Ending illegal wars, the death penalty and torture are even more important. Why would our government which has no problem killing, maiming and even "torturing some folks" even begin to care about poverty, illiteracy and disease? You may disagree but as a whole our government has a strong proclivity to violence which implies a lack of regard for life. Dealing effectively with poverty, illiteracy and disease presupposes our government is sufficiently motivated to direct its attention to those issues. Pick any metric you like and it clearly shows our government has other priorities. Poverty is up, illiteracy is up, education is overall declining, university tuition skyrocketing, cost of healthcare skyrocketing, planned parenthood under attack etc. Our government just bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, executed a woman in Georgia who should have served a life sentence instead, is about to execute a man whose guilt is unclear and still tortures people in dark forgotten corners of the globe. I don't think there can be any meaningful change until bad people with no respect for life are removed from office and replaced with good people who do respect life. It's no coincidence that since the warmongers seized control of this country that education and healthcare took a dive. Dr. Strangelove doesn't care one whit about poverty, illiteracy and disease .
Quantum Field Theory is really just ordinary Quantum Mechanics. It is necessary to use fields instead of "wave equations" because the number of particles can vary when the energy of a system exceeds a certain threshhold. (e.g. a single photon having an energy equal to or higher than the E=mc^2 energy of two electrons can transmute into an electron-positron pair. 1 particle transforms into 2. This is very common in high energy processes.)
Quantum fields are REAL because certain phenomena like solitons, vortices, monopoles and quark confinement can only be understood properly in the full field context. Quantum field theory cannot describe these phenomena in terms of Feynman diagrams. Feynmann diagrams and scattering cross sections/lifetimes were once considered fundamental and fields were believed to be a tool to derive them. Physicists now understand (the competent ones) that Fields are more fundamental than the diagrams. The Fields are also real in the sense that the do much more than just represent particle states, field symmetries are fundamental symmetries of nature, e.g. the strong force has SU(3) symmetry, electroweak SU(2)xU(1) etc.
Steven Weinberg gives a very strong argument for the necessity of fields in his vol. 1 QFT book. It's very technical but a brief summary is... QM + relativity + cluster decomposition principal (which more or less says the results of distant experiments should be unrelated) --> fields
Now I have to dig out a statement by Nima Arkani-Hamed where he says something like "[...] should bother you if you believed that fields are real." - I of course forgot the most important part but I still remember in which lecture series he said that. If my memories does not mislead me, he was really arguing that you should not think of fields as real things for very concrete reasons. Trying to find it.
This took way longer than I imagined. I won't repeat the argument here in detail but it essentially boils down to the argument that fields theories are just an effective description of long distance behavior ignoring what is really going on at short distances, that fields are just a convenient tool to make locality manifest and that field theories contain a lot of redundancies due to this.
The statement I was referring to comes 28 minutes into the lecture but you probably have to watch everything up to that point for the full context.
So after watching this again the answer to my question seems pretty clear - fields are not real things. I am still left a bit confused because you very often read and hear that fields are real things and actually more often then the opposite.
Ohhh no! Just when I thought I got the answer. Just skimmed it and I draw some hope from the fact that the author uses the unconfirmed Unruh effect and wave function collapse, which is as far as I know not a thing because it is not unitary, to explain the double slit experiment. So maybe it is the author who is confused and not the others he is complaining about and I won't have to change my mind once again but I will have to read it way more carefully before drawing any conclusions.
Hey, I knew a MUMPS programmer. Nice family guy too. Anyone would have guessed by appearances he was a car mechanic (dirty jeans, greasy hair etc.) and not a programmer. Not many MUMPS programmers out there, sound like anyone you know?
Whatever the official cause of cancer it will never be food additives, processed or poor quality foods, prescription drugs, air pollution, contaminants in the water supply, contaminated vaccines (I'm a believer in vaccines so don't go there!), new car smells, pesticide residues in food and clothing, fire retardant chemicals, xenoestrogens, secondary cancers caused by chemotherapy or radiation... it will just be bad luck.
If Finland's great teachers were to teach in U.S. schools, they would encounter significant pressure to conform from students, parents and administrators. The ones who tow the line and preserve the status quo would get to keep their jobs while the others would be mobbed, manipulated and discarded. Administrators would fabricate a false narrative using negative performance review. Parents would blame the teacher for failing to "teach" which means graciously ignore their child's poor behavior and hand out high grades. This is what would happen to the great majority of great Finnish teachers were they to work here in America. The few who by good fortune places themselves in American school communities which closely resemble Finland would fit right in.
Microsoft has turned into Ma Bell. Microsoft is so large that any innovation at this point has to be minimal and highly managed or it would rock the boat, threatening the cohesiveness of the company. This is the worst environment for the hacker. It's an excellent environment for office slime who know how to play the game and lean more toward the psychopathic end of the spectrum. It's a world tailor made for the venal and the mediocre. A word about priorities, let the pricks take all the money, it's really worthless anyway compared to your mental health. In lieu of any positive creative talent middle management and HR thrive on destruction pursuits like emotional abuse, gas lighting and lying. Start living a real life worth having, live by your own rules and play your own game even if it means living on $20,000 per year which is all you really need anyway. Most of us are fighting an uphill battle with corporate suits to protect our clutter, distractions and excesses. Go outside for a nice walk, feel the sun on your face, read a good book, talk to a friend, take your child to the play ground, throw out the stuff you don't need, just start living for God's sake. Be happy now and leave all misery and bad feelings with them where they belong. Do not take the anger and resentment of your bitter experience with you (that's their greatest weapon BTW). It's very difficult to just drop your anger and resentment but do it fast, hard and don't look back. You want to be happy don't you? You want to be free? Don't waste your time thinking about them. Only think about good things. If it doesn't make you happy, you shouldn't think about it. If it makes you happy, you should think about it. You can and should become the happiest person you family and friends know about. Happiness isn't free. It requires a disciplined mind that allows good stuff in a throws out garbage like grudges. Happiness costs you but it well worth the price. There will always be enough money in your life. Social status is overrated and useless. Imagine yourself on your deathbed, are you going to regret not making $X million dollars and being the center of attention or the opportunities for true happiness that you let slip.
> In lieu of any positive creative talent middle management and HR thrive on destruction pursuits like emotional abuse, gas lighting and lying.
This whole post is crazy but this quote especially is absurd.
I'm a current Microsoft employee and I'm not a brainwashed corporate drone constantly abused by incompetent management. I don't think you've had any experience being employed by Microsoft.
