Apparently stem cell research is proceeding with some sucess in this country (despite Pres. Bush’s ridiculous restrictions). See Wired News: Stem Cells May Open Some Eyes for some information on an experiment which converted stem cells into eye cells. If we could actually “grow” new eyes, that would certainly beat the current efforts with implanted CCD chips.
So, I’ve been in grad school for almost a month now, which seems incredible. I guess I should be used to time whizzing by now, but I still find it surprising. Classes are going okay. The problem sets are really rolling in now, but so far they have been manageable. I worry about when the problem sets really start getting difficult.
I haven’t been able to devote much time to research questions. Rob asked me to calculate the landscape of phase changes to the measuring pulse for the 2-qubit cQED system. It took me a while to figure out how to do this for the 1-qubit case, and by the time I thought I knew how to do 2-qubits, I was already deep in problem sets. So, I’ve been reduced to working on physics during time which I would normally set aside for relaxation. Oh well.
I’ve been pretty quiet on this blog, but I suppose it is time to start posting again. The web address will probably change soon. I’m thinking about taking down needcollegestuff.com indefinitely. So, this will likely move to an address I bought 6 months ago: blakerobertjohnson.com. We’ll see if I can get the hosting company to do the changeover gracefully.
Alright, I’m out. Gotta get to group meeting.
I read a really interesting paper by Sherrilyn Roush that provides an important insight into the way in which the weak anthropic principle is important to science:
The idea that we must avoid thinking of ourselves as special encourages us to think that the best epistemic policy for arriving at objective knowledge is to ignore the subject, the one who observes, even to the extent of never considering that subject except as an object, an extended body, or a thing. The general notion of a selection effect, and the WAP, encourage in contrast the valuable recognition that we do not arrive at objective knowledge except by correcting for the biases of the observing subject, and, further, that one does not achieve this correction except through a great deal of attention to the observing subject. It is not only naive self-love, but also naive self-loathing or self-avoidance, that must be rejected to come to an objective view.
A brief comment on my earlier post:
When I say that choices made in constructing theories and interpretations are based on aesthetics, what I mean is that scientists often insist on certain constraints which are justifiable only in themselves. That is to say that theories are developed from constraints which often cannot be proved necessary, but are grounded in fundamental beliefs of how the world should be. To take one example, we often require theories to have no preferred direction in space. This requirement is based on the belief that the universe should be symmetric in all directions. There is nothing that says that the only conceivable world has to be this way, so in a crude sense this is a matter of “taste”. But, this taste is not individual, it is shared by many in the scientific community. Consequently, the aesthetics of scientific theory is a rather complicated issue.
Through my classes on the history of 20th century physics and the philosophy of Nietzsche, it has become ever more apparent to me that physical theories are really a kind of art. This is to say that even in physics— a field which purports to reveal the truth of the nature of the universe— there is choice in constructing our theories and interpretations. These choices are not made based upon what is “real”, but on aesthetics.
This realization is something that I have oft resisted, because the possitivist viewpoint which governs most physicists’ thinking attempts to ground our theories in an external, measurable, truth. Yet, I am coming now to reconsider some of these conceptions. This is not to say that I now doubt the existance of truth, but rather that I now realize that the point of the scientific method is not that reproducibility ensures truth. Instead, reproducibility gives us a measure of confidence in experimental results. In the end, there is no certainty of any result, because researchers many years from now may discover a fatal flaw in our experiments.
Yet, there is still value in the possivist viewpoint, because at some point we need to posit the existence of facts in order to develop new theories and progress to new, better, more accurate ideas.