Smart People

6 Responses to Smart People

1. Anonymous says:

   May 31, 2005 at 4:18 pm

   Yes, Lubos Motl comes immediately to mind upon reading that article, as does Christopher Hitchens.
2. stephen says:

   May 30, 2005 at 3:02 am

   Taken from article

   “The lesson is this: “Speed kills”. I was never very good at pool, but this one guy there was, and whenever we’d play, he’d watch me miss easy shots because I tried to force them in with authority. I chose speed and power over control, and I usually lost. So like pool, when it comes to defusing smart people who are defending bad ideas, you have to find ways to slow things down.

   Some mathematicains take years for preparation to solve a problem and the Clay Institue offers “objective mental measures” for consideration and money?

   Would this be like “intelligent design?” and the efforts to “funnel thinking” down to specific lanes. Mathematical models “assumed” as being right for “the situation?”

   All and all, it seems like good advice.

   No “streaming of consciousness” there, but patient deliberation?:)
3. D R Lunsford says:

   May 29, 2005 at 9:54 pm

   Well it seems very condensed.

   -drl
4. Peter Woit says:

   May 29, 2005 at 6:16 pm

   Hi Gentle Skeptic,

   I’ve posted at various points about some of the topics you suggest (see for instance the third post on the blog near its beginning, and many of the posts about mathematics that I think may have some relevance to physics).

   The questions that are left open by the standard model are few in number and well-known to everyone in the field. Basically the main ones are:

   What is causing electroweak symmetry breaking?

   What explains the pattern of groups, representations and coupling constants of the standard model?

   What about quantum gravity?

   My own best guess about which direction to investigate is laid out in a paper on the arXiv and on my website entitled “Quantum Field Theory and Representation Theory: A Sketch”. I’ve been busy with other things this past academic year, but am again thinking about these topics this summer, and will try and write more of a positive nature about them here in the near future.

   But I really don’t want to spend much of my time promoting my own ideas. They’re there if you want to read about them (and I hope to write up something more detailed this summer), but I’m not going to repeat them endlessly here. The fundamental problem with particle theory these days is that things are hard and there are few if any good ideas around. But I feel the main reason for this is that all of the intellectual resources of the field are tied up in the failed string theory project. Until this situation changes, it is going to remain unlikely that things will improve.
5. A_Gentle_Skeptic says:

   May 29, 2005 at 5:41 pm

   Peter, your detestation of string theory is almost everywhere in evidence on your blog. Please forgive me for asking, but have you posted somewhere on your blog your own analysis of what are the main questions that physicists ought to be addressing today and what are the promising techniques that they ought to be employing?

   Thanks and best regards…
6. Anonymous says:

   May 29, 2005 at 2:33 pm

   Haha! That fits Lubos Motl perfectly

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