Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐 @bibliolater@social.cleverlibre.org

Here's a good talk by Ed Witten. It's so good that even Peter Woit, who hates string theory, recommends it!

A remarkable feature of the strong force is that while quarks have something like electric charge, called 'color', except at very high temperatures quarks always come in bunches where the color cancels out - they're 'colorless'.

For example a quark and antiquark can form a meson, which is colorless. Also three quarks can form a baryon, which is colorless. (Yes, color charge behaves more subtly than electric charge.)

Why are all the particles we see colorless? This is the mystery of 'confinement'. While the ultimate proof of confinement may require massive computer calculations using 'lattice gauge theory', there have long been hopes that we can understand it more simply using approximate calculations.

Witten explains two approaches. One is the '1/N expansion'. While there are 3 different colors of quarks, we can imagine a world where there are N, and things simplify as N → ∞. Another is string theory.

They're connected: there's some evidence that as N → ∞, our theory of the strong force would behave more and more like a string theory. But Witten admits

"The string theory we want is probably quite unlike any that we actually know, as of now. We don’t know how to make a string theory with the short distance behavior [that we see]".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvIz-6YOdKs

This is a big deal.

It was the first official account of Elizabeth I’s reign, one of the most valuable sources on early modern Britain, commissioned by her successor, King James I. But, for 400 years, no one has been able to read passages on hundreds of pages of this manuscript because they had been so heavily revised and self-censored by their 17th-century author, apparently to avoid punishment for offending his patron.

#History #Medieval #Histodons #medievaldons #elizabethan

@histodons

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/14/heart-stopping-censored-pages-of-history-of-elizabeth-i-reappear-after-400-years

The Rosetta Stone is found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre-François Bouchard during Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign #OTD in 1799.

It is a stele composed of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek.

#archeology

TIL: Survivors of Bubonic Plague (Black Death) of Europe had genes that led to increased chances of developing autoimmune disorders.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/genes-protective-during-the-black-death-may-now-be-increasing-autoimmune-disorders-202212012859
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15046ul/til_survivors_of_bubonic_plague_black_death_of/

"The THREE AGES OF WATER is a significant work on the critical topic of water. It’s historically rich and a scientifically accessible account of the water-human nexus over millennia, with a look at the future."

https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2023/07/book-review-water-scientist-offers-positive-vision-avoid-dystopian-future/?s=09

New #ebook @gutenberg_org: The celestial worlds discover'd by Christiaan Huygens https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71191