The Perfect Game That Wasn't

Wow, a blown call by an umpire cost Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers a perfect game last night. (The umpire admitted after seeing replays that he blew the call.) This would have been the third perfect game of the 2010 season, which is already the first season with 2 perfect games. Well, the record books might indicate that there have been 2 perfect games this year, but unofficially there have now been three. Wow.

Among other things, I bet that this will help hasten the expansion of instant replay in baseball. This story isn't over.

Tales from the arXiv: Theories of Nothing and Everything

And here comes a philosophical entry...


Title: A Complete Theory of Everything (will be subjective)

Author: Marcus Hutter

Abstract: The progression of theories suggested for our world, from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe and multiverse theories and beyond, shows one tendency: The size of the described worlds increases, with humans being expelled from their center to ever more remote and random locations. If pushed too far, a potential theory of everything (ToE) is actually more a theory of nothing (ToN). Indeed such theories have already been developed. I show that including observer localization into such theories is necessary and sufficient to avoid this problem. Ockham's razor is used to develop a quantitative recipe to identify ToEs and distinguish them from ToNs and theories in-between. This precisely shows what the problem is with some recently suggested universal ToEs. The suggested principle is extended to more practical (partial, approximate, probabilistic, parametric) world models (rather than ToEs). Finally, I provide a justification of Ockham's razor.


Comment: Subjective, indeed.

A new occurrence of DEI in films

There's a new film called Meet Dave that just came out. I was the mathematical consultant on the film, which was produced by the same luminaries who brought us Norbit. (I was asked to produce a fake grand unified field theory, so I took [fair] advantage of that opportunity and inserted a DEI into the formula, which I can confirm made it into the official movie props. My gamma delta beta gamma didn't make it into the props, as I describe below). I was worried that I would have to actually go see the film in order to see the one scene about which I cared (namely, the one with my stuff in it).

Thankfully, due to the magic of the Web, I don't have to waste 2 hours of my life and actually go see the film (which currently has a 3.3/10 on IMDB, which is even lower than Norbit's rating) to see how my efforts turned out, because this clip in IMDB conveniently includes the relevant scene (or at least part of it). If you fast forward to when there are about 8 seconds remaining, then you can see a massive formula being put very quickly on the board. That massive formula just so happens to be the fake grand unified field theory that the movie people asked me to come up with (for which I was paid, of course). I included a DEI (as a subscript of the wave function in the upper left... sadly, it's basically impossible to read --- let me know if you were able to do it) and a gamma delta beta gamma. The latter got cut off because the film's prop people simplified the relation by reducing the size of the 4 x 4 matrix that I included. (Anyway, if you wanted an idea of how film people change mathematical formulas, now you have one.) I saw the prop and the DEI made it on there, but it gets cut off on-screen during the close-up and it's too small to read when they show the full board.

By the way, the 'periodic orbit expansion' (which the movie folks called a 'period orbit expansion') is a nod to one of my Georgia Tech postdoc advisors.

By the way, I would have laughed hysterically if the music they had chosen to use during the clip were The Ride.

Anyway, enjoy!

An exceptionally silly theory of everything?

GFreak e-mailed me to alert me to this article offering a potential candidate for a theory of everything. I was expecting it to be an amusing piece of psychoceramics (i.e., crackpottery), but several experts seem to think that there is some interesting stuff there. Of course, that doesn't mean one will actually get a theory of everything out of it. However, this does appear to be a legitimate piece of scientific work. I know some of the math involved and could try to understand some of the paper if I tried to think about it (I'm exhausted at the moment and don't really want to bother right now), but basically contented myself to admiring the pretty pictures and extremely admirable command of latex. The citation list is a bit strange, with almost nothing coming from published sources. (Lots of arxiv papers were cited, and perhaps some of them have actually appeared in publications.)

Because the paper looked like legitimate science, I googled this guy and he is certainly receiving a lot of press about this. It will be extremely interesting to see how this plays out.

The guy who wrote this paper doesn't have a fixed affiliation (but has an excellent educational pedigree, so I imagine this is by choice), so I am naturally having images of Perlman (who was actually well-known, so there are some differences here).

Here is the website for the guy (Garrett Lisi) who wrote the paper. Here is an article from FOX News, although that organization is hardly reputable. Here is an article from The Telegraph.

Update: I actually meant to use the word "simple" in the title instead of "silly" but my word substitution amuses me, so I'm leaving the title as is.