaming providers (Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, Amazon Music, You Tube Music, Apple Music and some Swedish outfit) all charge. We're not looking at them right now. What can we get for free?

All the following have Apps and a website.

Radio Player provides access to a lot of UK radio stations, but not so many from outside the UK. If the stations use ads, you will get the ads.

Accuradio is a weird one. It has a wide range of channels, does have ads, and will lock you out if you listen for too long! The streaming rate is positively 1990's at 32kps (not a misprint).

There is TheClassicalStation(.org) which is conventional radio station based (or at least its phones are) in North Carolina. You get what they are broadcasting at the time, just like Radio 3.

Mixcloud (https://www.mixcloud.com/) has a wide selection of mixes and podcasts from DJs and programme makers. It's heavily oriented to dance / jazz / soul and similar, as the 'Mix' bit suggests. There are recognisable names using it, and the quality is generally good. If you don't like what you hear, just choose another mix. I am currently in the middle of a Mixcloud phase.

Bandcamp allows artists to upload music or podcasts, which can be listened to free, and if you like what you hear, you can support the artist by buying the track or CD. I have purchased one piece from Bandcamp (Headnodic & Raashan Ahmad's Low Fidelity, High Quality (Vol.2)). I got a think you e-mail and he got a darn sight more than he would from Spotify or a record label.

Soundcloud provides the same functionality as Bandcamp, though has more podcasts. "All podcasts are on Soundcloud" - except Joe Rogan. You can buy direct from the artist via Soundcloud.

Music Passion (aka Classical.com) looks like a classical music version of Bandcamp / Soundcloud, and has a $1/month subscription. (That's nearly free.)

Idagio is a classical streaming service which is free-with-ads, or ad-free and CD-quality with subscription. It looks a little mainstream to me: you're not going to be troubled by Boulex or Pendercki.

DanzWaves is an app with three radio streams: Chilltrax, Radio Danz, and Predanz. Chilltrax is what it suggests; Radio Danz has House and Dance music; Predanz has dance tracks from the 1990s and 2000s.

None of these will provide a guaranteed stream of listenable classical music at any time of the day or night. Not even Radio Three does that - the closest it gets is the Through The Night programme.

Which is a dodge I hadn't thought of. Go to https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_radio_three and scroll down for the Highlights. Night Tracks will provide you with perfectly acceptable music that lasts an hour or so.

If you want classical music, it may be all you need.

SAGE = Red Army Faction

Bear with me here.

Right at the start of this nonsense, I said that the March 2020 lockdown felt like a war.

I never examined that any further, partly because I couldn't hear any bombs, and nobody was dying in the streets.

But it doesn't feel like a war.

It feels like a terrorist campaign.

Terrorists aim to create an atmosphere of paranoia.

The Government must be made to suspect every innocent citizen of carrying a deadly virus bomb.

Innocent citizens must feel imposed upon by the Government's security measures.

Innocent citizens must look at each other as if they might be a threat.

Governments and corporations set up elaborate security theatre: X-Ray machines at airports; masks and social distancing.

A class of suspect people is created: Marxists, right-wing activists, asymptomatic carriers.

Special committees are convened to assess risks.

Government agencies get arbitrary powers to impose restrictions and searches.

Terrorists attack and scare the people...

The Great Toilet Roll shortage was a PR stunt that worked too well, and caused panic buying.

Pro-Virus propaganda was put out because we weren't scared enough.

Social distancing made us treat each other like disease-ridden curs.

Carefully-staged videos showing the Police bullying members of the public appeared on You Tube.

Restrictions on our behaviour were intentionally confusing and pointless, to make us feel insecure.

Working from home made the Virus seem deadly.

... but terrorists leave the infrastructure alone.

Middle-class civil servants had to work from home, but working-class Amazon drivers could still deliver things. And all those "essential jobs".

That's why I never felt right about any of the Government's actions around the Virus.

It's too much like what happens when a bunch of terrorists gets too active.

Governments over-react beyond all reason.

Flabby-faced men, and hatchet-faced women, in grey suits, with establishment jobs.

Can they be terrorists? So close to retirement and without guns and bombs?

But who needs guns and bombs when you have the Government to do your dirty work?

Walk. Duck. Quack.

This Goes On Until At Least 2025. There's Always Another Virus

In January this year, I suggested we should plan for this nonsense to be going on for another four years. Until 2025. I had a moment's hope after July 19th, as the Government switched policy from looking at cases to looking at deaths. Maybe we would get through Christmas without restrictions and suggestions that we all might like to stay home. Maybe Boris wanted to be the only leader of a Top Ten economy whose people had Christmas at all.

And then along came Omicron, and the PR turned on a sixpence. Suddenly cases mattered. Boris imposed mask wearing in shops and trains. It wasn't so much the condition, but that he felt he could do it. One of two things will happen: Omicron will be declared harmless, the restrictions removed and a Happy Christmas to all; or the restrictions will be tightened and a work-from-home advice given. There will be almost no enforcement of this, but it will be enough to p**s everyone off. As a result, the wary people will plan for another lockdown, and another two terms of home-schooling.

Break out that "I Am Exempt" badge. I've been using mine and have had zero problems. Shop assistants smile, they don't frown.

I am pretty sure that the Government cannot afford another lockdown, or even to close "non-essential shops" and restrict hospitality activity. The next one will be a LINO (lockdown in name only) that restricts our social lives, but is enforced by exactly nobody (except the twats and bullies, and there are always those).

But I am now confident that this is not going to go away in Summer 2022.

WW2 might have ended in 1945, but rationing remained until 1954. Bomb sites were common in the 1960s. It wasn't until the 1980s that The War faded from our social memory.

Economically, this is as expensive as a conventional old-school world war.

This stuff is going on until at least summer 2025. There's always another virus.

Travel restrictions, masking, working-from-home, cut-back-on-socialising-in-Winter, tests, Red Lists, quarantine hotels, and inoculation drives. Threats of passports this and certificates that. Closing shops, opening shops. Years of bulls**t PR gaslighting and of special interest groups advancing their causes in the chaos.

It will be a few years before we believe that restrictions will not suddenly be re-imposed.

Our lives will feel worn-out and shabby.

Like the world does after the snow turns to dirty slush.

Mac Pro 14" vs Mac Air 13.3" - Overthinking the Choice

I thought I'd call it "overthinking" before you did.

My trusty Mac Air has been with me for nearly six years. Intel i5, 4GB RAM, 256 SDD. I mostly use it for writing and media consumption, so it's vastly over-powered for my "use case" (as it used to be called).

But one day, it's going to pack up.

And I want to do other things. Like record some of the music I play on guitar and piano. Which means running Garageband and maybe some plug-ins. I'm not sure about making YT videos, or even why I might do it. Also photography, if I have good enough photographs to do things with. The current Air can handle that, except at industrial levels of production, which I'm not going to reach.

But the Intel Airs are no more. Only the M1 machines. Which are:

The minimum 256x8, 8-7-16 cores (CPU-GPU-Neural) Air for £999.
Trade up to 512x8 and it's £1,199.
Add another graphics core to 8-8-16 and it's £1,249.
Add another 8GB RAM and it's £1,449 / £1,399.

The basic Mac Pro is 512x16 and 8-14-16 cores for £1,899. It comes with Magsafe ("it's not a Mac if it's not Magsafe"), an HDMI port and a SDXC card reader (which my Mac Air has and I have NEVER used). Add adapters for all that to the cost of the Air, and it's another £45.

Whichever, I'm going to need USB A -> C adapters for my external CD drive, and Lightning to USB C adapters for my other iDevices. This is not going to be horribly expensive.

I think 512GB SSD is needed for the extra things I want to do. Plug-ins gobble up space. So £1,199 is the baseline.

The extra £700 to the Mac Pro gets me: a slightly bigger, but undeniably better screen; 8GB more RAM, 6 more video cores, plus better speakers, microphone array, and Face Time camera. Also the Mac Pro has fans, and the Air doesn't. Would I really use any of that?

Don't forget that the real upgrade is from my 4GB Intel i5 Air to an 8GB M1 chip. That's the WOW factor right there. The reviewers of the M1 Air said its video editing was easily fast enough unless you were doing really big files in 4K. If I ever do anything, it will be smaller and in 1080p. So I'm covered.

If I ever do need that extra processing power, I will probably buy an iMac. Heaven knows what I'll be doing though.

Is there any improvement in performance in going to 16GB of RAM? The reviewers say there isn't, except at insane loads I would never reach, because the M1 chip accesses the SSD so fast it's almost RAM. Other voices suggest 'future-proofing' with 16GB. Well, when I got my Intel Air, I wondered about getting 8GB because future-proofing, but 4GB has turned out to be just fine - especially when I dumped out Evernote and Dropbox, which had bloated beyond all reasonableness. Both Apple and Microsoft are paying more attention to making their operating systems use less RAM and work faster. Apple even more so. So I'm taking it that 8GB in the new Air will be as future-proof as well.

So is the luxury stuff (speakers, screen, microphones and iSight camera) and the additional ports worth £700?

Nah. The guy (*) did say that if you don't know that you need a Mac Pro, then you don't. And I've convinced myself the baseline Air will have all the oomph my modest needs will need.

Baseline Air with 512GB plus a Magsafe adapter, and the USB A -> C converters for my heritage USB A and Lightning gear.

OMG did I just reach a conclusion?



(*) You know, the guy whose YT video you watched and thought was good, but now you can't remember who it was. He makes a lot of videos.

Lightbulbs and the Poynting Vector (Veristasium)

Electro-magnetism (E&M) is genuinely weird. Most people never find this out, because most people never go into electrical engineering or a physics PhD (where you really have to grapple with it).

Most people think of electricity as volts, amps and watts. Maybe ohms. We don't use ohms in a household context.

The initiated talk about capacitance, reactance, inductance, resistance and conductance. They talk about "transmission lines", "skin effects", and "antennas". The rest of us need to be electrical engineers before all that makes sense. (Oh. Wait. I almost was one.)

Here's a way in: metals like copper are often called good "conductors of electricity", as if electricity is something that passes through the metal. Instead, think of metals as good receivers of electromagnetic radiation. Wires do not in some sense channel or concentrate the electromagnetic fields, or act as pipes for electrons to flow along, they respond to the electromagnetic fields. Indeed, everything responds to electromagnetic fields. Mostly not much.

Wires respond by creating their own little electromagnetic field around them. Most materials (because "everything is a capacitor") respond by retaining tiny, tiny amounts of charge which they then eventually let go of. Air does this. So does polyester, which is why it crackles when you take it off.

Mr Veritasium set up a circuit with a battery, a switch, a light opposite the switch and some very long wires connecting everything. The idea was that the wires would be so long it would take a noticeable amount of time for the electricity to "flow" along the wires and power the light.

Except the light comes on instantly.

His explanation uses a thing called the Poynting vector. Do not use those words near physicists, as they may call your bluff.

Electromagnetic waves have an electric field (E) and a magnetic field (B) that are always in phase and at right angles to each other, and to the direction of travel of the wave. (This is why there have to be at least three physical dimensions, or we couldn't have Radio Three.) Since electromagnetic waves carry energy, it makes sense that there should be an energy vector corresponding to the wave in the direction of travel. Poynting proved that this vector (*) S = E x B, where 'x' is the vector cross-product, and I've left out a constant of proportionality. It's the E times B bit that is the achievement, not the direction (cross product), because we got that already from the physics.

So Mr Veritasium said, the electric field is pointing this way (points along wire) and the magnetic field is pointing that way (points upwards) so the S vector must be (pointing at the light bulb). Presto! The energy gets to the light more or less instantly.

Which convinced absolutely nobody, because they piled in to discuss this using anything but Poynting vectors. Transmission lines and displacement currents was a favourite, because, well, engineers. Nobody was doubting the Poynting explanation, because physics > engineering, but because they were engineers, they wanted to explain it in terms of something more familiar and material.

Complete the well-known phrase or saying: cart, horse.

Poynting's insight was that the materials in which the wave moves (e.g. air, wires) do not facilitate the power transmission, rather they modify the electro-magnetic waves, and hence the power transmission. The transmission-line / displacement current explanations are consequences of the transmission of power in the direction of the Poynting vector, not explanations. When modelling a specific setup, the B vector (which is for free space) is replaced by the H vector, which takes into account the effect on the B vector of the materials involved.

What happens is this: when the switch is closed, a voltage pulse starts to travel round the circuit. This creates a magnetic field B through the Maxwell equation (with J = 0) for B

$\nabla \times B = \mu_0 \epsilon_0 \frac{\partial E}{\partial t}$

which creates a Poynting vector S. Behind that pulse comes the first lap of a current J that will be circulating once the circuit is in a steady state. That sustains the B field by the Maxwell equation (with $ \frac{\partial E}{\partial t} = 0$) for B

$\nabla \times B = \mu_0 J$

which sustains the Poynting vector S. (The E field is sustained by the battery voltage). That S field carries the energy that excites the molecules in the wire in the bulb and creates the light. Because the wire in the bulb is a good receiver of electromagnetic radiation.

Not a transmission line in sight.

It's worth noting that if the bulb was put, say 300,000,000 metres away from the switch on the opposite side of a loop, then it would take 1 second for the bulb to light, but that would still be faster than the roughly 1.6 seconds it would take for the voltage / current wave-front to reach it.

This is, of course, handwaving. More precise calculations would take account of the dielectric air between the wires to calculate H and also factor in the displacement currents, but the principle remains the same. That would start to sound like engineering. But the engineering is there to help perform the calculation, not to help understand what's happening.



(*) Strictly E, B and S are not vectors, which are 1-forms, but flux densities, which are 2-forms. This is the only time in your life you will ever read that.

Philosophy of Mathematics - Number Theory

Off in another part of my thoughts, which have been on hold for a while, I have been trying to work out some ideas on the philosophy of mathematics.

I have two theses. One is about the relationship of abstract mathematical ideas to various types of measurement or geometric properties. If you want to know how the various derivatives on curved spaces arise from the simple issues of co-ordinate changes, it's all there. The other is a methodological thesis, that the purpose of mathematics is to provide tools and techniques to solve problems that arise from modelling physical and other processes, and to understand the scope and limits of those techniques. Creating and solving the equations of the mathematical models is what's usually called "applied mathematics", while understanding the scope and limits of the techniques is a lot of what's called "pure mathematics".

And then there's Number Theory. Which is about numbers. Not mathematical models.

You know that Langlands thing that all the Kool Kids are working on?

Yep. Number theory. Finite field number theory at that. Geometric Langlands is even more abstruse.

It takes genius-level insight and technique to understand the more recent developments in Langlands. That's the point: if the specialists can barely follow it, how is it going to be any use to some poor post-grad working on differential geometry at the University of Ennui-sur-Blase?

The social purpose of mathematicians is to teach other people - physicists, statisticians, epidemiologists, computer scientists and programmers for example - how to use the problem-solving techniques mathematics offers. What mathematicians do in their spare time is their business: they need a decent laptop, a whiteboard and some paper and pens: math is cheap compared to fundamental physics.

The Langlands guys can do what they want in their spare time. But it's a rabbit-hole. Maybe it's a big, well-lit rabbit-hole with all the health and safety gear and plenty of mechanical digging tools, but it's still a rabbit-hole. Unlike some of the rabbit-holes mathematicians have buried themselves into (functional analysis, for instance), Langlands is not going to produce anything useful to regular working stiffs (for instance, functional analysis produced the theory of weak solutions to differential equations, which is very useful). I feel confident saying that because Langlands is about structures the rest of mathematics just doesn't use.

(Rabbit-holes are as opposed to specialisms, which are very specific subjects that have useful applications in the real world or other parts of maths with real world applications. Like research in PDEs.)

Maybe "rabbit-hole" should be a term of art in methodology. It's a line of research that has no obvious application to any existing problems or in other branches of maths. The scientific version would be a research programme that was making theoretical progress but no empirical progress (was not making new predictions). A rabbit-hole may branch up to the surface every now and then, as applications to problems in other branches of maths are found, but generally once dug, the researchers dig away happily underground.

In this case I would be saying that Number Theory was a mathematician's pastime, and that other very abstruse, or very off-beat, programmes, are for all the sophistication, esoterica for the aficionados. Which doesn't sound too dramatic.