Alex Carten

Taking complicated things apart. There are always fewer parts than you'd think.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

https://t.co/zdQY9GfRfl

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

Richard Feynman took the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. His sister found both their school IQ records at age 10 and his was the lower number, 122 against her 123.

Web of Stories filmed her in April 2019. She is 92, in her own living room, 1 year from the end of her life. The camera runs 7 minutes and she spends most of them on childhood.

She goes back to kindergarten in Far Rockaway. A teacher steps out from behind the piano and asks if she is Richard Feynman's sister. Yes. The teacher asks if she is as smart as he is.

She says no. Few people are.

Then she is 10, working in the school office. The drawers hold every record the school keeps. She reads her own. Then she reads his.

Their mother had already told her that women's brains cannot do science.

She signed her papers with her married name for decades so nobody would connect them, published more than 100, proved in 1985 what builds an aurora, and took NASA's medal in 2002.

She waited until she was 92 to say the numbers out loud.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

https://t.co/zdQY9GfRfl

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski published their theorem in 1924, building on earlier work by Giuseppe Vitali and Felix Hausdorff. 97 years later, a UNSW mathematician called it fiction on camera.

The theorem: cut a solid ball into 5 pieces, rotate and slide them, get 2 balls back, each identical in size to the original.

Norman Wildberger doesn't dispute the algebra. He targets the axiom of choice, the rule letting the proof assume an infinite number of selections nobody could ever perform. He has a name for the problem: the law of logical honesty.

The pieces need an oracle, a being outside the universe with infinite memory, generating digits by no rule at all. Every point on the ball gets indexed this way, a sequence no computer could ever run.

Reject the axiom, Wildberger says, and analysis, topology, and differential geometry all need rebuilding from zero. That's the real reason nobody in the field touches this argument.

97 years on the syllabus. Still no ball anyone could hold.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

https://t.co/zdQY9GfRfl

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

A 20-year-old bled to death in a Paris field in 1832, 2 days after he finished writing the mathematics that would define modern algebra.

Oxford historian Peter Neumann tells the story at Gresham College, working straight from Galois' own manuscripts.

He duels at dawn. A single shot hits his stomach. He dies the next morning, and no doctor reaches him in time.

Neumann stops and asks the room the obvious question: why care about a reckless boy who got himself killed for nothing?

History remembers the duel. The equations were the real event.

The French Academy rejected them 2 times. Joseph Liouville finally published them in 1846, 14 years after Galois died.

But here he is.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

A 20-year-old bled to death in a Paris field in 1832, 2 days after he finished writing the mathematics that would define modern algebra.

Oxford historian Peter Neumann tells the story at Gresham College, working straight from Galois' own manuscripts.

He duels at dawn. A single shot hits his stomach. He dies the next morning, and no doctor reaches him in time.

Neumann stops and asks the room the obvious question: why care about a reckless boy who got himself killed for nothing?

History remembers the duel. The equations were the real event.

The French Academy rejected them 2 times. Joseph Liouville finally published them in 1846, 14 years after Galois died.

But here he is.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

https://t.co/zdQY9GfRfl

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

Harvard. A million dollars sitting there since 2000, still unclaimed. Seven Millennium Problems, and only one has actually been solved. The guy who solved it wouldn't even take the money.

Grigori Perelman cracked the Poincaré Conjecture in 2003, a hundred years after Poincaré first asked the question. He turned down the $1 million prize. He turned down the Fields Medal too. That's basically the Nobel of math. Then he just stopped. No interviews, no conferences, no public life. He's been living with his mother in St. Petersburg for two decades now.

So when Harvard put together a lecture on how the conjecture actually got solved, they couldn't get Perelman. Obviously.

Instead they got Michael Freedman, who has his own Fields Medal for solving the same problem in four dimensions. Before he even starts on the math, he tells the room why Perelman isn't there. And the whole room laughs.

What follows is 58 minutes on how you solve a topology problem without using topology. Perelman's trick was to treat the shape like it was cooling down, like heat spreading across a surface, and just watch what it settled into.

Watch the first minute. It's not the math that gets you. It's the joke about the guy who's missing.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

https://t.co/zdQY9GfRfl

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

A physicist blew off a physics conference to go dancing in 1930, mailed in a particle nobody could see, and was proven right 26 years later.

Beta decay broke the books. A nucleus threw out an electron and the energy came up short every time, as if the conservation law that all of physics rests on had quietly died.

Wolfgang Pauli picked the ball. His note to the conference opened "Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen," apologized that dancing kept him away, and claimed the lost energy escapes as a ghost particle no instrument could catch. He called it so undetectable he had done a terrible thing by predicting it.

Enrico Fermi named it the neutrino. Cowan and Reines finally trapped one in 1956.

A party guess held the conservation law together for a quarter century before anyone saw the proof.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

https://t.co/zdQY9GfRfl

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

Physicists have spent 300 years pretending they understand gravity. The smartest one who ever lived admitted, on camera, that they don't.

1964, Cornell. Richard Feynman stands at a blackboard and says the quiet part out loud: Newton's law of gravity has been tested more precisely than almost anything else in the history of science. Thousands of experiments. Three centuries. It works every single time.

Nobody has ever explained why.

Not how — physicists can calculate gravity down to the decimal. Why it exists, what it actually is, is still an open wound in physics. It's also the one force nobody has ever managed to unify with the other three.

I wrote about all four forces last week. This is the one that breaks the pattern.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

@JonathanCh67186 Fair enough. Gravity bends light, holds galaxies together, and gets measured to 15 decimal places, so "not real" is a bold place to plant the flag. Good talk.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

Physicists have spent 300 years pretending they understand gravity. The smartest one who ever lived admitted, on camera, that they don't.

1964, Cornell. Richard Feynman stands at a blackboard and says the quiet part out loud: Newton's law of gravity has been tested more precisely than almost anything else in the history of science. Thousands of experiments. Three centuries. It works every single time.

Nobody has ever explained why.

Not how — physicists can calculate gravity down to the decimal. Why it exists, what it actually is, is still an open wound in physics. It's also the one force nobody has ever managed to unify with the other three.

I wrote about all four forces last week. This is the one that breaks the pattern.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

https://t.co/zdQY9GfRfl

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

@JonathanCh67186 Einstein reframed it as curved spacetime instead of a pull, which is closer to what you mean than it sounds. Do you read it as not fundamental, or not real at all?

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

@vexelxbt And the strangest part is we feel it every second and understand it the least. What would actually count as an answer for you, a deeper mechanism or a full unification with the other three?

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

@bannedby Right distinction. 'Why the hospital' and 'why does he love her' aren't the same regress, one bottoms out in a fact, the other in a choice about which layer counts as an answer. That's the whole post, actually.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

The BBC asked Feynman one easy question in 1983. He refused to answer it for seven minutes, and that refusal explains more physics than the answer would have.

The question: what do you feel when you push two magnets apart?

He doesn't say "magnetic force" and move on. He asks the interviewer what kind of answer he is willing to accept. Every "why" has another "why" under it. At some point you stop and call one layer the explanation — and that stopping point is a choice, not a fact.

Then he turns it around.

You are not bothered that a chair pushes back when you sit on it. Same repulsion. Same force. Your electrons against the chair's electrons, and a gap that has never closed. You just never asked, because it never occurred to you that a chair needed a reason.

The magnets feel strange. The chair does not. Nothing about the physics is different — only what you got used to.

Watch the moment he stops talking about magnets and starts talking about the chair. That's the part nobody quotes.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

https://t.co/zdQY9GfRfl

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

@djeucharist That's backwards. Nobody asked why the chair pushes back either, not because science answered it, but because you stopped asking. Same move, different target.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

@CJohnson136656 Catch-22 is exactly the shape of it — the rule that explains itself only by pointing at the rule.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

@ichieobata Glad it landed. Which of the four surprised you most? Most people say the weak one — it does not hold anything together, its whole job is to let go.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

https://t.co/zdQY9GfRfl

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

@jaz23uk Fair. Watch the last two minutes — that's the part that actually lands.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

While Kubrick and Clarke were busy inventing a fake future for the movies, the BBC quietly filmed Clarke describing the real one. 1964. Same year. Nobody noticed.

Horizon aired it as "The Knowledge Explosion." No trailer, no music, just Clarke in a chair explaining what the year 2000 would look like.

He never says computer. He never says internet. He says an executive will run his business from Tahiti as easily as from London.

"Men will no longer commute. They will communicate."

Then he reaches further: instant contact with anyone, anywhere on the planet. And he closes on machines, not men, not monkeys, as the most intelligent inhabitants of the world to come.

Remote work: landed. Global instant contact: landed. The machines are still arriving.

He gave himself no deadline. Sixty years later, we're still catching up to the chair.

Watch the part where he stops talking about Tahiti and starts talking about machines. That's the part nobody quotes.

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

https://t.co/TKXZjXC8T9

[Alex Carten @AlexCarten_]

@AnushkaNazareth Exactly. That's why it holds up — he wasn't selling gadgets, he was reading how people would actually live. The tech was just the vehicle.