Wrapping Up

all good things

This is the last edition of World of Wonders.

It's been three full years without a missed week.

I've learned a lot.

I've grown my readership by a factor of almost five, from just over 20 to just under 100. Which is fine: I've not exactly catered to any particular audience with this more-or-less random scattering of posts covering everything from the plate tectonics to the nature of God, with excursions into specific bits of science and the design of upper-room UV air cleaning systems.

I'm deeply grateful to any of you who have stuck with me from the beginning, and likewise to those who have joined me along the way. Particularly the one reader who pledged money should I ever adopt a paid subscription model. Thank you!

To anyone who just joined recently, my apologies: I myself have an uncanny knack for joining things at the point of their dissolution, to the extent of having twice gotten stories accepted by publications that went under before my work appeared. It takes a special kind of person to have that kind of luck, and I welcome you to the club.

In the three years I've been writing this life has gone on, for me at least, although not for everyone. I've done what I can to explain the science of aerosol spread of disease, and reached perhaps a few people. To those of you who N95 indoors in public: thank you. You are the humans who make life worthwhile. We'll bring the rest along in time, and get indoor spaces up to ASHRAE 241 standard so we can ditch those damned masks for good and all. Eventually.

What comes next is some other priorities. My quantum simulation work has been going on nicely in the background, and I've made good progress on a number of fronts. There are a couple of software frameworks that I use which have been improved in the process.

My intent in the next few years is to focus on that work, including writing it up in forms suitable to preprint servers, which is a viable surrogate for publication these days. I also plan to open source the code.

In terms of particular problems, I'm interested in the simulation of de-excitation of excited states by thermalization, which I've been exploring for the past few months to no good effect. I've also got a couple more ideas about how to distinguish "collapse" interpretations of quantum theory from "many worlds" interpretations, which is what this work was originally aimed at.

And I have thoughts toward testing the proposition that Born's rule--the idea that the integral of the square of the wavefunction is a probability--can be derived from the formalism of the Many World's view. I've talked to some physicists who hold this view, and my impression is that they are slipping in some classical assumptions along the way, using abstraction for what it was originally evolved for: misleading people and confusing the situation.

Since I've got a system for simulating particle interactions, there is some chance I'll be able to simulate a situation that makes is clear--or not--how probability arises from the underlying equations. I'm doubtful that it does: the classical mindset is hard to get out of, and it's easy to slip the assumption "the classical world exists" into our thinking along the way, even when we are asking the question, "Why does the classical world exist?"

If I get really ambitious I may try to wrap the code up in a book to make it suitable for use by students. I think there's a lot of value in computational approaches to quantum ideas: allowing students to play with different scenarios and see what happens in concrete terms can be far more edifying than working through the formal mathematics in the few cases we can do that with.

But I have no contacts to speak of any more in the academic-industrial complex, which in any case, like all amoral hierarchies in the West these days, is more interested in moralistic posturing than actually delivering education and research. So work like that, much like this newsletter, is nothing more than a vanity project.

Still, if--as the Teacher says--"all is vanity", mine may as well be vanity that's solidly grounded in accurate physics and technical capability.

"My vanity project is superior to other people's!" at least has the virtue of self-consistency.

The world moves on, and for a time at least I'll move on with it.

Every good wish, to all of you.