Agree with your point. The actual title, "If the Universe Is a Hologram, This Long-Forgotten Math Could Decode It," has another issue: physicists may have "forgotten" operator algebras, but it's certainly been a very active part of mathematics.
Wikipedia calls them by a different name! As for history, Tomita is said to be the most important guy* behind the elucidation of Type III but gets no credit…
Feels like this is a classic case of blind men and elephant
>These were further developed later by Takesaki, and the theory is called the Tomita–Takesaki theory. It has great influence in statistical mechanics too. That was the beginning part, but in Tomita’s papers, he didn’t write proofs.
I: Mathematicians usually like proofs. Is Tomita a mathematician?
A: [Minoru] Tomita is a pure mathematician. There are a lot of algebraists in Japan, including [Masamichi] Takesaki, but Tomita is a completely different kind of person, very “singular”.
An operator can be something like the differentation operator (d/dx), the integral operator, gradient, curl, or other structure. Operators are similar to functions but work more generally, like mapping functions to other functions.
IIUC, Operator algebra is the study of the properties of operators just like real, complex, matrix, and linear algebra are the study of the properties of those objects/constructs. As such, once you have defined an operator for e.g. Schroedinger's wave equation you can manipulate and explore that using the rules and principles of operator algebra. Thus, making them easier to work with.
von Neumann algebras are operator algebras. They are algebras whose elements are operators on some Hilbert space. They also satisfy some other conditions. What I just said is not meant as a definition.
A signal processing prof back in college had worked on radars in WWII, and he told us about using acoustic delay lines for various purposes. (Can't find a good reference in the couple minutes I have right now, unfortunately.)
I'm an academic at a large state university (not SUNY). Faculty, staff, and students generally have very little direct say in IT-related matters. These decisions often come down from central admin, through a process that is just as mysterious (and sometimes infuriating) to us.
I will also chime in. Having contracted with multiple large, state universities, this is the norm. Staff and faculty have little, if any, input into the systems the university uses, and are often just as confused as the rest of us.
Every institution I've worked for had a check-off for IT and central admin if software purchases were requested. These are well-known to be poison to most initiatives without a Dean level or above pushing for it.
I don't think people that criticize non-admin university employees have any idea how these things work. Not only do they not talk to the people that do the work to find out what they need, they're not open to feedback on the garbage they've cobbled together after they put it in production, and every decision is made assuming faculty, staff, and students are always wrong and they're always right. I could write a book about the things I've seen.
Not a physicist, but this seems to depend on the physical setting? Seems there are usually metric with physical meaning in continuum mechanics, e.g., elasticity or GR, but not so much if one is working in say geometric mechanics — one can define a Hamiltonian flow on a symplectic manifold without a metric.
I really like the Financial Times. It was a breath of fresh air compared to other newspapers. If nothing else, I liked the tone: matter of fact, no drama. But it's (i) not cheap; and (ii) canceling was a bit harder than subscribing. (I found I wasn't reading it enough to justify the cost. Subscribing was easy but canceling required a phone call -- bit of unnecessary but understandable friction.)
I agree incentivization is definitely a big part of the problem, but I think in general a bigger issue is that as a society we tend to reward people who are the first to arrive at a non-null result. This is as true in science as much as in any other area of human endeavor.
Except for open access models where someone -- usually the authors, but sometimes universities or other institutions -- pay so that the article can be accessed by the public for free. (Authors usually don't pay out of pocket but using grants, and OA journals usually offer some sort of "financial aid" for those unable to pay.)
What a waste of money to pay these parasites to let the public see your research.
It’s just as much a waste of grant money too. Whether that comes from or from a nonprofit, padding the pockets of some publishing company gatekeeper is in no way what anyone should expect their money to go toward.
Leaving aside all the geopolitics and bragging rights, I would imagine that one scientifc reason for trying is that since the far side gets more meteor hits, there may be more material from elsewhere in the solar system. (Having said that I know nothing about this mission and am just guessing.)
I mentioned Gold on my comment before I read yours. Yes that makes perfect sense. Why ruin your reputation (hehe) with children mining rare metals, when you can have known and unknown rare metals flown in..
It is costly though to bring in a ton of <insert element> from the moon.
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