On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Scott Locklin <[email protected]> wrote: > IMO, this is just something that happens in the late stages of > bureaucratization. Though I am no expert, other than a few grad school > courses, and talking to real experts, I don't think there is anything > particularly wrong with QM. Maybe there will be something more satisfying one > day, but at present, there seems no reason to doubt the results. Stuff like > string theory, or doing decades of "research" on programming imaginary > quantum computers, though: this is just an academic glass bead game. If it's > not physical, as in, you can do an experiment with physical objects, it's not > physics. The experimental side is the hard part. A lot of theory is just > collecting a paycheck for being smart. Easy living if you can get the work > though; I considered it as a career path before coming to my senses.
I think our current bureaucracies, need some change, yes. As for QM, so many QM theories introduce free variables or infinities without adding any measurable predictive capability. And, yes, string theory is an example of adding useless unbound variables. That said, QM theory (some aspects of it) winds up being concretely useful (for example, in the context of VLSI fabrication and various i/o and storage mechanisms). > I'd be curious what you're thinking here. The spooks certainly have stuff we > don't specifically know about (crazy space planes, big computers, big ASIC > things for doing crypto, weird ECM doodads), but it seems to me a large scale > revolutionary invention like a useful optical computer would be difficult to > hide. You can infer a lot about spooky government priorities going through > the SBIR funny papers; all the "total information awareness" successors were > pretty obvious looking at these some years ago. You could also tell the F-35 > was doomed back in 2006 or so. It seems like a big optical computer would > require infrastructure and new doodads that you'd hear about from time to > time. You'd probably also see things from Coherent and Newport (and, I dunno, > maybe Cisco) which could be used for such a beast. Most of those ideas are foreign to me. And I need to think and observe a bit more before advancing any claims of my own. > FWIIW, I think this project has the best chances of turning Fusion into an > energy technology. I'll eventually be going through some of the patents on my > blog, but they seem like serious people with some really good ideas. > > http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/the-secret-us-russian-nuclear-fusion-project/19039 That's an interesting concept. But I think I'll be adopting a "I'll see it when I believe it" attitude. I do that a lot (though perhaps not often enough). Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
