Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Travel and Book Update

My book “Lost in Math” has meanwhile also been translated to Hungarian and Polish. Previous translations have appeared in German, Spanish, Italian, and French, I believe. I have somewhat lost overview. There should have been a Chinese and Romanian translation too, I think, but I’m not sure what happened to these. In case someone spots them, please let me know. The paperback version of the US-Edition is scheduled to appear in June.

My upcoming trips are to Cambridge, UK, for a public debate on the question “How is the scientific method doing?” (on Jan 28th) and a seminar about Superdeterminism (on Jan 29). On Feb 13, I am in Oxford (again) giving a talk about Superfluid Dark Matter (again), but this time at the physics department. On Feb 24th, I am in London for the Researcher to Reader Conference 2020.

On March 9th I am giving a colloq at Brown University. On March 19th I am in Zurich for some kind of panel discussion, details of which I have either forgotten or never knew. On April 8, I am in Gelsenkirchen for a public lecture.

Our Superdeterminism workshop is scheduled for the first week of May (details to come soon). Mid of May I am in Copenhagen for a public lecture. In June I’ll be on Long Island for a conference on peer review organized by the APS.

The easiest way to keep track of my whatabouts and whereabouts is to follow me on Twitter or on Facebook.

16 comments:

  1. Hello Sabine!

    Any chance of a Portuguese translation? I've read it in English and have been wanting to gift the book, and a PT translation would be more accessible.
    Bonus points if Brazilian Portuguese!

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  2. This is great news Sabine, finally your "Lost in Math" is translated in Poland. Will check online bookshops for a hard copy. Thank you for your great work in bringing back roots of scientific thinking. Best wishes from Poland

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  3. Good to hear. All the best. Thank you.

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  4. Sabine, if you are (still) interested in an Indian edition of your book, check your inbox (a few months ago), I believe.

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    Replies
    1. Shantanu,

      Yes, I got the email and I told them the same I tell everyone who asks about translation rights, which is to contact my agent. Since I haven't heard from my agent, I assume they couldn't reach an agreement.

      Delete
    2. Hi Sabine
      I meant an Indian edition written in English (not in any Indian vernacular language). This will make it easier for Indian readers (including students, all educated in English) to buy the book at a cheaper price.

      Delete
  5. Congratulations! :)

    German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, ... Romanian (I originally read it as Russian!), ... Portuguese. And ... Chinese. Very European; no one has approached your agent about Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Turkish, (and Russian)? No surprise re Persian ...

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    Replies
    1. JeanTate,

      To tell you the truth, I don't know. My agent sends the contracts and I sign them and then I forget about it. I had entirely forgotten about the Hungarian thing until the translator contacted me. The contracts are almost certainly somewhere in my tax paperwork (or they should be) but I don't look at that unless I really really have to. So, well, continue to be surprised with me ;)

      Delete
    2. Thanks for the update/info.

      I assume the publisher will always send you a free copy (including of new editions); if they do, at some point the collection would make for a nice photo.

      OT, but an idea for a future post, of the lighter kind: write about the questions you've received from various translators. Some will surely be quirky, and I think many of your readers will be interested! I certainly would be (my mother did some translation/polishing work after she retired; some of her anecdotes were hilarious, and many provoked "huh? that's ... weird".)

      Oh, and I hope you continue to announce each new language edition. Once a Chinese one becomes available, I've a couple of people in mind for gift copies ...

      Delete
  6. So are Superdeterministic the time/CPT symmetric ways of solving models?

    E.g. of field theory through the least action principle, or of Schrodinger equation through Feynman path ensembles, or of QFT through (CPT symmetric) Feynman diagram ensembles?

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    Replies
    1. Jarek,

      I had promised to look over your paper and give you feedback. Apologies for taking so long: I fear I spent too much time chatting with Jay Yablon, Amos, and Andrei. I warned you that I would probably be critical.

      The good news is that I see nothing that is wrong mathematically or that is simply nonsense (no guarantee that I would have caught every error, but nothing jumped out at me).

      However, as I suggested in advance, it does seem to me that you are not dealing at all with time-dependent QM, and time-dependent QM is basically the real world.

      As far as I can see, you are more or less doing the same thing that can be done with Wick rotations, Euclidean path integrals, Parisi-Wu stochastic quantization, etc.: i.e., getting the ground state by allowing the states with higher eigenvalues to die off faster. You mention in the paper that you do see the effects of the higher eigenvalues, but that seems to just be the standard convergence effect, where you see them as they die off.

      For various reasons, I myself have a fair amount of experience numerically solving problems involving the Laplacian, and you do tend to see that kind of die-off.

      There probably is some way of getting those higher states: there are well-known tricks such as shifting the energy levels by a constant to make some other eigenvalue closer to zero in absolute value or making the process orthogonal to the ground state. But, even if you can make something like that work, those are just calculational tricks, not a real simulation of QM.

      To get real QM, you need time-dependent QM.

      Also, I found your section on Bell’s theorem confusing: you seem to be saying simply that you can get probabilities that add up to more than one. But, what we would really like to see are the actual probabilities you get with, say, the photon polarization experiments actually used to test Bell’s theorem.

      My guess is that if you fool around with this enough, you will end up with something like Nelson’s stochastic mechanics or Bohmina mechanics or one of the models I have cooked up. So, you can try.

      Again, your paper is no worse than most of what gets published nowadays (and at least your paper is not simply and obviously false!). But I do not think you have succeeded at what you were hoping for, and I think it will take a lot of work (and luck) to get to time-dependent QM.

      All the best,

      Dave

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    2. Dave,

      Thank you for the comments. Indeed time-dependent MERW is also much more complex - if you want you can easily find my "Exteneded maximal entropy random walk" physics PhD thesis, which Section 5 discusses it.

      In short, instead of dominant eigenvector, exact calculation would need to meet propagators from both past/future infinities - exactly as in TSVF. It becomes simpler if assuming slow changes ("adiabatic approximation"). Ehrenfest equation is a bit funny there: uses opposite sign. But it is not that strange if thinking e.g. about rapid switch between two potential minima: for symmetry the packet needs first to accelerate uphill, then decelerate downhill (Fig. 5.2).

      But let's go back to the main problem: Bell theorem.
      In MERW, Born rule comes directly from symmetry, having Born rule we can violate inequalities derived with standard (Kolmogorov) probability theory.

      I have recently realized/reminded that we have also spatial physical realization of MERW: Ising model also assumes Boltzmann ensemble of sequences e.g. of spins.
      So we can take this Born rule/Bell violation there - this time from spatial symmetry:
      https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/524856/violation-of-bell-like-inequalities-with-spatial-boltzmann-path-ensemble-ising

      A few days ago it lead me to further: Wick-rotated quantum computers realized in Ising model (linked in above) - solving 3-SAT if physics indeed uses exactly Boltzmann sequence ensemble (probably not).

      The probabilities I use are normalized to sum to 1 - please specify where exactly do you see the issue you mention?
      Please think about this Born/Bell construction as realized with Ising model: using less controversial left-right spatial symmetry, instead of temporal for QM.
      And once again, this is not about deriving entire QM (MERW has no interference), only a toymodel to understand Born rule, Bell violation.

      All the best,
      Jarek

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  7. Do you know if the public will be invited to the colloquium at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island?

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  8. > On March 9th I am giving a colloq at Brown University.

    Would love to be there. :) I was there 1971-1979 and only been back twice. I only took 2 semesters of physics (it was too hard) from Frank Levin. That was almost 50 years ago now.

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  9. I am very irregular reader of your blog and read it for many years in varying times and intervals. So I didn't know about developments about your book, but I noticed your name in bookshops in Poland and immediately knew what gift to request for a Christmas. Really interesting book, interesting perspective on current state of science.

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