Harold and Buzz

sunbaker

astronaut

The Social Dilemma

Grace

What does that even mean?

What is a comic? A comic is a cartoon with a storyline. What is a cartoon? A cartoon is a caricature that exaggerates the obvious and ignores complexity.

What is grace?

Grace is kindness and respect and humility and forgiveness. It is the willingness to bend rules. It is being charitable of other peoples faults while being critical of your own. It is to know yourself. It is to listen. It is to tell your story and to avoid telling other people theirs. It is the capacity to judge yourself before passing judgement on others. It is to laugh out loud. And to shout in silence. It is about conviction. And self-respect. And loyalty. And the ability to let go. It is to move on. It is the following of rules. It is the acceptance of order and hierarchy. It is about holding the line. It is about sacrifice. It is understanding the past. And about creating a future. It is about accepting leadership. And about taking leadership. It is the ability to make change without sparking a revolution. It is also the ability to accept change. It is charity. It is about learning from mistakes. It is about setting goals. And accepting compromise. It is about knowing your limitations. And about extending yourself. It is about understanding your fears. And having the courage to face them. It is to look outward. It is to expand your universe. It is to experience loss. It is to reflect. It is to withhold blame. It is the ability to say sorry. It is empathy.

Grace, like all things of great value, is easily lost in the messiness of the world. It cannot be forced into existence. And it cannot exist in isolation.

It is an ideal worth striving for. For most situations, it is the best we can be. 

And we shall miss it when it is gone.

Toy soldiers and four dogs

Sabine Hossenfelder interview with Garrett Lisi

“Why are you so convinced there is a theory of everything?” I ask.

“What we have now with the standard model, it’s a mess,” Garret says. “We have the [mixing matrices], and the masses - we have all these parameters. I’m of the opinion that all these pseudorandom parameters have an underlying explanation that will lead to a unified underlying theory.”

“What’s wrong with random parameters? Why does it have to be simple?”

“Well, as we’ve gone down in distance scales it’s always become simpler,” Garrett argues. “You start with chemistry, and the substances, they have all these these scattered properties. But the underlying elements are pretty simple. And if you look at shorter distances, inside the atom, it gets even simpler. Now we have the standard model, which seems to be a complete set of particles and gauge bosons. And with what I have done, I think I have a good geometric description of the fermions. It looks like it’s all one thing. To me, that’s just extrapolating the path of science. Things seem to look simpler if we look at smaller scales.”

“That’s because you conveniently started with chemistry,” I say. “If you start at a larger scale, the scale of, say galaxies, and go down, it doesn’t get simpler - it first gets more complicated, as with life crawling around planets and all that. It’s only past the level of biochemistry that it starts getting simpler again.”

“Ah, it can’t be like that,” Garrett says. “We know the elementary particles can’t be like planets. We know they are exactly identical.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘exactly’ - it’s always to some limited precision,” I point out. “But I don’t mean that elementary particles are like planets,” I explain. “Just that, whatever is the theory at short distances, it might not be simpler than what we have now. Simplicity doesn’t always increase with resolution.”

“Yes, it could be a mess,” Garrett agrees. “Or it could be that there is some underlying framework that we’ll never have experimental access to, and all we can see is this mess that sits on top of it. Xiao-Gang Wen, for example, he likes to say that the laws of nature are fundamentally ugly. But this is an idea that’s abhorrent to me. I think there is a simple, unified description that will explain all phenomena.”

I make a note to contact Xiao-Gang Wen.

Excerpt from Lost in Math - how beauty lead physics astray
Sabine Hossenfelder

(Basic Books, June 2020, pp167-8)

Moonshot

https://youtu.be/KA69Oh3_obY?t=2092

Newton, trigonometry and naval gunnery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbXyAzGtIX8