Music, molecules and misanthropy (econophysics part 1)

I make no secret of my disdain for “social scientists.” Most social science is just some guy telling you a story, and pretending to be a big shot. It isn’t much different to me than some ancient bearded fellow at the campfire explaining lightning as sparks from Thor’s hammer. Economists shouldn’t be so bad. They have actual numeric data, data on the economy itself, financial data and individual data. They have grand theories about how the world works. They should be able to do something. But their ideas usually have the substance of political ideology. If they’re feeling particularly ambitious, they’ll wire their idiot ideology up to some weaksauce math like Granger causality.

Physicists are people interested in modeling things from first principles, so they occasionally try to come up with some more interesting models than professional economists have come up with thus far. For example, consider a bunch of people in an auditorium listening to some bad opera music. According to something like standard utility theory, each person in the audience will clap based on how much they individually enjoyed the opera. The collective clapping function is the linear sum of the individual clapping functions. If you believe standard utility theory, every individual in the crowd has N claps worth of utility in them, and will give those N claps according to when they precious well intend to clap and stop. Same thing with standing ovations.

Ever been in one of these audiences? If you have, and you paid attention, you’d notice that people mostly clap and stop clapping in total synchrony with people around them. Same thing with standing. Occasionally some brave person will stand prematurely, and the social forces in the theater will force him back down again. Then the damn fool will stand up again when the rest of the crowd tells him it is OK. Same thing with clapping, or stopping clapping. Some people will stop clapping before those around them do. They sit uncomfortably for a while, then they start clapping again, until everyone else around them decides not to. You can also observe patterns and defects in the behavior of people in this social lattice: there may be a group on the right, or towards the front who are more enthusiastic or subject to peer pressure.

“people, or spin-1/2 particles? hard to say from far enough away; everything looks small”

As it turns out, this behavior can be modeled pretty well using the ferromagnetic random field Ising model; a model which derives magnetic properties based on how microscopic spins in a substance work and interact with each other. In a ferromagnet, such spins have what amounts to peer pressure from exchange forces arising from the Pauli exclusion principle. A random field is added to each spin location to give a “tendency” to an individual clapper (or a spin). An overall driver field is added to provide a stimulus (this field can be 0, like when there is no external magnetic field, or they turn out the lights). And you can vary the strength of the “peer pressure” forces between spins or clappers. You can observe all the phenomena of ferromagnetism: domain walls, echos and hysteresis in the social lattice of the clapping opera fans. One of the interesting results of all this is that, in systems with a lot of peer pressure, you can get very abrupt drop off of clapping without a sharp change in the driver field (aka, how much the lights come on after the Opera). In fact, this is sometimes observed, generally in societies with strong peer pressures. Even when it is not abrupt, the drop off follows a pretty distinct scaling law. The details of such models are mostly in the network type, which, in the case of concert halls, is a square lattice, like the one shown below.

“+/- denotes opinion, color is tendency, and the big arrow an external driver field”

I’m not the only person to think of using Ising models to model crowd behavior; there is a small industry of econo-physicists who use such models. I originally read about it years ago in a book called Synergetics by Hermann Haken (a book which has been formative in my way of looking at the world). Not only are these kinds of models pretty good at reproducing phenomenology, as J.P. Bouchaud and friends proved, they’re even pretty good at reproducing actual numbers in more or less controlled experiments. They’re good at other things too; for example, such networks can reduce to Hopfield nets in some approximations. Which rather indicates they’re also useful for modeling how individuals make certain kinds of decisions as well. In other words; not only do you act like you are one of these spin-1/2 particles, in many situations, you act like your brain is made up of a scale free network of them. The same models can be used to model advertising or political campaigns, rumors, mass hysterias and fashion trends. And the numbers match up pretty well. I’ve seen the model applied to all kinds of things. I even know about a way of mapping it onto the Bass diffusion model.

“The end of a clapping session. Note rapid fall off; the black curve dies off faster than the echo time of the room it happened in, meaning social pressure to stop clapping travels faster than the speed of sound -I stole the graph from a paper by Q. Michard and J.P. Bouchaud” which is well worth your attention if you like this brief treatment

Consider all this the next time you are in a concert hall clapping for some trained baboon who thinks he is Ludwig von Beethoven, and the dimwits next to you are going into transports over what a wonderful performance it was (of course it was wonderful; they paid $300 for the seats!). Do you find yourself clapping because you think the monkey deserves it? Or do you find yourself clapping because you’re a molecule in a lattice of humanity? What does that say about you in the rest of your day to day life? How much of what you do and think you are is just because of social pressure? How many celebrated trends and movements, no more enduring and dignified than a spin-1/2 particle helplessly flopping around in response to other mindless spin-1/2 particles? Let’s face it; if you know someone else who has similar opinions to yours, if you run in a crowd, if there are others who are like you: this is probably why. You have to be pretty misanthropic to grasp this on an emotional level, but it’s something philosophers have been saying for centuries, and now a days you can actually write code which models it.

The implications for trading trends are obvious. Since people in “peer pressure” situations can  change their minds abruptly, one needs to be ready for the flip over, or at least aware of the nonlinear conditions which can lead to an abrupt change in people’s positions. Are their hints as to when people are going to stop clapping? Well, let’s talk about that in part two. Professor Didier Sornette seems to think so. Sornette worked with the Random Field Ising model, but his fame has come from a sort of scaling law he has come up with dealing with trend followers and opinion bubbles.

U.S. energy independence: hard numbers

People have been gnashing their teeth about this for decades, since the 1973 Yom Kippur war and Arab oil embargo. There are giant government think tanks and agencies devoted to fixing this problem, and the present government seems to be obsessed with appearing to do something about it, but I’m going to solve the problem without putting any pants on. In fact, I will complete my solution before the morning’s second cup of joe is done (finding pictures took longer than figuring out what to do).

The most basic question to address is, how much energy do we use in america? About 100 quadrillion BTU’s. We import about 25 quadrillion BTU’s net (we import some, we export some). I’m basing this on 2000 figures, figuring consumption is approximately flat due to increased costs; scale up or down as needed if you feel like digging up the current figures.

Of this, about 780 billion kilowatt hours are generated using nuclear power, aka 2.6 quadrillion BTU’s. So, build 10 times the nuclear power capacity of america, and all our energy importation problems are solved. Coal liquefaction or domestic oil will take care of the fact that our cars burn gasoline rather than the hydrogen used in electrical batteries. This means, we’d have to add 7800 billion KWH to the infrastructure. This costs $1500 per KW in capital outlay. This works out to $1.3 trillion in capital outlay for all our new nuke plants. Amortized over 10 years, that’s a reasonable $130 billion a year in capital outlay. It will also quickly pay for itself, though such a huge change to the economy might have positive side effects. For one thing, it will up the construction and heavy manufacturing industries which helps out the vast pool of working class americans with nothing to do, and give them money to spend on goods and services. It will also help the nuclear service industries. It would also give us lots of cheap power with which to do interesting things, like make liquid coal to burn in vehicles. Also, uranium is mostly mined in Canada and Australia, which are much more politically stable than the places where we get oil from. Not that we’d have to care about those other places any more; while it is political of me to say so, and I loathe politics, the cost savings from not having to periodically invade the Middle East could easily pay for our new nuke plants. We can let the Germans run the Middle East if they want to, since they were foolish enough to get rid of their nuclear power infrastructure.

We could do the same thing with coal (our proven reserves of coal are enough for 200 years at current energy consumption rates) for just about the same price. The disadvantage is far worse pollution load; coal ash is nasty and fairly radioactive stuff. Teller once worked out that there is more radioactive waste generated by burning coal per BTU than burning Uranium. The waste products from coal are either pumped into the atmosphere, or into the ground if you use scrubbers. There are huge volumes of stuff involved; huge volumes of coal, and nearly equal volumes of solid waste products. Coal is also politically unacceptable to people who subscribe to the presently fashionable climatological fantasies. Personally I think minimizing the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere isn’t a bad idea either, even though I don’t believe the climatologists. So, nukes are better; they don’t make any appreciable waste volumes.

People wring their hands about the horrors of SUV driving, incandescent light bulbs, and living in areas with bad climate which require heating and cooling, but all transportation in america totals up to about 22 quadBTUs, and all residencies in america consume 15 quadBTUs. While these are substantial and could be squeezed a bit more (radical changes would give maybe a factor of 2 improvement, for a savings of 18 quad BTUs), the more important consumption rates are industrial and commercial. These groups already have a huge incentive to be efficient as possible, as energy costs influence their bottom line. The most important consumers of energy are the economic engines which make the United States a wealthy country. This is true across the board. If you look at what China and India consume in terms of energy, per capita GDP and per capital energy consumption are pretty much linear. Russia is an outlier due to all those wasteful communist power plants, and the fact that they have plenty of power to burn. Plus it is cold there, so many industrial processes take more heat. Here is a little chart showing how much wealth is generated per amount of energy used; for the number in the last column “the bigger the better,” meaning such countries generate more wealth for every bit of energy used. It could mean they use lots of slave labor and don’t heat anything, like in China. It could mean the countries that are big and/or cold (Canada, Australia, America and Russia) require more energy. The differences between these nations in wealth generated per unit energy is not so great that you’d figure you could do much better than America does now, even if you were as obsessed with efficiency as, say, the Germans are. It is an interesting calculation; check it out:

Country	per capita energy use	GDP/capita	economic output/energy use
USA:	340 megaBTU	42000	$124/megaBTU
China:	35 megaBTU	6300	$180/megaBTU
Germany	173 megaBTU	29000	$167/megaBTU
Japan	175 megaBTU	30000	$171/megaBTU
Russia	200 megaBTU	11000	$55/megaBTU
Canada	343 megaBTU	33000	$96/megaBTU

This makes complete hash of the modern urban piety of “saving energy.” Even in China, where there are no environmental constraints (environmental constraints usually cost more in energy), and where people live like the serfs in Metropolis (approximate personal or comfort energy usage in China is zero), they still generate about the same amount of economic output per BTU as we do in the U.S.. I figure we could do a little better, but not too much better without becoming very poor.

For you hippies who fantasize about “renewable” (an absurd neologism meaning, “not nuclear”) solar power and windmills, the capital outlays are a minimum of a factor of 10 higher, and they often create more pollution and kill birds and desert life. The maintenance costs required are also absurd compared to nuclear power. Imagine a giant wind plant over the course of 50 years; the nuke plant is guaranteed to continue operation for the whole 50 years without serious construction costs. At best, I could imagine 1/5 of this figure from “renewable.” Wind might become slightly more important, as building really big mills can be cost efficient in windy areas, but even if you harvested all the wind energy in the country, you wouldn’t put an appreciable dent in U.S. energy needs. Consider; the total average amount of energy you get from the sun (solar, hydro, biomass and wind power all comes from the sun) is about 160W per square meter. The most you can get from that is about 5%., so, 32watts per square meter. America is 9 trillion square meters. You do the math. I think it comes out to 2E18 BTU. So, we use about 1/20 of the recoverable energy output of the sun to power the United States. I don’t fancy covering 1/22 of the nation in arsenic laden solar cells and replacing it every 10 years when they wear out. Though if we could bioengineer trees with electrical outlets, that would be OK by me.

Anyway: the hair shirt crowd needs to grow up; you can’t power the United States on pinwheels and solar powered calculators. You can’t save an important amount of energy unless you’re willing to eat gruel and live like a serf; and not a make-believe serf that takes international plane flights to save-the-world parties either. Americans as a people are a nation of artificers, mechanics and ingenious inventors; it wouldn’t be America without jet funny cars and monster trucks; let’s make them nuclear powered, and monster truck our way into …. the human future!

“Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred and speed! Does this surprise you? it is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!”-F.T. Marinetti

A peregrination on the nature of money

I’ve never studied economics. What I have read of economics appears to be ideology combined with bad math. Since so much of what passes for modern thought is annoying ideology combined with bad math, I try to avoid such unpleasantry. History, on the other hand, I always have time for. I would like to think using history to think about mysterious concepts like money is useful, but maybe not. It amuses me to do so in any case.

What is money? As I see it, money is a measure of economic output, which is used to create liquidity in markets, and which is backed by social agreement. Without money, you can’t buy things. If you can’t buy things, you’re stuck with your own economic output to make a living. Have fun dirt farming.

The earliest form of money was commodities. If you wanted a horse, you’d trade some grain for it. Later on, people learned to love silver and gold, and the rarity and density of these metals made them useful to trade for other things. The fact that gold was rare, inert and next to impossible to fake made gold that much more valuable than other materials as a trading instrument. The Lydians were the first to invent coin money in the 600’s BC. Coin money was a standardized mass of precious metal with a proof mark on it. People seem to think commodities are good hedges against inflation, and this is sometimes true, but, for example, Europe experienced hyper inflation in the 1500s and 1600s when Spain brought enormous gold hoards into the European economy. In a commodities denoted economy, if there is a sudden increase in supply of a commodity without an increase in economic output, inflation follows. Nobody did any more useful work, but there was more money. Therefore, you needed more money to buy a given amount of work, or anything else. If an increase in the supply of gold was accompanied by a similar increase in productivity, everything would balance out. For example, if your increase in gold comes from inventing the steam engine, you can use the gold to buy all kinds of other stuff made with steam engine productivity. On the other hand, if you only use gold for money, and experience a huge increase in per-capita productivity without an increase in the amount of gold, money doesn’t circulate freely; you get deflation. This means, holding gold is a better idea than spending it on stuff. This happened in the 1930s in America. This is why the 1930s sucked. This is also why people who want to return to the gold standard are insane. Gold works great when your society and economy doesn’t change much, but when it does, you need more flexible kinds of money. Another way to think of it: imagine your society has one hundred people with X pounds of gold. Now imagine hundreds more goldless people start to move in. Your gold becomes more valuable, so you’re less inclined to spend it as long as people keep moving in. That’s deflation. Now imagine your population of 100 people with X pounds of gold catches plague. The amount of gold stays the same, but the number of people who can do work gets smaller, so you get inflation.

A slightly different form of money is commodity backed money. In the old days, for example, the British Pound was backed by a pound of sterling silver. The first form of commodity backed money I know about was from ancient Sumeria, where they used clay figurines of goats to represent real goats. Between 1945 and 1971 (or 1973, depending how you count it), the US dollar was backed by gold reserves, though it was illegal for individuals to own gold reserves of their own, to prevent a run on the bank. Why? Because the Federal Reserve didn’t have enough gold in it to pay every depositor off. So, even though we used to have gold backed paper money, it was really just an idea of being paid off in gold. Between 1945 and 1971 nearly all forms of money in the world were based on US dollars. We had large gold reserves because we looted the world of gold as payment for WW-2. Since nobody else had any gold, and there really wasn’t enough physical gold, the convenient method of exchange was the dollar, as symbol of gold. The fact that all currencies were based on the dollar was not necessarily a good system for anybody (and it periodically had to be adjusted by moron economists: whenever it was, it caused huge problems), but it is an important historical fact. Commodity backed money is simple to understand. It’s just a convenient symbol for the stuff it’s backed by. In principle, it’s equivalent; just more portable. While people may look at that era as an, um, “golden era of hard currency, they somehow overlook the fact that the gold was a social fiction. I’m certain we didn’t have as much gold as dollars, though I don’t know how well this is documented, or even where it would be documented. The gold standard was really an idea, rather than a big pile of metal.

Another form of money is fiat money. That’s what we use now since the dissolution of the Breton Woods agreement. This agreement was broken in 1968, because the US was systematically devaluing its currency to fund Johnson’s “great society” programs, the Vietnam war, and the Space Program. Gold began to float against the dollar in 1971, basically because we didn’t have any more gold to keep up the social fiction. Now, US dollars are worth whatever you want to pay for them. In some ways, dollars are a bet on the US economy, which remains the largest, most stable and most productive in the world, despite all the present horrors. So, people still tend to base their currencies on dollars. Especially when they do a lot of business with America, which virtually everyone does. Problems can happen, however. If you export a lot to America, and your currency is fixed to dollars, you have to buy American debt. Which means, you’re buying your own currency, setting it on fire and sending America stuff in exchange for the currency you set on fire. This more or less works, until the debt becomes close to your GDP. Once the trade imbalance becomes severe, a correction is inevitable, and unfortunately for the holder of the bonds, they end up being worth a lot less. Fiat money is a bet that the US government will give you stuff if you give them dollars. Fiat money in America was originally issued by states to pay state taxes with.

Fiat money was not invented in 1971. America had gone on and off this type of money many times in its history. The glorious Song Dynasty in China invented fiat money in the 10th century. It was generally used by governments through out history when they wanted to fund large projects, like wars. It has many advantages over commodity backed money; for example, you can easily make more of it if your economy expands. If you have less money than you need to run your economy, you get big problems, like Great Depressions. Why buy anything when your money is a better investment than the economy itself? Currency which is a better investment than the economy itself is an abomination which negates its own purpose. Let that sink in: it is important and as far as I can tell, irrefutable.

If you have too much currency in circulation for your economic output, you get inflation, which is a sort of tax on people who have too much money saved up. Inflating currency on purpose can be done to avoid deflation; as the Fed is attempting now. Inflating currency on purpose can be done to avoid paying debts, as the Germans did after Versailles. You generally don’t want too much inflation, or your money isn’t worth anything (post WW-1 Germany), and so it isn’t useful for trade, but it is really just as harmful if money deflates even a little bit. When currency becomes more valuable over time, people will sit on their dumb pile of money, and nothing will ever happen. America and most of the world in the 1930s was an example of not enough money in circulation. One of the reasons the fascists (and, more obviously, the Swedes) did so well economically, is they issued fiat money. When you read the primary sources for the history of the Great Depression, you can see that all of FDR’s crazy ideas were ham-fisted attempts to create inflation without actually going into debt (Hoover was doing the same thing; I don’t know why he gets such a bad rap). The real answer was much simpler; create more money. When FDR did this to fund the destruction of Europe and Japan, the economy finally got better.

A prevalent but mysterious form of money is “credit money,” which is fiat money backed by banks, rather than by governments. People make a lot of noise about how credit money is some new form of supreme evil. Credit money is actually very old. Any time a bank would issue cheques or notes which were not backed by gold, they invented credit money. Now a days, banks issue credit money when they sell bonds. You can think of fiat money as a form of credit money issued by a government. But banks issue even more money by writing loans which are backed by bonds. In the old days, this was even more obvious: banks actually would issue their own notes. You might have “Wells Fargo dollars.” In more recent times, this sort of money is created by banks and hedge funds issuing derivative securities or exotic bonds, either backed by nothing, or backed by other securities; securities for which there may or may not be a market, and which may or may not have actual value. The use of credit money seems to help more than it hurts, as it allows private entities to create money when liquidity is needed by the economy to do things like, say, buy lots of stupid houses in the suburbs. Credit money is no different in principle than the government selling “war bonds.” You’re just funding different kinds of activity. Is it a bubble? Not a bubble? The way to answer the question is, is the credit money used for something worth investing in.

One of the little appreciated facts of American history: the Westward expansion was funded mostly by credit money. Banks and companies would set up shop with tiny gold reserves, people would use their money as currency, and the banks would regularly explode, making the issued money worthless paper. Why on earth would anyone back such a hare brained scheme? Simple, really: there was no other form of money available, because the government removed vast amounts of money from circulation in the form of greenbacks (fiat money which funded the Civil War) and silver notes. That, combined with the very real economic expansion brought on by new technologies and exploitation of new resources in the American West required much more money than was available. So, seemingly silly monopoly money was the only game in town. This caused problems to the people who held a lot of cash backed by an exploding bank, but it solved more problems than it caused, as it enabled markets, trade and economic growth at an important time in American history. You think derivatives are complicated? At the outbreak of civil war, there were over 7000 different kinds of Bank issued credit money in circulation in America; and there were no computers to sort this all out. Yet, America in that era was a Capitalist marvel; one of the greatest economic and industrial expansions of human history was funded on credit money. Sure, we were in the Long Depression but it was also the gilded age. “Funny money” works just fine, if your purpose is to get people to do useful work. The point of money isn’t to keep something in the bank like most people think: the purpose of money is to circulate. The “funny money” was used directly for what it is good for: people worked for it, and the fruits of their labor continued to exist after the money disappeared: aka, all of America West of the Mississippi. All the rail lines, mines, buildings, plumbing: they’re mostly still there. Sort of like all the houses, fabs and facebooks which were built in the 00’s, when that pile of credit money disappeared.

So, history indicates money is a measure of economic output backed by social agreement, which is used to create liquidity in markets. This sort of historical definition probably implies all kinds of other interesting questions, like what is a market, a bank, economic output, liquidity and so on. I’m not real interested in creating a school of economics, but it’s good to get to some kind of basic understanding of this sort of thing without looking through someone else’s blinders.

For a view into current events, I think Krugman is uncharacteristically spot on:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/americas-chinese-disease-not-quite-what-you-think/

And on a lighter note:

The problem with Lee Smolin and physics

Lee Smolin wrote a very important book a few years ago called, “the trouble with physics.” I give Lee a lot of credit: he recognizes there is trouble with physics; thousands of men have been working on string theory since the 1980s, and have yet to make anything resembling scientific progress in the subject. On the other hand, he misses out on an obvious reason why physics is in trouble, and I feel a powerful need to correct my intellectual superior in physics.

This book came out at around the same time as Woit’s “not even wrong,” which is on a similar topic, though Woit takes a different tack. Both contain decent descriptive histories of what string theory is, and where it went pear-shaped. Both books explain the sociological and ‘economic’ forces in building up a large community of very smart people … which doesn’t function properly. Both also miss out on an important thing which is pretty obvious to people outside his field. What all quantum gravity people (Smolin and his crew of merry misfits included with the string theorists) are doing is entirely aesthetically driven. There is no reason gravity should have a quantum theory any more than a ham sandwich should have a quantum theory associated with it. There are no experimental, or even observational reasons to presume gravity has a quantum limit. It’s all aesthetics. They’re nice aesthetics, but science has no real business doing aesthetics. The image Smolin paints of his flamboyant Italian colleague waving a knife around at the idea that the universe might not live up to his aesthetic ideals is supposed to be funny, but the knife fighter is emblematic of a very serious problem. Science is about learning about how the universe works, not seeking aesthetic answers to questions that the universe isn’t asking. While many great physicists have been prey to neo-platonic grandiosity as to how the universe works, they’re not being physicists when they think like that. They’re being art critics.

Allow me to explain what I mean with some other examples from Lee’s book. In his first chapter he defines what he claims are the five great outstanding problems in physics today. I must respectfully disagree with all but his second one. The four I disagree with are essentially cosmological questions; the questions string theory (and Smolin and Rovelli’s rival idea of “loop quantum gravity”) ultimately attempt to answer. Quantum gravity may be a silly question. I’m not some kind of lone heretic in saying this: I’m stealing the idea from people much smarter than I. People like the grand old man of physics, Freeman Dyson -or perhaps better yet for credential worshippers, Phil Anderson, a man who discovered something of mind-boggling importance which is largely met with a world-weary shrug by theoretical physicists in noodle theory land. Both Dyson and Anderson agree that we may no more have a quantum limit for gravity than steam engines and other grossly macroscopic phenomena have a quantum limit. Assuming gravity does have a quantum limit may be the great intellectual folly of theoretical physics of the last 50 years. Don’t do it just because Einstein did it. Einstein was also a communist, and we know that communism was a very, very bad idea.

Smolin’s outstanding problems numbers three and four, I count as essentially the same: he thinks it is important to come up with a unified field theory that predicts fundamental constants observed in nature. Why should things work this way, besides the fact that it would make Lee and his pals happy? Again; this “problem” is an aesthetic guess how he thinks things should be. These ideas about how a “theory of everything” should be are problematic for the same reasons the idea of quantum gravity itself is problematic. While many people do indeed think the universe should have some sort of ultimate theory which can unify the particles and forces, and predict why the fine structure constant is what it is, the reasons people think such are historical and aesthetic -these reasons can not remotely be described as physics. Aesthetically, physicists like only having to remember a few things, rather than many things. You can derive everything about electromagnetism by memorizing very few simple facts; same with statistical physics. Historically, the unification of magnetism, electricity and light into one theory really was a tremendous breakthrough in human knowledge. 50 years later, all manner of practical uses were found for it.

Let us compare E&M to the most successful unification of modern times, the electro-weak theory (a unification of a force governing certain kinds of nuclear decay with that of electromagnetism). Unlike Maxwell’s equations, electroweak theory is abysmally ugly. Unfortunately for aesthetics, it does appear the universe works this way. The wise and benign god who wrote Maxwell’s equations must have contracted electroweak theory out to some perverse lesser daemon, like Loki. Comparing practical implications; 50 years from the invention of modern electrodynamics we had the creation of the modern world of AC power, radio and almost everything else involving electricity which you take for granted. 50 years from the creation of electroweak theory: there have been no technological implications. I’ll go out on a safe, sturdy limb and assert there will be none, ever. As an intellectual project, glorious electroweak theory is literally more technologically sterile than … I don’t know: Thomas Aquinas ideas on how many angels fit on the head of a pin. And electroweak theory is a smashing success compared to any kind of quantum gravity; it was motivated and verified by experiment.

As for the many outstanding problems in astronomical cosmology which Smolin collects together as the fifth major outstanding problem in physics; I find it hard to get too worked up about them, as the astronomers seem to find new “anomolies” every time they fire up a new telescope. Historically, astronomy gave us Newton’s laws, but what has astronomy done for us lately in terms of real physics? Sure, dark matter and so on are interesting and worth thinking about, and it is nice to have someone telling the telescope johnnies what to look for, but there are far more frightening lacunae in physics which should be on this list.

I’m a lowlife quant: I went to a cow college and did fairly badly for myself while I was screwing around in physics. Very few of my former colleagues will stand up for me and talk about my ultimate brilliance, because frankly, I didn’t display any. However, even a mercenary dirtbag like me can come up with a better list than Lee Smolin, or, for that matter, any physicist in the public eye today. Here is the Scott Locklin’s five most important unanswered unquestions in theoretical physics today:

1. The fundamentals of quantum mechanics. I admit it; I stole this one from Lee Smolin. I just want to know how it works when it starts to turn into classical physics. Seriously: this is important, and it isn’t known. This is the subject I concerned myself with when I was doing physics. I made no progress at all, but I think it’s one of the things worth spending your time on. There are several small sub-fields of active research in the subject: quantum chaos and Mesoscopic physics. Maybe quantum information theory -though it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about it, and beyond Shor’s algorithm, I have read an awful lot of silly bullshit coming from this quarter. For some reason, there are not 10,000 physicists thinking about the basic question of nature, like there are in string theory. Smolin correctly identified the reason why: physics bureaucracy does not favor it.
2. The second law of thermodynamics, chaos and the arrow of time. If you never thought about this, you will say, “yeah, whatever,” but this is important. It’s important in all kinds of places; information theory, finance, psychology, and it’s not really understood why it is so.
3. Self-organization and emergent properties in matter. Sure, you have “nanotech” types of people (subject for another rant) trying to exploit this. Why doesn’t anyone even attempt to understand this? Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel for this; it seems to be worthy of study, and there is tons more to do. Meanwhile, armies of vast string theorists count the angels on heads of a boson.
4. Why is life? Never mind “how does life work,” tell me why life works at all! You’re all faced with an ultimate mystery of physics every morning in the shaving mirror. Why don’t you think about it a little? Don’t wave your hands on this one; tell me what’s going on. There is obviously order here; order which can presumably be understood by mathematics.
5. How do neural computers, aka brains work? Another problem of immense import. People are studying it; there are even good pop science books on the subject. Nobody is seriously studying it from a theoretical point of view.

I have this idea that physics, along with Western civilization in general, never fully escaped from the wandervogel era “playing indian in the woods” navel gazing of post WW-1 Europe. In fact, I think as a result, physics attracts moosh-headed people who think this sort of “looking into the mind of god” thinking is, well, acceptable, when it really shouldn’t be for a serious scientist. In the Victorian era which spawned the ideas of Maxwell and (early) Einstein, a theoretical physicist’s job was to come up with models that fit the experimental data; a physicist was a sort of mathematical phenomenologist. He was not an aesthetician, though he might create something of great aesthetic merit. An interesting observation which might be made is how physics followed many other formerly rigorous fields in to the badlands of ‘theory.’ String theory is to Victorian physics what modern Literary theory or artistic technique is to their Victorian analogs. Certainly, the modern things can be said to be more ’sophisticated’ -but it is also more useless for understanding the world.

Smolin’s idea that more affirmative action is going to help physics is laughably insane. I’d go so far as to say this is probably a symptom of the type of mental illness which thinks doing quantum gravity is important “because it must be so,” aesthetically. Physicists did better before they were required by their Universities to engage in ritual Maoist witch hunts against racism and sexism. That’s a historical fact. Throwing away the simple, effective idea of judging physicists based on something resembling competence isn’t going to get us anywhere good.

My attempt at a solution to this social problem (and it is a social problem) is a lot more radical and frightening to people who work within the University-Industry axis of mediocrity. It is positively heretical to people who worship education as some kind of secular sacrament. To my mind, the strength of the institution you belong to is the weakness of the individual. The very idea of a University is medieval and feudalistic, or at best Industrial. You want to do real original research? Quit academia and become a free lance consultant. Smolin’s most interesting menagerie of oddball physicists did just this, so I know he’d be behind me. Smolin himself works in a very nontraditional institute funded by private industry. It’s what I have done, and freed of the bureaucratic need to churn out nonsense papers, or spend my time baking vacuum chambers, my creativity has blossomed. I’ll never be an eminence grise like Smolin in any subject, as I’m not as clever as he is, but I will likely die richer, and have enjoyed my life more than chaining myself to some horrific bureaucracy whose purpose is to crush all original thought. Do you think Kepler would have had his brilliant idea if he were rotting in a University or government observatory somewhere? I don’t, and I think if you want to be Einstein or Kepler, your path is clear, and is far away from a safe life of vegetable contentment, sucking at the public teat.

Someone needs to write a futurist manifesto of physics, because physics is no longer bringing us into the future. With apologies to F.T. Marinetti:

The universities? Government labs? Cemeteries! Public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Absurd abattoirs of play actors ferociously slaughtering each other with bureaucratic slaps, idiot journal editing blows, the length of the fought-over walls!

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the icon of Albert Einstein, I grant you that… But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted drudge through the universities and neuroses of long dead physicists. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?

And what is there to see in quantum gravity except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream of original research?… Admiring unification theory is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation.
Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

In truth I tell you that daily visits to government labs and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for physicists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner… But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurist physicists!

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!… Come on! set fire to the government labs! Turn aside the canals to flood the universities!… Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old frauds bobbing adrift on those waters, broken and shredded!… Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the long dead academic system, pitilessly!

Links:
Lubos Motl is a righteous peckerwood for a mainstream physicist. If he reads this, he’ll probably dismiss me as an insignificant dunderhead who couldn’t make it in physics: that’s one of the reasons I like the guy; I respect a straight shooter.

Some other guy’s list of important questions; typical “quantum gravity” bias, but at least he notices some other interesting stuff I don’t bother mentioning. Some of them are literally table top physics you could do at home.

A horrible example of the psychedelic quackery that passes for “science” from the New York Times “science” page