It's referring to a successful political overthrow.
The quote really needs the first two lines:
Now is the winter of our discontent
made glorious summer by the sun of York.
The verb in the sentence is "is made", not just "is". "Now" it is summer, not winter. They were discontent in the past. Now they are happy.
York (Richard's brother, Edward, now King Edward IV) has overthrown King Henry VI. There's also an important pun: "York" also refers to their father, also named Richard, who was the Duke of York until his death at the hands of Henry's faction. So Edward is also the "son of York".
That said, Richard is being sarcastic. He's plotting the next political overthrow, which will also be successful. And who will in turn be overthrown again. That, at least, will put an end to it, if for no other reason than that literally everybody else is dead.
One of my most important jobs as a Shakespeare actor is to find ways to enunciate some of his over-long sentences in a way that allows the audience to follow them just by listening.
In this case, it's not too hard. Shakespeare likes giving you oppositions, like "winter" and "summer". Put the stress there, and the audience will follow. And you don't need to breathe at the end of the line; it can flow directly into the next one.
Unlikely, since our labor costs are still considerably higher than elsewhere. For a very long time our economy has rested on developing high margin products and letting others do the low-marginal-overhead of making it. We assumed that they were not going to catch up to us as innovators.
That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.
Most of Trek's tech is just a way to move the story along. Transporters were introduced to avoid having to land a shuttle. Warp drive is just a way to get to the next story. Communicators relay plot points.
Stories which focus on them as technology are nearly always boring. "Oh no the transporter broke... Yay we fixed it".
Lobbying is tightly regulated, and the FEC really does keep a close eye.
This is just flat out bribery, using the thinnest of legal fig leaves. Which would not possibly pass muster if he hadn't also packed the court with supporters.
No Theory of Everything is going to make realistically testable predictions. That's a problem of the domain, not the theory. The unification energy between the graviton and quantum field theory is on the order of 10^19 GeV, over a dozen orders of magnitude beyond anything we can generate.
We might get lucky that some ToE would generate low-energy predictions different from GR and QFT, but there's no reason to think that it must.
It's not like there's some great low-energy predictions that we're just ignoring. The difficulty of a beyond-Standard-Model theory is inherent to the domain of the question, and that's going to plague any alternative to String Theory just as much.
The testable predictions would be at the places where QM and GR meet. Some examples:
1. interactions at the event horizon of a black hole -- could the theory describe Hawking radiation?
2. large elements -- these are where special relativity influences the electrons [1]
It's also possible (and worth checking) that a unified theory would provide explanations for phenomena and observed data we are ascribing to Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
I wonder if there are other phenomena such as effects on electronics (i.e. QM electrons) in GR environments (such as geostationary satellites). Or possibly things like testing the double slit experiment in those conditions.
re 2: special relativity is not general relativity - large elements will not provide testable predictions for a theory of everything that combines general relativity and quantum mechanics.
re: "GR environments (such as geostationary satellites)" - a geostationary orbit (or any orbit) is not an environment to test the interaction of GR and QM - it is a place to test GR on its own, as geostationary satellites have done. In order to test a theory of everything, the gravity needs to be strong enough to not be negligible in comparison to quantum effects, i.e. black holes, neutron stars etc. your example (1) is therefore a much better answer than (2)
Re 2 I was wondering if there may be some GR effect as well, as the element's nucleus would have some effect on spacetime curvature and the electrons would be close to that mass and moving very fast.
For geostationary orbits I was thinking of things like how you need to use both special and general relativity for GPS when accounting for the time dilation between the satellite and the Earth (ground). I was wondering if similar things would apply at a quantum level for something QM related so that you would have both QM and GR at play.
So it may be better to have e.g. entangled particles with them placed/interacting in a way that GR effects come into play and measuring that effect.
But yes, devising tests for this would be hard. However, Einstein thought that we wouldn't be able to detect gravitational waves, so who knows what would be possible.
You don't need a full fledged theory of quantum gravity to describe Hawking radiation. Quantization of the gravitational field isn't relevant for that phenomenon. Similarly you don't need quantum gravity to describe large elements. Special relativity is already integrated into quantum field theory.
In some ways saying that we don't have a theory of quantum gravity is overblown. It is perfectly possible to quantize gravity in QFT the same way we quantize the electromagnetic field. This approach is applicable in almost all circumstances. But unlike in the case of QED, the equations blow up at high energies which implies that the theory breaks down in that regime. But the only places we know of where the energies are high enough that the quantization of the gravitational field would be relevant would be near the singularity of a black hole or right at the beginning of the Big Bang.
Can't black holes explain Dark Energy? Supposedly there was an experiment showing Black Holes are growing faster than expected. If this is because they are tied to the expansion of the universe (univ. expands -> mass grows), and that tie goes both ways (mass grows -> universe expands), boom, dark energy. I also think that inside the black holes they have their own universes which are expanding (and that we're probably inside one too). If this expansion exerts a pressure on the event horizon which transfers out, it still lines up.
I'm far from an expert in this field--indeed, I can but barely grasp the gentle introductions to these topics--but my understanding is that calling string theory a "theory of everything" really flatters it. String theory isn't a theory; it's a framework for building theories. And no one (to my understanding) has been able to put forward a theory using string theory that can actually incorporate the Standard Model and General Relativity running in our universe to make any prediction in the first place, much less one that is testable.
Getting into the weeds about what is and is not "A Theory" is an armchair scientist activity, it's not a useful exercise. Nobody in the business of doing physics cares or grants "theory status" to a set of models or ideas.
Some physicists have been trying to build an updated model of the universe based on mathematical objects that can be described as little vibrating strings. They've not been successful in closing the loop and constructing a model that actually describes reality accurately, but they've done a lot of work that wasn't necessarily all to waste.
It's probably either just the wrong abstraction or missing some fundamental changes that would make it accurate.
It would also be tremendously helpful if we had some new physics where there was a significant difference between an experiment and either GR or the standard model. Unfortunately the standard model keeps being proven right.
I think that’s highly debatable. For example, dark matter particles with testable properties could be a prediction of a ToE. Or the ToE could resolve the quantum measurement problem (collapse of the wave function) in a testable way.
What's the "quantum measurement problem"? And why is it a problem? I get the wave function collapses when you measure bit. But which part of this do you want to resolve in a testable way?
It’s the question of how the wave function collapses during a measurement. What exactly constitutes a “measurement”? Does the collapse happen instantaneously? Is it a real physical phenomenon or a mathematical trick?
I thought that what constitutes a measurement is well understood; it's just the entanglement between the experiment and the observer, and the process is called decoherence - and the collapse itself is a probabilistic process as a result.
AFAIK an EoT is not required to design experiments to determine if it's a real physical phenomenon vs. a mathematical trick; people are trying to think up those experiments now (at least for hidden variable models of QM).
There's a more basic problem with string theory, which is that it's not a theory. It's a mathematical framework which is compatible with a very wide range of specific physical theories.
About tests of quantum gravity, there have been proposals for feasible tests using gravitationally-induced entanglement protocols:
I don't think that's quite the problem. In mathematics, the word "theory" is often used when referring to particular mathematical frameworks (e.g. Group Theory, Graph Theory, Morse Theory). In that sense I think String Theory is very much a theory. As you imply, in physics, the word "theory" is typically used in a different sense. I'm not a physicist but I presume a physical theory has to be verifiable, consistent with observations, able to predict the behavior of unexplained phenomena. If I understand correctly, the basic problem is that in some quarters string theory is being passed off as a physical theory. I know of pure mathematicians who are interested in string theory and who couldn't care less whether its a physical theory.
The word "theory" doesn't matter in the way you are portraying it as.
Like a book is a book because it's got pages with words on them glued to a spine with covers. It's not "not a book" because the plot makes no sense.
Scientists don't care about what "a theory" is, it's not philosophically important to them. It's just a vague term for a collection of ideas or a model or whatever.
I guess I'm not being clear. I don't care about the word "theory". The point is string theory makes no predictions. It's not just inaccessible energies which make it untestable, but the fact that, as a framework, string theory is compatible with a huge range of possible universes.
Eh, again you're just saying "it's not real because..." whether or not you attach the word theory. It is a space with lots of possible parameters being explored and is not one set of parameters with predictions because all of the sets that have been explored so far are either broken or don't represent reality. That in itself does not mean it doesn't have merit. It's simply incomplete, but given its history it's fair to doubt that it ever will close the loop and have a final form that models our reality.
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with tbh. If you look up the thread, my point is that the reason string theory is untestable is not simply that high energies are experimentally inaccessible. Rather, string theory doesn't make any definite predictions for those high energies either. It seems you agree with that?
i mean, a theory of everything should at least make retrodictions, which afaik string theory never got to. if someone wants to point me to where someone solved e.g. the hydrogen spectrum using a string theory, then I will be wrong but very happy
> The unification energy between the graviton and quantum field theory is on the order of 10^19 GeV, over a dozen orders of magnitude beyond anything we can generate.
Neither. The goal is to scare people off of criticizing the US in the first place. If you're not going to absolutely and irrevocably boycott the US, then you're going to think twice before posting anything negative.
We don't even have to ever actually implement it. We just have to threaten to. Even if we did implement it, it would probably only be used rarely, because it's a huge effort and will turn up nothing useful, but the chilling effect is immediate and universal.
If your ideology has differential effects on people by race, then you may well be participating in a racist ideology even if you detest it.
Most notably: current policies are addressed at punishing illegal immigrants, but it's clear that it's being targeted at non-white and mostly Spanish-speaking people. There are numerous incidents of people being racially profiled despite being American citizens, and no steps are being taken to minimize that. The policy is popular with those who are explicit about their racial supremacy.
If you support programs that hurt people of a different race, then calling you a "Nazi" is not inapt, regardless of what you think of the actual Nazis.
> If your ideology has differential effects on people by race, then you may well be participating in a racist ideology even if you detest it.
Mine don’t, I don’t like that people are being unfairly targeted if they’re citizens or have legal rights to be in the country. That said, I don’t want illegal immigrants to be harmed or mistreated. And it’s not just me, many Americans feel the same way.
The issue is more complex than simply a humanitarian cause. The effect of letting in hundreds of people is something you can balance over time, but letting in millions over a relatively short period has both economic and geopolitical ramifications. Besides that, borders exist for more than security, their permeability has implications for national sovereignty as well. For Americans who aren’t racist, the issue is multifaceted and just as important as the plight of an economic immigrant or asylum seeker.
If you look at who is entering the U.S. illegally, it includes people from strong economic powerhouses with healthy growth projections and competitive GDP, like Brazil, Mexico, China, India and so on.
When you just absorb the economic or political issues of other countries by taking in their poor, then you don’t ever let those societies reflect on what they’re doing wrong or right for their people. Countries should be responsible for their people, and if they’re unable to be that way for one reason or another, their people need to examine why and ask their leaders some tough questions. Immigrating to other countries, for jobs, safety, or education, is not a good or sustainable way of doing things, which is why we’re currently having the issues that we’re having.
I also think asylum seekers should be sent to countries that most match their cultural backgrounds, and repatriated when conflict is resolved, or sent somewhere where they have family ties. There needs to be a better way to bring normalcy into the lives of people affected by war or conflict other than turning them away, or indefinitely opening your doors to anyone who claims asylum, where there is a non-zero occurrence of fraud.
Good and responsible governance is the only way to ensure better outcomes for people. Political extremism isn’t going to enable good governance.
> The effect of letting in hundreds of people is something you can balance over time, but letting in millions over a relatively short period has both economic and geopolitical ramifications.
Which specific ramifications? It is interesting how often people stop here.
There’s a lot of information available already, feel free to look it up. No one reasonable says that (legal) immigration is bad, what becomes concerning is mass, unsanctioned movement. I don’t discount the humanitarian crises, which is why I think there needs to be a good faith effort to resolve the issues for people who are impacted by such crises. Sadly, the problem is realpolitikal, and that’s why there is no good faith solution which presents itself.
So the issue isn’t about racism, mass migration from a country is not a healthy indication of state of affairs, and in some way countries tacitly sanction bad governance by others when they absorb the problems of others. No one should have to leave their homelands for economic or safety reasons.
So let me just be clear. You are saying that Somalians are predisposed to commit fraud in ways that Americans are not such that having any Somalians immigrate to the US will increase the amount of fraud here and overall make society worse?
And you want me to believe that this isn't bigoted garbage?
So you don't believe that immigration of millions of people from let's say India (my country) which has corrupt institutions and people generally lack civic sense (littering etc.) will not cause issues to America and Americans ?
I see him as a clever person. It points out that the very title of the piece exhibits exactly the same behavior that it pretends to call out. That's a time-saver: if the author is that un-self-aware, then the article itself is not worth the time to refute.
Getting the agent to be in charge was the very last step. They had to spend decades building up resentment of Europe, among many other things.
Destroying the US wasn't the hard part. Getting about half the nation to cheer it on was the hard part.
reply