The Larson Research Center

The FQXI contest is over. The big winner is Julian Barbour, but there are many other winners of lesser prizes. Unfortunately, my essay, “A Mystic Dream of Four,” is not among them. Too bad. I would have liked to have seen some sort of visible impact on the traditional thinking of the judges, given the unprecedented invitation to try to do so.

I’m sure Larson would have been able to pull it off. It’s an interesting thought to contemplate, but, still, a useless one too, since us lesser lights are left to carry on as best we can without him. It is interesting to note, however, how happy the judges were with Barbour’s “crystal clear and engaging” essay that argued for something called “ephemeris time.” This is the time that transforms Newton’s notion of absolute time into a set of vector motions described by energy conservation laws. 

In his excellent treatment, Barbour was able to delight the judges by once again glorifying the venerated action principle, making it crystal clear that they still prefer that sort of thing over the type of innovative thinking that Larson was so good at. So, in the final analysis, maybe he wouldn’t have had any better luck than I had, in spite of his genius.

I guess it’s just too hard not to imagine that the change we call time is inextricably connected with the changing locations of heavenly bodies, even after all these centuries of mankind’s astonishing progress in understanding the structure of the physical world. You would think that the knowledge that we now have of the inherent oscillations of radiation and its constant speed of propagation, relative to all matter, would lead us to conclude that the space/time equations associated with it might be trying to tell us something about the nature of space and time in general that has nothing to do with the changing locations of heavenly bodies, but then that’s just me.

I expected Carlo Rovelli would win a juried prize, with his “Forget Time” essay, but he lost out to Barbour, Kiefer and Carroll, all of whom sought to find a way to transform time in their essays rather than to forget it. The remainder of the winners, were also, as expected, either professors, post docs, or grad students working on their PhDs under the tutelage of PhDs. As far as I can tell, not one prize was awarded to an “independent researcher.”

While this is understandable, given the community running the program, and the fact that so much noise accompanies the thinking of independent researchers, it nevertheless leaves us to ponder once again the wonder of mankind’s experience: The pace of our enlightenment seems to be governed by the birthing of gifted children more than the schooling of learned scholars.

Nevertheless, I’m grateful to FQXI for inviting the commoners to the festival.