Academics From The United States

"The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat."

"Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage."

"The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as long as all the time before."

"Poor humans; they will all die." "Poor us; we will not."

"How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails."

"Did you ever think? Old-fashioned writing is the ultimate in context tagging. It’s passive, informative, and present exactly where you need it."

"That was the old saying: Once your secret is outed anywhere, however briefly, it is outed forever. “Oh, I don’t know,” said Juan. “The way to cover a slip is to embellish it, hide it in all sorts of fake secrets.”"

"Over the last twenty years, the worldwide net had come to be a midden of bogus sites and recursive fraudulence…telling truth from fantasy was often the hardest thing about using the web."

"Principal Alcalde was into a long speech, about the fast-changing world and the need for Fairmont to revolutionize itself from semester to semester. At the same time they must never forget the central role of modern education, which was to teach the kids how to learn, how to pose questions, how to be adaptable—all without losing their moral compass."

"Every state religion he’d ever seen had a core of hypocrisy. That was why he’d been against bringing “Hrala” ashore—he knew the priests would never accept their theology suddenly incarnate."

"One of his many mottos was, “If you didn’t figure it out yourself, you don’t understand it.”"

"Some dreams take a long time in dying. Some get a last minute reprieve…and that can be even worse."

"She was obviously an idealist: that is, someone who can twist his every vice into self-righteous morality."

"The closer a Citizen came to the centers of power, the more of a madhouse the universe became."

"Our system is founded on the Concept of Chaos. The universe is basically a dark and Unhappy place—a place where evil and injustice and randomness rule. The ironic thing is that the very act of organization creates the potential for even greater ruin. Social organizations have a natural tendency to become monopolistic and inflexible. When they finally break down, it is a catastrophic debacle. So, we must except a great deal of disorder and violence in our lives if we are to avoid a complete blow up later."

"Even as my conscious mind concluded that we were under fire, I threw myself on the ground and flatten into the lowest profile possible. You’ve heard the bromide about combat making life more real. I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly true that when you are flat against the ground with your face in the dirt, the whole universe looks different."

"There may have been some time in the past when a group calling themselves astrologers could produce results. I don’t know, and the matter doesn’t interest me, for I live in the present. In our time the men working in the name of astrology are incapable of producing results, are conscious frauds."

"Wil wondered fleetingly if she might be psychopathic, and not merely young and naive."

"Quit crossing your fingers, Wim; the only thing that’ll ever save you from is the respect of educated men."

"The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity."

"I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet … we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is..."

"We can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals."

"The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century."

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

"A reason to have computers understand natural language is that it’s an extremely effective way of communicating. What I came to realize is that the success of the communication depends on the real intelligence on the part of the listener, and that there are many other ways of communicating with a computer that can be more effective, given that it doesn’t have the intelligence."

"There is a tendency to throw computers at third world problems, which I think is often a distraction. Putting computers in the schools is great, but it may be more important to put teachers in the schools."

"What surprised me, which Google was part of, is that superficial search techniques over large bodies of stuff could get you what you wanted. I grew up in the AI tradition, where you have a complete conceptual model, and the information retrieval tradition, where you have complex vectors of key terms and Boolean queries. The idea that you can index billions of pages and look for a word and get what you want is quite a trick. To put it in more abstract terms, it's the power of using simple techniques over very large numbers versus doing carefully constructed systematic analysis."

"Seekers after the glitter of intelligence are misguided in trying to cast it in the base metal of computing. There is an amusing epilogue to this analogy: in fact, the alchemists were right. Lead can be converted into gold by a particle accelerator hurling appropriate beams at lead targets. The AI visionaries may be right in the same way, and they are likely to be wrong in the same way."

"The techniques of artificial intelligence are to the mind what bureaucracy is to human social interaction."

"If we assume that the person asking the question is serious, there is an underlying background of purposes and understanding (the 'horizon' as Gadamer calls it) into which the question fits. If a questioner were to ask "Can pigs have wings?" a respondent within the analytic tradition might have difficulty answering, because although the idea is outrageously farfetched, current work in genetic engineering does leave open the logical possibility of creating a beast with the desired characteristics. Admittedly, there might be some refuge in challenging the asker as to whether such a monstrosity would still properly be called a pig,11 thereby invalidating the question. But if the question were asked seriously, neither the logical possibility nor the precise meaning of "pig" would be the issue at hand. The questioner would be asking for some reason in some background of understanding and purpose, and the appropriate answer (just like the appropriate answer to "Is there water in the refrigerator?") would have to be relevant to that background."

"The main activity of programming is not the origination of new independent programs, but in the integration, modification, and explanation of existing ones."

"But every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand."

"It is some relief to move from the exalted realm of philosophical ethics to the mundane realm of scientific methodology. However, I rather shy away from discussions of Methodology with a capital M. To paraphrase Shaw: Those who can do science; those who can’t prattle about its methodology."

"Schwinger had... been working on and solved some radar related... electrodynamic problems, classical electrodynamic theory problems that nobody else could approach... [A]s a calculator he was amazing... phenomenal. ...You can well argue that radar... as well as new developments in bomb technology, in fuses, played a more important role than nuclear weapons [in World War II]."

"So in 1958 when I went for my thesis exam... and Yang... was in my committee, he and Paul [C.] Martin and Julian Schwinger... I started explaining how the is different from the and Yang said, "Wait a minute... there's no way of distinguishing electron neutrinos from muon neutrinos. It makes no sense to say they are different from one another. It's a meaningless concept." ...I began to explain and Schwinger, seeing my distress and realizing that he was the cause... said, "Let me explain the situation to Mr. Yang" and he patiently explained how an experiment could be done, namely the experiment that would be done in a couple of years... to distinguish electron neutrinos from muon neutrinos, if... they were different... and Yang nodded and the exam continued and I passed the exam. ...[S]ix months later Lee and Yang published a paper explaining how electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos could be different from one another. They simply stole the idea from Julian. He was subject to many such acts of thievery. Years later I met Yang in China... and I described the incident to him... He said, "It is exactly as you said, Shelly.""

"He argued to me that electrons and s, which are particles, charged s we call them, were known... He said that if we're going to have a that distinguishes electrons from muons, then surely... it should not be e- and μ- that have... , it should be the e- and the μ+. So... that way... charge and the new can distinguish electrons from muons... and it followed that there had to be two kinds of s in nature. So built into the way he taught... particle physics was the fact that there are two kinds of neutrinos. ...It was acknowledged as a technical possibility by some people, but it... wouldn't be known until 1963. This was in the 1950s."

"It's true that he had a funny style. His lecture was precise. He had the voice of a radio announcer. Everything was in perfect sentences, grammatically perfect. The formulas were all clearly written on the board. The talk was so designed that he would be at the blackboard nearest the exit door at the end of the lecture. He would end the lecture and... immediately slip out the door and disappear so that his graduate students could not track him down too easily."

"During this period I attended two sessions of the Michigan summer school at which Schwinger (1948) and Feynman (1949) described their respective reformulations of QED. Schwinger’s was deeper and more complete while Feynman’s was easier to use but at that time incomplete. One may give a feeling for the impact of Schwinger by quoting Dyson who wrote home that ”in a few months we shall have forgotten what pre-Schwinger physics was like.” Bethe at that time described this period as the most exciting in physics since the great days of 1925-30 when quantum mechanics was being discovered."

"For two years in the late 1950s I was a postdoc at Harvard. Julian Schwinger was the leading light in theoretical physics at the time. We, the postdocs and junior faculty, audited whatever course he happened to be teaching. The material was always original. The lectures were on Wednesdays, and afterward the small group of us would have lunch with Schwinger at Chez Dreyfus in Cambridge. We would be joined by another small group from MIT that included Vikki Weisskopf. If Schwinger had any new ideas, he would try them out on Weisskopf. As it happened on this occasion, he had developed a “theory of everything.” Some of this theory survives in the work of other people. In 1962, he published a paper on “Gauge invariance and mass.”9 … In it he raised the question of whether one could have a massive vector meson in a theory that had an underlying gauge invariance. This possibility … inspired P. W. Anderson to use these ideas in condensed matter physics.10... 9 J. Schwinger, “Gauge invariance and mass,” Phys. Rev. 125, 397–398 1962 . 10 P. W. Anderson, “Plasmons, gauge invariance and mass,” Phys. Rev. 130, 439–442 1963."

"Is the purpose of theoretical physics to be no more than a cataloging of all the things that can happen when particles interact with each other and separate? Or is it to be an understanding at a deeper level in which there are things that are not directly observable (as the underlying quantized fields are) but in terms of which we shall have a more fundamental understanding?"

"Perhaps the most important contribution to science that the Royal Society has made in its three centuries of existence is its early role in publishing Newton's masterful account of his discoveries: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy—the Principia."

"If my history lesson has done nothing else, it should have reminded you that, during any given period in the evolving history of physics, the prevailing, main line, climate of opinion was likely as not to be wrong, as seen in the light of later developments. And yet, in those earlier times, with relatively few individuals involved, change did occur, but slowly... What is fundamentally different in the present day situation in high energy physics is that large numbers of workers are involved, with corresponding pressures to conformity and resistance to any deflection in direction of the main stream, and that the time scale of one scientific generation is much too long for the rapid pace of experimental discovery. I also have a secret fear that new generations may not necessarily have the opportunity to become familiar with dissident ideas."

"Time appears in quantum mechanics as a continuous parameter which represents an abstraction of the dynamical role of the measurement apparatus. The requirement of invites the extension of this abstraction to include space and time coordinates. The implication that space-time localized measurements are a useful, if practically unrealizable idealization may be incorrect, but it is a grave error dismiss the concept on the basis of a priori notions of measurability."

"Many principles of economics were hidden in obscure verbiage of previous generations; he reformulated and extended them with crystal clarity in the language of mathematics."

"He was influential. He influenced students through his textbook, and he influenced the entire economics profession through his dissertation, published as "Foundations of Economic Analysis." Readers of this blog will tend to disapprove of his influence, in that it promoted Keynes and the use of mathematical modeling. Perhaps Milton Friedman was more influential on policy. But Samuelson was more influential on the internal dynamics of the economics profession. On that score, I would say that he was without peer in this century. […] Compared with later generations of economists, he was more nuanced in his thinking and not as capable a mathematician."

"John Maynard Keynes may have had more influence on policy makers, Milton Friedman on citizens, Kenneth Arrow on economic theory, but Samuelson had more influence on the way economics is done today, and the purposes to which it is put, than any other economist of the twentieth century."

"A few years ago, I had the good fortune of running across a first edition of Paul's textbook (not the recent reprint of the original text, but an actual 1948 edition). It was a real find. I bought the volume in an online auction for, if my recollection is correct, $35. Talk about consumer surplus! I would have gladly paid many times that. At the next Boston Fed meeting, I took the book along to get Paul to sign it. Below is the book's title page, along with Paul's gracious inscription."

"One recent history of economic thought (Jürg Niehans’s A History of Economic Theory) devotes twenty-four pages to Samuelson’s ideas. Adam Smith only gets thirteen. Samuelson’s work on stock markets and the random walk takes up less than two of those twenty-four pages. He was “the last generalist in economics,” as he liked to say, and for him financial market studies were just a side project that he at times seemed deeply ambivalent about. His intervention was, however, crucial to the triumph of the random walk. Here was one of the most important economists of all time, and he didn’t think the relationship between coin flips and the stock market was a dinner-speech triviality."

"There have been hedgehogs; there have been foxes; and then there was Paul Samuelson. (...) I’m referring, of course, to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction among thinkers – foxes who know many things, and hedgehogs who know one big thing. What distinguished Paul Samuelson as an economic thinker, making him like nobody else, past or present, was the fact that he knew – and taught us – many big things. No economist has ever had so many seminal ideas."

"Samuelson is an artist; he brought undergraduates pretty well up to the level of the state of knowledge in the profession."