Academics From The United States

"Why do I paint? In my work as a mathematician, form, structure, and economy of expression are important. In music, add tone quality, balance and harmony. And now in painting, these aesthetic values are enhanced by color, contrast, and composition."

"How many talks have you sat through where the researcher qua [as] person just didn't show up: no anecdotes, no personal details, no emotion or enthusiasm, no humor (intentional, that is), no real contact with the audience – in other words, no performance. [...] They may satisfy the second two requirements mentioned above – accuracy and nonadvocacy – but they fail in the first and, in some ways, the most important."

"If speaking to nonscientific audiences is something that interests you or will likely be asked of you, keep in mind three overriding requirements: first, you must be a human being, an interesting one if at all possible; second, you must be accurate in what you say, that is, tell the truth (about what is known and what isn't; about issues, debates, controversies); and third, if your subject is scientific knowledge, you must remain a scientist and not slip into the role of advocate or activist."

"The rule of law is not an exception to rule by fear; it is the fulfillment of rule by fear."

"Robin is a lumper, an über-lumper, which may please his beleaguered readers on the left, but makes his entire enterprise incoherent. He fails to see that it is based on a glaring fallacy of composition: he posits a class, isolates a characteristic of one of its members, and then ascribes that characteristic to every member of the class."

"Leviathan was like the Wizard of Oz, an illusion built from the calculations and imagination of those beholding it. But if there was not much behind the curtain, it did not really matter. For whatever was there, the beholder of the illusion could be certain that the sovereign possessed more power than he wielded himself."

"Hobbesian state power was not intended for greatness, but to curtail challenges from below. It succeeded when its subjects merely stood still or got out of its way. Their immobility was the outward sign of their fear ... a fear all the more potent for the minimal power that aroused it."

"A wise psychoanalyst once told me, “Stop looking at what you’re saying, look at what you’re doing.”"

"Personally about Mr. Trump, it tells me that his desire to protect himself, his ego, his appearance, his sense of being right, is bottomless, because if there's anything that you should hold back from doing, it's from punishing someone like Lt. Colonel Vindman. ...[I]t calls up to me... a memory of what s are like, because that... is what is happening. People who refuse to tow the line, a line of fiction. A line which said that Ukraine plotted against the United States, and not Russia. A line that said a server was in Ukraine, which has never been the case. A line which said that Ukraine was corrupting us, when were trying to corrupt Ukraine, in fact, in the Trump administration. A line which was false. A set of statements which were clearly false and which Republican senators also know to be false. That you don't follow a line like that, and then get purged. That's what happens in... totalitarian systems."

"If a Russian spokesman (e.g. Dmitri Peskov) must be cited, it must be mentioned that this specific figure has lied about every aspect of this war since it began. This is context. Readers picking up the story in the middle need to know such background."

"Citing Russian claims next to Ukrainian claims is unfair to the Ukrainians. In this war, what Russian spokespersons have said has almost always been untrue, whereas what Ukrainian spokespersons have said has largely been reliable. The juxtaposition suggests an equality that makes it impossible for the reader to understand that important difference."

"Russian spokespersons claiming that Ukraine did something (in this case, blow a dam) is not part of a story of an actual event in the real world. It is part of different story: one about all the outrageous claims Russia has made about Ukraine since the first invasion, in 2014. If Russian claims about Ukrainian actions are to be mentioned, it has to be in that context."

"[A]ccording to the Constitution the Chief Justice presides, that is to say, he's in charge. The Senators are meant to be jurors. What Chief Justice Roberts allowed to happen, was that the jurors decided that they could do things like, say how they were going to vote in advance; that the jurors could decide to do things like, not listen to evidence; that the jurors could decide, basically, the shape of the trial. ...[I]f you're in any kind of court in the United States, those kind of principles where the judge just gives up, would be unthinkable. So basically what we saw was a trial that wasn't a trial, and so both in the form and in the outcome the Supreme Court ends up being marginalized, and not just the Congress."

"Our second basic founding document, the Constitution, is basically a design how to prevent someone becoming a tyrant. It assumes that if we have three parts of the government they will balance each other, but what we saw unfold in the impeachment trial was the opposite. The Congress gave way, and then Justice Roberts also gave way. So that at the end... we have a much, much stronger executive claiming nearly absolute power, which is something that the Founders were precisely trying to prevent."

"The whole idea of the Declaration of Independence is that no man is above the law. ...King George was breaking established rules, established contracts. ...Mr. Trump's defense in the impeachment trial was precisely that he is above the law; that whatever he says is the law; that we should wait and see what he says, and then adapt the law to that. That is precisely what tyrants over the centuries, and authoritarians in the last century have always said."

"The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of the voters."

"Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raise a millennial generation without history."

"The twentieth century was well and truly over, its lessons unlearned. A new form of politics was emerging in Russia, Europe, and America, a new unfreedom to suit a new time."

"By 2015, Russia had extended an extraordinary campaign of cyberwarfare beyond Ukraine to Europe and the United States, with the assistance of numerous Europeans and Americans. In 2016, the British voted to leave the European Union, as Moscow had long advocated, and Americans elected Donald Trump... an outcome the Russians had worked to achieve. Among other shortcomings, the new U.S. president could not reflect upon history: he was unable to commemorate ... nor condemn Nazis in his own country."

"Our Vienna maternity ward, where inexpensive insurance covered everything, was a reminder of the success of the European project. It exemplified services that were taken for granted in much of Europe, unattainable in the United States. The same might be said of the quick and reliable subway that brought me to the hospital..."

"[A] turning point of the twentieth century: the Nazi-Soviet alliance... In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded Poland... In April 1940, the Soviet secret police murdered 21,892 Polish prisoners of war... shot in the back of the head at five killing sites, one of them the Katyn Forest... Only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 could historians clarify... the mass murder had been deliberate policy, personally approved by Joseph Stalin. ...On February 3, 2010... the Russian prime minister made a surprising proposal: a joint commemoration... on the seventieth anniversary of the crime. On the seventh of April a Polish government delegation... arrived in Russia. Two days after that, a second Polish delegation set out... One of its members was my friend Tomek Merta... April 10... Tomek boarded an airplane. It crashed... short of a landing strip at the Russian military airfield at Smolensk. There were no survivors."

""[E]ternal vigilance is the price of liberty,"...We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold for democracy, looking for threats from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end."

"The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions..."

"Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century."

"Fascists rejected reason... denying objective truth in favor of glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people."

"European democracies collapsed into and fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The communist Soviet Union, established in 1922, extended its model into Europe in the 1940s. ...[S]ocieties can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits..."

"Since the American colonies declared their independence... [m]any... democracies... failed, in circumstances that in some important respects resemble our own."

"As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny."

"Russia, an aging tyranny, seeks to destroy Ukraine, a defiant democracy. A Ukrainian victory would confirm the principle of self-rule, allow the integration of Europe to proceed, and empower people of goodwill to return reinvigorated to other global challenges. A Russian victory, by contrast, would extend genocidal policies in Ukraine, subordinate Europeans, and render any vision of a geopolitical European Union obsolete."

"If we don't have access to facts, we can't trust each other. Without trust, there's no law. Without law, there's no democracy. So, if you want to rip the heart out of a democracy directly -- if you wanna go right at it and kill it -- what you do is, you go after facts. And that's what modern authoritarians do. Step one: You lie yourself, all the time. Step two: You say it's your opponents and the journalists who lie. Step three: Everyone looks around and says "What is truth? There is no truth." And then resistance is impossible and the game's over."

"The point of Bloodlands was that we hadn’t noticed a major event in European history: the fact 13 million civilians – civilians and prisoners of war, not soldiers on active duty! – were murdered for political reasons in a rather confined space over a short period of time... We have some history of Soviet terror, of the Holocaust, of the Ukrainian famine, of the German reprisals against the civilians. But all of these crimes happened in the same places in a short time span, so why not treat them as a single event and see if they can be unified under a meaningful narrative."

"The current Russian attempt to manipulate the memory of the Holocaust is so blatant and cynical that those who are so foolish to fall for it will one day have to ask themselves just how, and in the service of what, they have been taken in. If fascists take over the mantle of antifascism, the memory of the Holocaust will itself be altered."

"Ukraine is not a theater for the historical propaganda of others or a puzzle from which pieces can be removed. It is a major European country whose citizens have important cultural and economic ties with both the European Union and Russia."

"What does it mean when the wolf cries wolf? Most obviously, propagandists in Moscow and Kiev take us for fools—which by many indications is quite justified."

"The way out of the crisis is a return to Ukrainian democracy. Mr. Yanukovych was elected, but has since illegally changed the system in ways that undermine its legitimacy. With a fresh start and new elections, Ukrainians could decide for themselves whether they prefer Europe or Eurasia."

"Ukraine is not Russia. Too many Ukrainians have tasted too much freedom for too long."

"Since late November [2013], millions of Ukrainians have campaigned for a pro-European course, only to find themselves branded extremists, foreign agents and criminals."

"The Belarusian failure therefore provides a useful test. Here we have an “ethnic group” which is the largest by far in the area in question. According to the Russian imperial census of 1897, more people spoke Belarusian in Vil’na province than all other languages combined. In Vil’na, Minsk, Grodno, Mogilev, and Vitebsk provinces, contiguous territories of historic Lithuania, speakers of Belarusian were three quarters of the population. In the twentieth century, this “ethnic group” did not become a modern nation. In combination with Lithuanian and Polish successes, this Belarusian failure helps us to perceive what national movements actually need."

"Traditionally, fundamental theories of nature have had a tendency to break down at short distances. This often signals the appearance of new physics that is discovered once one has experimental instruments of high enough resolution (energy) to explore the higher energy regime. Before asymptotic freedom it was expected that any quantum field theory would fail at sufficiently high energy, where the flaws of the renormalization procedure would appear. To deal with this, one would have to invoke some kind of fundamental length. In an asymptotically free theory this is not necessarily the case — the decrease of the effective coupling for large energy means that no new physics need arise at short distances. There are no infinities at all, the bare coupling is finite — indeed it vanishes. The only divergences that arise are an illusion that appears when one tries to compare, in perturbation theory, the finite effective coupling at finite distances with the vanishing effective coupling at infinitely short distances. Thus the discovery of asymptotic freedom greatly reassured one of the consistency of four-dimensional quantum field theory. One can trust renormalization theory for an asymptotically free theory, independent of the fact that perturbation theory is only an asymptotic expansion, where it gets better and better in the regime of short distances."

"Nelson rejected the prevailing views to the effect that nonstandard analysis operates with some fictional elements that extend the standard world of mathematical entities. In his approach, nonstandard objects inhabit the realm of the most ordinary mathematical objects. Nelson emphasized the creative syntactic contribution of the new approach in the following terms: “Really new in nonstandard analysis are not theorems but the notions, i.e., external predicates.” (Nelson 1988 ...)"

"Intellectual property is an oxymoron."

"The subject matter of mathematics is the expressions themselves together with the rules for manipulating them—nothing more."

"Physics is always a gamble; it is a game of exploration. That’s the fun of it. We never know for sure what will happen. Sometimes, we theorists can anticipate, but nature is the final judge."

"Remarkably, the building of the Standard Model — the theory of how particles and forces interact — was the success of the conservatives. It required no revolution at the foundational level. Normal physics, the kind that goes on experiment after experiment, produced the Standard Model."

"Why is space-time doomed? There are many reasons, among which: In string theory we can change the dimension of space-time by changing the strength of the string force. Thus, the so-called II-A string theory, which semi-classically describes closed strings moving in ten-dimensional flat space for very weak coupling is dual for strong coupling to a theory, called M-theory, that at low energies is described by eleven-dimensional supergravity. By increasing the string coupling we can grow an extra dimension. How can the spatial continuum be fundamental if the number of spatial dimensions can be so changed?"

"String theory was not invented to describe gravity; instead it originated in an attempt to describe the strong interactions, wherein mesons can be thought of as open strings with quarks at their ends. The fact that the theory automatically described closed strings as well, and that closed strings invariably produced gravitons and gravity, and that the resulting quantum theory of gravity was finite and consistent is one of the most appealing aspects of the theory."

"The universe has been expanding since the big bang, thus early on it was hot and dense. To trace the history of the universe we must understand the dynamics that operates when the universe was hot and particles were very energetic. Before the standard model we could not go back further than 200,000 years after the big bang. Today, especially since QCD simplifies at high energy, we can extrapolate to very eary times, where nucleons melt and quarks and gluons are liberated to form a quark-gluon plasma."

"... From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind."

"Are all the (measurable) dimensionless parameters that characterize the physical universe calculable in principle or are some merely determined by historical or quantum mechanical accident and incalculable?"

"Bitcoin did have great potential, but it is damaged beyond repair. ... Bitcoin was born with serious flaws. ... it has been compared to a Ponzi scheme. ... It's time to admit that the current Bitcoin needs to be scrapped ... bear in mind what it is that makes some venture capitalists Bitcoin zealots: pure greed. That is the reason clearest to me for Bitcoin's failure."