Posts Tagged ‘Mathematics’
“Juggling is sometimes called the art of controlling patterns, controlling patterns in time and space”*…
A skill for our times…
The Library of Juggling is an attempt to list all of the popular (and perhaps not so popular) juggling tricks in one organized place. Despite the growing popularity of juggling, few websites are dedicated to collecting and archiving the various patterns that are being performed. Most jugglers are familiar with iconic tricks such as the Cascade and Shower, but what about Romeo’s Revenge or the 531 Mills Mess? The goal of this website is to guarantee that the tricks currently circulating around the internet and at juggling conventions are found, animated, and catalogued for the world to see. It is a daunting task, but for the sake of jugglers everywhere it must be done.
For every trick found in the Library, there will be an animated representation of the pattern created via JugglingLab, in addition to general information about the trick (siteswap, difficulty level, prerequisite tricks, etc.). If I am able to run the pattern, then I will provide a text-based tutorial for the trick with the help of animations. I will also include links to other tutorials for the trick that can be found online, ranging from YouTube videos to private sites like this one. If I am unable to provide my own tutorial, there will still be a short description of the trick in addition to outside tutorials and demonstrations…
… if you have come to the Library looking to find out how to start juggling, than it would be best to begin with the Three Ball Cascade pattern. If you are a juggler who is already familiar with the basics, then the various tricks included in the Library can be accessed via the navigation tree on the left, or you can click here to view all of the tricks by difficulty…
Enjoy “The Library of Juggling.”
And see also: “The Museum of Juggling History,” the resources at the International Jugglers’ Association, and “The world cannot be governed without juggling.”
* mathematician (and juggler) Ronald Graham
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As we toss ’em up, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to G. H. Hardy; he was born on this date in 1877. A mathematician who made fundamental contributions to number theory and mathematical analysis, Hardy juggled other interests as well– for example his Hardy–Weinberg principle (“allele and genotype frequencies in a population will remain constant from generation to generation in the absence of other evolutionary influences”) is now a basic principle of population genetics.
In Hardy’s own estimation, his greatest contribution was something else altogether: from 1917, Hardy was the mentor of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, a relationship that has become celebrated. Hardy almost immediately recognised Ramanujan’s extraordinary (albeit untutored brilliance), and the two became close collaborators. When asked by a young Paul Erdős what his greatest contribution to mathematics was, Hardy unhesitatingly replied that it was the discovery of Ramanujan, remarking that on a scale of mathematical ability, his own ability would be 25, Littlewood would be 30, Hilbert would be 80, and Ramanujan would be 100.
“They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don’t know what it is.”*…
Back in 2019, (R)D considered a piece from the remarkable Freeman Dyson on what the biotech revolution could mean (itself further to thoughts in an earlier piece of his). Those thoughts popped back into my mind when I read Quentin Hardy‘s recent recounting of his lunch with a friend…
We’re at an outdoor table in Mission Bay, the wet tech hotspot of San Francisco, home to Biopharma, Biotech, and Techbio research labs, known and emerging, plus big hospitals and research outfits.
Across from my salad and his sandwich, Ashlee sweeps his arm in a big arc across Long Bridge Street, towards all the residential and mixed-use buildings.
“There’s dozens of tiny labs up there,” he says, “somebody’s got a mouse, they’re doing something – growing organs, playing with neurons, injecting them with a virus to change their genetics. All kinds of weird shit. It’s wild, man.”
“All kinds of weird shit” and Ashlee have been intimates for years. They have been good to each other. We met around the time computers started moving from the closet to the cloud, and we both wrote about dirt-cheap satellites, and how cell phone guts were ending up in strange places, changing our world with cheap drones and voluminous data. Back when everything really started changing.
I went to Google to write about how those really big data sets and massive amounts of cloud computation were enabling Artificial Intelligence. Ashlee wrote the first biography of Elon Musk, which took him into Musk’s interests in non-governmental rocketry and neural implants. For many years Bloomberg paid him to do a show called Hello World, where he covered Doomsday preppers, fake meat, Nigerian hackers, and all kinds of strange things. All the creative journalists were jealous of him, not least because they couldn’t touch his talent for finding and admiring this abundance of exotic invention.
He now has his own show, Core Memory, which has unsurpassed reporting on all sorts of cutting-edge robotics, life reprogrammers, amateur space stations, body hackers, and new materials manufacturers. Highly recommended.
Back to his current interests. “I know this guy who’s harvesting rat neurons,” he says, “he talks about using them to power data centers.”…
… We start talking about biohacking and self-medication, all the people shooting up peptides, and the places around town where the kids are mixing their AI with their biohacking, and all the quasi-legal stuff people are doing, growing new human and animal parts.
On one level, they’re just following the “lots of data, lots of compute” model, only into the infinitely more complex wet world. Just as enough people posted tagged photos online to enable Fei Fei Li to make and exploit ImageNet, a major milestone in the creation of image-recognition AI, so these new hackers hope to tag, track, remix and scan enough biological data to remake biological understanding. And capability.
I’ve got my kale and he’s got his meat, partly liberated from the bread. Some of the fun in hanging out with Ashlee is the way we can free-associate over years of covering this kind of stuff, knowing that some things blow up and some things don’t work out, good ideas go down while the mad and the lucky are proclaimed geniuses. In other words, we get to bullshit about the weird shit.
“Maybe it’s going to turn into some kind of ghost gun thing, where people take drugs and perform genetic procedures that are legal on their own and turn it into some kind of illegal treatment,” I say. “You’ll go on a luxury cruise into international waters to get your genetic makeup altered, or blend two different animals into a third. Like ‘The Floating Offshore Platform of Dr. Moreau,’” after the H.G. Wells’ story about a mad scientist making human-animal hybrids…
… But we’re also talking about Biology, that most intimate and complex of sciences, being colonized by a trend we’ve seen elsewhere in tech for years: Prices fall far enough to change the rules of access, newcomers hack the system in defiance of the old standards and business models. Oceans of new data turn up, changing the entire process of understanding.
We’ve seen it happen in enough places to know the pattern. Open source Linux, cheap and attractive enough for all kinds of people to improve it for free, wiped out the old computer server industry. WiFi was open source too, so the price was right and interest surged.
The tech doesn’t have to be open source, or free, either. Economic cycles play a part. When the Internet bubble burst, space companies like Iridium and Globalstar, Rotary Rocket and Kistler, crashed. Lots of cheap talent and parts hit the market, which enabled Elon to do Space X. I once did a story about how entertainment in Africa changed after the price of satellite dishes fell below $200, and the tech moved from expatriate compounds to local bars.
The cost of biological experimentation is on a far crazier decline, giving Ashlee a lot of material. Twenty-three years after the first human genome was sequenced at a cost of $2.7 billion, a “complete genetic engineering home lab,” with a refurbished DNA sequencing machine and a “Bioengineering 101 Course” can be yours for $2500. Neurotechnology tools are available for sale or rent, so you can try neural implants at home. China is spinning up dozens of brain-computer interface startups.
“They’ve got a city in China that’s just doing brain technology stuff,” says Ashlee. When I lived in Asia 30 years ago, cities in China were famous for specializing in things like athletic socks and bras, wiping out the competition worldwide by cranking out more stuff more cheaply than anyone else. Now that the abundance of data and the cheapness of commute have kicked off the AI revolution, they have turned to brain tech. I pick at my kale.
Of course, just because the prices are a fraction of what they used to be, and these new hackers are descending on San Francisco, Cambridge, Miami, and who knows where else, it doesn’t mean breakthroughs are at hand. Biology is a lot more complex than electronics – a lot. Perhaps even more important, the new AI technology that people hope will enable all kinds of bio breakthroughs requires enormous amounts of data. The data set has to be huge, it has to be gathered in a single place the AI can access, and perhaps most critically of all, it has to be standardized to the highest quality…
… The biohackers face a big quality issue too. The Nobel Prize-winning protein information made use of some of the cleanest data possible, and Waymo came out of Alphabet’s cutting-edge sensor- and data-analysis labs. The guy in some converted Apartment 3G doing the thing with the iguana liver, the woman in the co-working space with the rat pituitary, they’re probably not going to bring the same magic.
“Yeah, but they’re not the only ones doing this,” says Ashlee. “I just had on Jennifer Doudna.” Doudna, who won a Nobel prize for her work on gene editing, now runs the Innovative Genomics Institute, a place rigorously pursuing this knowledge following traditional standards. She makes a couple of excellent points in Ashlee’s interview. She thinks a lot of the gunslinger biohackers will find biology much more complex and problematic than they think. At the same time, she expects a lot of the regulatory hurdles to new ways of doing things will become familiar over time, lowering the steps and costs of bringing out new drugs and treatments.
These lower costs will make more things possible, and attract more innovation. This will drive crazy a health and insurance industry built around high costs. If history is any guide, the incumbents won’t surrender their high-cost businesses without a fight. That may be one reason why Doudna thinks that big genetic alterations, will show up in agriculture first…
… Which, apparently, at this point isn’t weird enough. “I’ve got to catch up with this university researcher I met at a party,” he says, pushing away his plate. “She’s working on transplanting the personality of one animal, like a dolphin, to another, like a cow.”
“You mean, like you get a cow that wants to body surf in the wake of a tourist boat?”
He nods. “I know. Weird shit, right?”
I barely know what to do with this one, but I’m still in my “Dr. Moreau” zone.
“So maybe someday, instead of capital punishment, a convicted murder will receive the personality of a Labrador Retriever?”“Could be,” he says. “Who knows what people do with this stuff.”
“Has there ever been a time when people were creating a future this weird, when people were going to live in ways they couldn’t even recognize?”
“I dunno,” he says. “Explorer times?”
“I mean yeah, maybe for the Aztecs at first, when they saw the Conquistadors on their horses and thought it was some new kind of hybrid god/animal. But pretty soon the Spanish guys got off their horses and just started messing up the city and killing people. Pretty much like the Aztecs had been doing for a couple of generations. Business as usual.”
“I feel you,” he says. “Hey, I got to go. There’s some guys in Argentina who have this satellite and space tug that went off course. It’s like 50 million kilometers from Earth, but they think they can bring it back.” Weird stuff…
Biohacking in SF, where Dr. Moreau’s a piker, & humanoid robots are a happy delusion. Eminently worth reading in full: “Kale Salad with Ash.”
For more on the dizzying pace of experimentation (this time, in AI), pair with “Agent Claw.”
[Image above: source]
* “At such times the universe gets a little closer to us. They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don’t know what it is. These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what we are.” – Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
###
As we FAFO, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that the Indiana State House of Representatives passed Bill No.246 which gave pi the exact value of 3.2– a nice, round– and wrong– number.
Hoosier Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin, M.D, a mathematics enthusiast, satisfied himself that he’d succeeded in “squaring the circle.” Hoping to share with his home state the fame that would surely be forthcoming, Dr. Goodwin drafted legislation that would make Indiana the first to declare the value of pi as law, and convinced Representative Taylor I. Record, a farmer and lumber merchant, to introduce it. As an incentive, Dr. Goodwin, who planned to copyright his “discovery,” offered in the bill to make it available to Indiana textbooks at no cost.
It seems likely that few members of the House understood the bill (many said so during the debate), crammed as it was with 19th century mathematical jargon. Indeed, as Peter Beckmann wrote in his History of Pi, the bill contained “hair-raising statements which not only contradict elementary geometry, but also appear to contradict each other.” (Full text of the bill here.) Still, it sailed through the House.
As it happened, Professor Clarence Abiathar Waldo, the head of the Purdue University Mathematics Department and author of a book titled Manual of Descriptive Geometry, was in the Statehouse lobbying for the University’s budget appropriation as the final debate and vote were underway. He was astonished to find the General Assembly debating mathematical legislation. Naturally, he listened in… and he was horrified.
On February 11 the legislation was introduced in the Senate and referred to the Committee on Temperance, which reported the bill favorably the next day, and sent it to the Senate floor for debate.
But Professor Waldo had “coached” (as he later put it) a number of key Senators on the bill, so this time its reception was different. According to an Indianapolis News report of February 13,
…the bill was brought up and made fun of. The Senators made bad puns about it, ridiculed it and laughed over it. The fun lasted half an hour. Senator Hubbell said that it was not meet for the Senate, which was costing the State $250 a day, to waste its time in such frivolity. He said that in reading the leading newspapers of Chicago and the East, he found that the Indiana State Legislature had laid itself open to ridicule by the action already taken on the bill. He thought consideration of such a propostion was not dignified or worthy of the Senate. He moved the indefinite postponement of the bill, and the motion carried.
As one watches state governments around the U.S. enacting similarly nonsensical, unscientific legislation (e.g., here… perhaps legislators went to school on this), one might be forgiven for wondering “Where’s Waldo?”
“I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.”*…
Physicists believe a third class of particles – anyons – could exist, but only in 2D. As Elay Shech asks, what kind of existence is that?…
Everything around you – from tables and trees to distant stars and the great diversity of animal and plant life – is built from a small set of elementary particles. According to established scientific theories, these particles fall into two basic and deeply distinct categories: bosons and fermions.
Bosons are sociable. They happily pile into the same quantum state, that is, the same combination of quantum properties such as energy level, like photons do when they form a laser. Fermions, by contrast, are the introverts of the particle world. They flat out refuse to share a quantum state with one another. This reclusive behaviour is what forces electrons to arrange themselves in layered atomic shells, ultimately giving rise to the structure of the periodic table and the rich chemistry it enables.
At least, that’s what we assumed. In recent years, evidence has been accumulating for a third class of particles called ‘anyons’. Their name, coined by the Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, gestures playfully at their refusal to fit into the standard binary of bosons and fermions – for anyons, anything goes. If confirmed, anyons wouldn’t just add a new member to the particle zoo. They would constitute an entirely novel category – a new genus – that rewrites the rules for how particles move, interact, and combine. And those strange rules might one day engender new technologies.
Although none of the elementary particles that physicists have detected are anyons, it is possible to engineer environments that give rise to them and potentially harness their power. We now think that some anyons wind around one another, weaving paths that store information in a way that’s unusually hard to disturb. That makes them promising candidates for building quantum computers – machines that could revolutionise fields like drug discovery, materials science, and cryptography. Unlike today’s quantum systems that are easily disturbed, anyon-based designs may offer built-in protection and show real promise as building blocks for tomorrow’s computers.
Philosophically, however, there’s a wrinkle in the story. The theoretical foundations make it clear that anyons are possible only in two dimensions, yet we inhabit a three-dimensional world. That makes them seem, in a sense, like fictions. When scientists seek to explore the behaviours of complicated systems, they use what philosophers call ‘idealisations’, which can reveal underlying patterns by stripping away messy real-world details. But these idealisations may also mislead. If a scientific prediction depends entirely on simplification – if it vanishes the moment we take the idealisation away – that’s a warning sign that something has gone wrong in our analysis.
So, if anyons are possible only through two-dimensional idealisations, what kind of reality do they actually possess? Are they fundamental constituents of nature, emergent patterns, or something in between? Answering these questions means venturing into the quantum world, beyond the familiar classes of particles, climbing among the loops and holes of topology, detouring into the strange physics of two-dimensional flatland – and embracing the idea that apparently idealised fictions can reveal deeper truths…
[Shech explains anyons, and considers the various strategies for making sense of them. (They”paraparticles” like anyons don’t actually exit. Or we simply lack the theoretical framwork and experimental work to follow to find them. Or in ultra-thin materials physics, we’ve already found them.) Considering the latter two possibilities, he concludes…]
So, if anyons exist, what kind of existence is it? None of the elementary particles are anyons. Instead, physicists appeal to the notion of ‘quasiparticles’, in which large numbers of electrons or atoms interact in complex ways and behave, collectively, like a simpler object you can track with novel behaviours.
Picture fans doing ‘the wave’ in a stadium. The wave travels around the arena as if it’s a single thing, even though it’s really just people standing and sitting in sequence. In a solid, the coordinated motion of many particles can act the same way – forming a ripple or disturbance that moves as if it were its own particle. Sometimes, the disturbance centres on an individual particle, like an electron trying to move through a material. As it bumps into nearby atoms and other electrons, they push back, creating a kind of ‘cloud’ around it. The electron plus its cloud behave like a single, heavier, slower particle with new properties. That whole package is also treated as a quasiparticle.
Some quasiparticles behave like bosons or fermions. But for others, when two of them trade places, the system’s quantum state picks up a built-in marker that isn’t limited to the two familiar settings. It can take on intermediate values, which means novel quantum statistics. If the theories describing these systems are right, then the quasiparticles in question aren’t just behaving oddly, they are anyons: the third type of particles.
In other words, while none of the elementary particles that physicists have detected are anyons – physicists have never ‘seen’ an anyon in isolation – we can engineer environments that give rise to emergent quasiparticles portraying the quantum statistics of anyons. In this sense, anyons have been experimentally confirmed. But there are different kinds of anyons, and there is still active work being done on the more exotic anyons that we hope to harness for quantum computers.
But even so, are quasiparticles, like anyons, really real? That depends. Some philosophers argue that existence depends on scale. Zoom in close enough, and it makes little sense to talk about tables or trees – those objects show up only at the human scale. In the same way, some particles exist only in certain settings. Anyons don’t appear in the most fundamental theories, but they show up in thin, flat systems where they are the stable patterns that help explain real, measurable effects. From this point of view, they’re as real as anything else we use to explain the world.
Others take a more radical stance. They argue that quasiparticles, fields and even elementary particles aren’t truly real: they’re just useful labels. What really exists is not stuff but structure: relations and patterns. So ‘anyons’ are one way we track the relevant structure when a system is effectively two-dimensional.
Questions about reality take us deep into philosophy, but they also open the door to a broader enquiry: what does the story of anyons reveal about the role of idealisations and fictions in science? Why bother playing in flatland at all?
Often, idealisations are seen as nothing more than shortcuts. They strip away details to make the mathematics manageable, or serve as teaching tools to highlight the essentials, but they aren’t thought to play a substantive role in science. On this view, they’re conveniences, not engines of discovery.
But the story of anyons shows that idealisations can do far more. They open up new possibilities, sharpen our understanding of theory, clarify what a phenomenon is supposed to be in the first place, and sometimes even point the way to new science and engineering.
The first payoff is possibility: idealisation lets us explore a theory’s ‘what ifs’, the range of behaviours it allows even if the world doesn’t exactly realise them. When we move to two dimensions, quantum mechanics suddenly permits a new kind of particle choreography. Not just a simple swap, but wind-and-weave novel rules for how particles can combine and interact. Thinking in this strictly two-dimensional setting is not a parlour trick. It’s a way to see what the theory itself makes possible.
That same detour through flatland also assists us in understanding the theory better. Idealised cases turn up the contrast knobs. In three dimensions, particle exchanges blur into just two familiar options of bosons and fermions. In two dimensions, the picture sharpens. By simplifying the world, the idealisation makes the theory’s structure visible to the naked eye.
Idealisation also helps us pin down what a phenomenon really is. It separates difference-makers from distractions. In the anyon case, the flat setting reveals what would count as a genuine signature, say, a lasting memory of the winding of particles, and what would be a mere lookalike that ordinary bosons or fermions could mimic. It also highlights contrasts with other theoretical possibilities: paraparticles, for example, don’t depend on a two-dimensional world, but anyons seem to. That contrast helps identify what belongs to the essence of anyons and what does not. When we return to real materials, we know what to look for and what to ignore.
Finally, idealisations don’t just help us read a theory – they help write the next one. If experiments keep turning up signatures that seem to exist only in flatland, then what began as an idealisation becomes a compass for discovery. A future theory must build that behaviour into its structure as a genuine, non-idealised possibility. Sometimes, that means showing how real materials effectively enforce the ideal constraint, such as true two-dimensionality. Other times, it means uncovering a new mechanism that reproduces the same exchange behaviour without the fragile assumptions of perfect flatness. In both cases, idealisation serves as a guide for theory-building. It tells us which features must survive, which can bend, and where to look for the next, more general theory.
So, when we venture into flatland to study anyons, we’re not just simplifying – we’re exploring the boundaries where mathematics, matter and reality meet. The journey from fiction to fact may be strange, but it’s also how science moves forward…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Playing in flatland,” from @elayshech.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
Pair with: “Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?“
* Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
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As we brood over the boundaries of “being” (and knowing), we might spare a thought for Bertand Russell; he died on this date in 1970. A philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual, he influenced mathematics, logic, and several areas of analytic philosophy.
He was one of the early 20th century’s prominent logicians and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore, and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British “revolt against idealism“. Together with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic and a major attempt [if ultimately unsuccessful, pace Godel] to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic. Russell’s article “On Denoting” is considered a “paradigm of philosophy.”
“I love to talk about nothing. It’s the only thing I know anything about.”*…
Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But as George Musser reports, what “zero-point energy” really means is up for interpretation…
Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly empty it. You remove all its visible contents, pump out any gases, and — applying some science-fiction technology — evacuate any unseeable material such as dark matter. According to quantum mechanics, what’s left inside?
It sounds like a trick question. And in quantum mechanics, you know to expect a trick answer. Not only is the box still filled with energy, but all your efforts to empty it have barely put a dent in the amount.
This unavoidable residue is known as ground-state energy, or zero-point energy. It comes in two basic forms: The one in the box is associated with fields, such as the electromagnetic field, and the other is associated with discrete objects, such as atoms and molecules. You may dampen a field’s vibrations, but you cannot eliminate every trace of its presence. And atoms and molecules retain energy even if they’re cooled arbitrarily close to absolute zero. In both cases, the underlying physics is the same.
Zero-point energy is characteristic of any material structure or object that is at least partly confined, such as an atom held by electric fields in a molecule. The situation is like that of a ball that has settled at the bottom of a valley. The total energy of the ball consists of its potential energy (related to position) plus its kinetic energy (related to motion). To zero out both components, you would have to give a precise value to both the object’s position and its velocity, something forbidden by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
What the existence of zero-point energy tells you at a deeper level depends ultimately on which interpretation of quantum mechanics you adopt. The only noncontentious thing you can say is that, if you situate a bunch of particles in their lowest energy state and measure their positions or velocities, you will observe a spread of values. Despite being drained of energy, the particles will look as if they’ve been jiggling. In some interpretations of quantum mechanics, they really have been. But in others, the appearance of motion is a misleading holdover from classical physics, and there is no intuitive way to picture what’s happening…
More on the development of our understanding of “zero-point energy” and on the questions that remain: “In Quantum Mechanics, Nothingness Is the Potential To Be Anything,” from @georgemusser.com in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
For the most amusing of musings on nothing, see Percival Everett‘s Dr. No.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we noodle on nought, we might spare a thought for Kurt Gödel; he died on this date in 1978. A mathematician, logician, and author of Gödel’s proof. He is best known for his proof of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems (in 1931). He proved fundamental that in any axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved within the axioms of the system. In particular, the consistency of the axioms cannot be proved… thus ending a hundred years of attempts to establish axioms to put the whole of mathematics on an axiomatic basis. [See here for a consideration of what his finding might mean for moral philosophy…]
“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last”*…
From the arcane through the mysterious to the perplexing, a glorious collecton of obscure– but fascinating– knowledge…
Freakpages is a community-curated directory of esoteric articles across the internet, primarily from Wikipedia. Here, we encourage you to learn about interesting topics you have never heard of…
… divided into categories (Society, History, Technology, Psychology, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Finance, Philosphy), with continuously refreshed selections from both the curators and the community.
A few examples: Egregore, Operation Northwoods, Matrioshka Brain, Zeigarnik Effect, Retrocausality, Horizontal Gene Transfer, Strange Matter Seeding, Keynesian Beauty Contest, Chinese Room…
So many more at: Freakpages
[Image above: source]
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As we explore, we might spare a thought for a man driven by an endles spirit of inquiry, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin; he died on this date in 1907. A mathematician, mathematical physicist, and engineer considered by many “the Newton of his era,” Lord Kelvin was instrumental in the formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and contributed significantly to unifying physics, which was then in its infancy of development as an emerging academic discipline. He received the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 1883 and served as its president from 1890 to 1895. In 1892 he became the first scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords. Absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin in his honor.
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