Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Cairo : Oracle - Greg Egan

City in Egypt.


3 out of 5

Cavendish Laboratory : Oracle - Greg Egan

Where Stoney works at Cambridge. A mid-Victorian building.


4 out of 5

Saint Paul's Cathedral : Oracle - Greg Egan

A big church in England.


3 out of 5

Westminster Abbey : Oracle - Greg Egan

A church in England.


3 out of 5

Thames : Oracle - Greg Egan

A river in England.


3 out of 5

Sherborne : Oracle - Greg Egan

A public school he went to.


4 out of 5

Milton, Dante, John the Divine : Oracle - Greg Egan

Writers.


3 out of 5

H.G. Wells : Oracle - Greg Egan

An author.


3 out of 5

Hamilton's young friend : Oracle - Greg Egan

Has a PhD in algebraic geometry from Cambridge.


3.5 out of 5

Aristotle : Oracle - Greg Egan

Ancient philosopher.


3 out of 5

Kurt Godel : Oracle - Greg Egan

Austrian mathematician.


3 out of 5

Michael Polanyi : Oracle - Greg Egan

An academic philosopher who agrees to moderate the debate.


3 out of 5

Wagner : Oracle - Greg Egan

A composer.


3 out of 5

Luke : Oracle - Greg Egan

Assistant and an affair of Stoney's.


3 out of 5

Huysmans : Oracle - Greg Egan

Basically just a very dim Catholic.


3 out of 5

Helen of Troy : Oracle - Greg Egan

Ancient beauty.


3 out of 5

Joyce Hamilton : Oracle - Greg Egan

John's dying wife.


3 out of 5

William Blake : Oracle - Greg Egan

A poet.


3 out of 5

Rosalind Franklin : Oracle - Greg Egan

From Birkbeck, helped perfect the fabrication process for the computing circuits.


3 out of 5

Nevill Mott : Oracle - Greg Egan

Made the superconducting alloys for the imager.


3 out of 5

Malcolm Muggeridge : Oracle - Greg Egan

Another mathematician that did war work.


3 out of 5

William Hamilton : Oracle - Greg Egan

John's brother.


3 out of 5

Aquinas to Wittgenstein : Oracle - Greg Egan

Philosophers.


3 out of 5

Elizabeth Anscombe : Oracle - Greg Egan

A philosopher and winner of a debate with Hamilton.


3 out of 5

John Hamilton : Oracle - Greg Egan

Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Also an author of religious defenses and children's fantasies.


3.5 out of 5

Yang : Oracle - Greg Egan

A physicist.


3 out of 5

Feynman : Oracle - Greg Egan

A physicist.


3 out of 5

Everett : Oracle - Greg Egan

Had a time travel theory that was right.


3 out of 5

Ealing : Oracle - Greg Egan

A movie director.


3 out of 5

Helen : Oracle - Greg Egan

A time travelling multiverse shifting android.


3.5 out of 5

Newton : Oracle - Greg Egan

A scientist.


3 out of 5

Hardy : Oracle - Greg Egan

A mathematician.


3 out of 5

Eddington : Oracle - Greg Egan

A physicist.


3 out of 5

Chris : Oracle - Greg Egan

A friend at school Stoney was in love with who died of bovine tuberculosis.


3 out of 5

Hermann Weyl : Oracle - Greg Egan

A mathematician.


3 out of 5

Guy Burgess : Oracle - Greg Egan

A corrupted English spy.


3 out of 5

Mr Wills : Oracle - Greg Egan

A detective at the Manchester CID.


3 out of 5

Arthur : Oracle - Greg Egan

Stoney's boyfriend at the time of his trouble.


3 out of 5

Franza Kafka : Oracle - Greg Egan

Not a Commie, and a writer.


3 out of 5

Peter Quint : Oracle - Greg Egan

A spook, and one of Stoney's captors.


3.5 out of 5

Robert Stoney : Oracle - Greg Egan

A professor of mathematics.


4 out of 5

Monday, March 28, 2011

Only Connect - Greg Egan

Vignette



Number of words : 750
Percent of complex words : 18.1
Average syllables per word : 1.7
Average words per sentence : 28.9


READABILITY INDICES

Fog : 18.8
Flesch : 31.3
Flesch-Kincaid : 16.1


PEOPLE

E.M. Forster

A writer.

Kusnanto Sarumpaet

Javanese mathematician. Author of six papers on general relativity and QGT. Found a simple dynamical law related to tetravelt graphs which always leads to the average valence stabilising at four.

Michael Faraday

A physicist who had a notion of lines of force running between electric charges.

Roger Penrose

A physicist and his spin networks are trivalent graphs with each edge labelled by a half integer, corresponding to a possible value of the spin of a quantum particle.

William Thomson

Had a theory of atoms as knotted vortex tubes.

Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli

1990s Physicists. discovered an analogous result in quantum gravity, where spin network states have a simple geometric interpretation.

John Baez and Fotini Markopoulou and José-Antonio Zapata

Did ground-breaking work on the possible dynamical laws for spin networks in the early 21st century.


CONCEPTS

Graph

A set of nodes and edges.

QGT

In Quantum Graph Theory, a quantum state describing both the geometry of space and all the matter fields present is built up from combinations of graphs.

Quantum Field Theory

A spin network embedded in a region of space can be used to assign an amplitude to every possible configuration of a field. The quantum states defined in this way consist of lines of flux running along the edges of the network.

Tetravalent graphs

With the four edges emerging from each node giving area to the faces of a “quantum tetrahedron”.

Polymer states

Possibility of open chains of dopant nodes.


TECHNOLOGY

Orbital Accelerator Facility

Currently being used to test for polymer states.


PLOT

The history of the physics and mathematics underpinning the developments of Quantum Graph Theory and Quantum Field Theory.


3.5 out of 5