Notices by Blake C. Stacey (bstacey@icosahedron.website), page 13

:blobpats: :blobpats: :blobpats: 🌉

I had one of those Wonka "strike that, reverse it" moments about a physics question tonight, suddenly wondering if taking the conclusion of a familiar argument as the premise instead and working backward would be possible and at least pedagogically interesting. And I think it's true, to an extent anyway, which will be a good thing to check in the morning when I am not zonked with the tiredness.

@NightRose @jc Ha! What a wonderful way to let people know about it. "Sci-Hub? What's that? [searches the Web] [adopts George Takei voice] Oh, myyyy."

@tomharris At UMB, at least the new science building is one of the pretty ones they put on the brochures. (The old science building is a decaying red brick mass that does not have potable water.)

@tomharris I have to be at work to hear a talk at 12:45 tomorrow, so I probably can't do lunch at BU. :-(

Wow, it is snowing pretty effectively tonight.

I was willing to overlook a couple sketchy dudes being on their editorial board for the sake of getting my own beat-poetry physics into their stuffy pages, but now, any contribution I make will be seen as me lending credibility to all kinds of wretched behavior.

And, of course, my further criticisms of Becker's book (I have buckets) will be dismissed as political revenge.

... Does anyone want the contra-Becker-and-Glashow-but-mostly-Becker piece I wrote?

So, what do I do? I had a draft ready, carefully crafted to shake up a crew of old white male egos with pro-socialism quips in with the physics, but now the story is in goddamn Boing Boing that /Inference/ is beyond the gray area of academic centrism/contrarianism.

... But it's just a plain fact that you can have a physics PhD and know jack squat about the philosophy of physics, the details of its history, and quantum foundations --- the subjects of Becker's book.

I have a credible source that the reprisal business is bullshit and that Glashow had panned Becker's book well before Becker had asked them any questions about their operation.

Becker writes that Glashow "said the book displays my ignorance of quantum physics and “it is a matter of regret” that I do not understand quantum theory despite my Ph.D. in physics." This might be an attempt to make Glashow sound absurd...

Becker wrote a piece for /Undark/ claiming that /Inference/ was funded by Peter Thiel: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/29/report-on-peter-thiels-jun.html

... and more-than-insinuating that the negative review of his book was payback for his investigating them. ("It’s odd that Inference would want me to write for them shortly after my book was published, then decide to pan it a few months later, after they knew I was investigating them.")

Sheldon Glashow also wrote a review for /Inference/, an online periodical he edits: https://inference-review.com/article/not-so-real

TBH, I wasn't all that impressed by Glashow's piece, so when the offer to write a reply bounced from colleague to colleague until landing with me, I drafted up an essay that took issue with both.

OK, now for the weird part.

It is not *literally* true that every time I open Adam Becker's /What Is Real?/, I find an error of physics, history or philosophy, but it is true to an excellent approximation. My colleague Chris Fuchs noticed some problems: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.05147

Tom Siegfried found some that both Chris and I had missed: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/beyond-weird-and-what-real-try-make-sense-quantum-weirdness

And I have pages more. tl;dr Becker needed a villain and chose Niels Bohr.