I made my way over to the Eagle last night. The fish & chips are indeed excellent, although there's actually one place in the world in which I've had better fish & chips. Not that anybody reading this should care about my ranking, but the relevant point is that the place in question is in Santa Monica, CA, so that we should all go there. It's called Ye Olde King's Head, and it's a traditional British pub (modulo the way smoking and ordering works in the US, but you get the idea). On the way there, I noticed a coffee place (that I tried today; it actually can make iced drinks; hooray!) as well as a cafe'/dessert place that's open until 10pm (i.e., something along the lines of what I was trying to find on Monday night). The Eagle has a sign on its front indicating its role in the whole Watson/Crick thing (they apparently went there to drink and discuss their work; very cool!), and I suspect that my current postdoc advisor (Michael Cross) went there as well, given that his College (Corpus Christi) from his undergrad days is right next to this pub (with maybe one other restaurant in between). Apparently, he showed some people his old dorm room at some point during this semester's program.
The other pub I visited was The Castle Inn, although I didn't eat anything, so I didn't get much out of it. (I don't drink, so I have to have another reason to go. The way things worked, seating was an issue, so I also didn't really get a chance to sit around and talk to the people with whom I went.) The pub social atmosphere is certainly pretty cool, but the smoking sucks ass. I really don't like it when my clothes reak of smoke when I leave the place and when I'm around smoking too much I start to feel sick. (That is, not only do I dislike smoking because it smells bad, but it goes beyond my tastes in that I am "visibly" affected.) It's such a shame. I guess I would just have to learn to live with it if I lived here or (more likely) visited here for 6 months to a year as part of some program. (Given the existence of the Isaac Newton Institute, the latter situation is fairly likely to happen at some point in my life.)
Another thought that has nothing to do with this but that I forgot to mention. This comes from a brief conversation on Sunday and I unfortunately don't remember the wording as well as I did before. I also won't say who said this but the quote is basically along the following lines: "Creatism is not a theory because you can't test it. Neither is string theory, really, for the same reason, in fact, but at least the latter becomes a theory asymptotically as time ---> infinity."
I guess you really were soaking up the atmosphere.
ReplyDeletePublic smoking bans still seem a little borderline to me in terms of what should and shouldn't be set down in law, but I have to admit I really appreciate the affect.
More specifically, the test for the validity of creationism, or more accurately the existence of an afterlife, is "acceptable" but not "recognizable." I'm speaking from the computer science terms here--if it is true, you will reach a state in finite time where this truth becomes known to you. If false, you aren't guaranteed anything. I don't think this distinction per se gains you anything.
ReplyDeleteThe real merit of a theory comes from whether or not it serves as a good model--specifically whether it allows you to predict future outcomes. A theory doesn't even have to be correct to do this--consider the Bohr model of the atom! Hardly a useless construct, but not really correct, either. Some might argue that the complexity of anything that captures the behavior of the whole system would by necessity have to be as complex as the whole system, and thus could not be contained in it. To this I say that it must be as complex as the Kolomogorov complexity of the whole system, or the complexity of the rules rather than the data they are operating on. A universal turing machine can execute a copy of itself (executing a copy of itself, if you like!) just fine. Oh, side track, back to "what you get out of a theory". Maybe what you get out the creationism theory is a free ride out of hell (political prison) if you subscribe to the right religion (political party), but to me this also implies an unjust god (Joseph Stalin).
In communist russia, theory disputes you!
I'm with you on the smoking thing. My political views are against what's being done in that respect in the US, but the selfish part of me puts that aside.
ReplyDeleteI just got back an hour ago, by the way. I'm checking e-mail to see if there's a game tomorrow. I feel like total crap.
Your statement about theories is interesting in light of the fact that the usefulness of string theory (as far as I can tell) has thus far come only from its mathematics (where it's done quite a lot) and not from any purported physics. String theorists seem to really hate it when you tell them what they're doing is math rather than physics...