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Thursday, February 22, 2024
Ray McGovern: CIA, JFK, Deep State, and Ukraine Crisis — Manifold #54
Sunday, October 22, 2023
Abdus Salam and the Pakistan Nuclear Weapons Program
Abdus Salam: A Reappraisal. Part II Salam's Part in the Pakistani Nuclear Weapon ProgrammeSalam's biographies claim that he was opposed to Pakistan's nuclear weapon programme. This is somewhat strange given that he was the senior Science Advisor to the Pakistan government for at least some of the period between 1972 when the programme was initiated and 1998 when a successful nuclear weapon test was carried out. I look at the evidence for his participation in the programme.
Salam shared the Nobel Prize with Glashow and Weinberg. He is a leading theoretician, although many have questioned what, exactly, was his contribution to the formulation of the electroweak theory of particle physics that Glashow and Weinberg contributed to.
Currently Pakistan's arsenal is ~200 warheads and similar in size to India's. Their largest warhead is estimated to have a yield of ~40kt, compared to ~20kt for the Indians.
What interested me the most was Salam's role in the early stages of the project.
See the paper for more interesting details. Previously I was only aware of Riazuddin through his academic publications, not his weapons work.
I mentioned to Karnad that I had been surprised that some of the Iranin theoreticians assassinated by Israel over the last 10-15 years had quite abstract research interests. They didn't seem the type to be working on bombs - but I suppose you never know!
Thursday, October 19, 2023
Bharat Karnad: India geostrategy, nuclear arsenal, and assassination of Homi Bhabha, the Oppenheimer of India — Manifold #46
".. their head expert was fully capable of building a bomb and we knew what he was up to. He was warned several times but what an arrogant prick that one was. Told our people to fuck off and then made it clear that no one would stop him and India from getting nuclear parity"
Thursday, October 05, 2023
Yasheng Huang: China's Examination System and its impact on Politics, Economy, Innovation — Manifold #45
Thursday, January 19, 2023
Dominic Cummings: Vote Leave, Brexit, COVID, and No. 10 with Boris — Manifold #28
Thursday, September 08, 2022
Lyle Goldstein on U.S. Strategic Challenges: Russia, China, Ukraine, and Taiwan — Manifold #19
Thursday, June 30, 2022
Kishore Mahbubani: A Nuanced View of Asia & China's Rise — Manifold Podcast #15
Friday, December 31, 2021
Happy New Year 2022!
Sunday, October 31, 2021
Demis Hassabis: Using AI to accelerate scientific discovery (protein folding) + Bonus: Bruno Pontecorvo
I want to be remembered as a great physicist, not as your fucking spy!
Tuesday, July 06, 2021
Decline of the American Empire: Afghan edition (stay tuned for more)
BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) — The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said.
Afghanistan’s army showed off the sprawling air base Monday, providing a rare first glimpse of what had been the epicenter of America’s war to unseat the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on America. The U.S. announced Friday it had completely vacated its biggest airfield in the country in advance of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August.
“We (heard) some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram ... and finally by seven o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,” Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander said. ...I wrote the following (2017) in Remarks on the Decline of American Empire:
1. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous -- trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on Middle Eastern wars, culminating in utter defeat. This defeat is still not acknowledged among most of the media or what passes for intelligentsia in academia and policy circles, but defeat it is. Iran now exerts significant control over Iraq and a swath of land running from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. None of the goals of our costly intervention have been achieved. We are exhausted morally, financially, and militarily, and still have not fully extricated ourselves from a useless morass. George W. Bush should go down in history as the worst US President of the modern era.
2. We are fortunate that the fracking revolution may lead to US independence from Middle Eastern energy. But policy elites have to fully recognize this possibility and pivot our strategy to reflect the decreased importance of the region. The fracking revolution is a consequence of basic research from decades ago (including investment from the Department of Energy) and the work of private sector innovators and risk-takers.
3. US budget deficits are a ticking time bomb, which cripple investment in basic infrastructure and also in research that creates strategically important new technologies like AI. US research spending has been roughly flat in inflation adjusted dollars over the last 20 years, declining as a fraction of GDP.
4. Divisive identity politics and demographic trends in the US will continue to undermine political cohesion and overall effectiveness of our institutions. ("Civilizational decline," as one leading theoretical physicist observed to me recently, remarking on our current inability to take on big science projects.)
5. The Chinese have almost entirely closed the technology gap with the West, and dominate important areas of manufacturing. It seems very likely that their economy will eventually become significantly larger than the US economy. This is the world that strategists have to prepare for. Wars involving religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us from a possible future conflict with a peer competitor that threatens to match or exceed our economic, technological, and even military capability.
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—In what officials said was the "only way" to move on from what has become a "sad and unpleasant" situation, all 100,000 U.S. military and intelligence personnel crept out of their barracks in the dead of night Sunday and quietly slipped out of Afghanistan.
U.S. commanders explained their sudden pullout in a short, handwritten note left behind at Bagram Airfield, their largest base of operations in the country.
"By the time you read this, we will be gone," the note to the nation of Afghanistan read in part. "We regret any pain this may cause you, but this was something we needed to do. We couldn't go on like this forever."
"We still care about you very much, but, in the end, we feel this is for the best," the note continued. "Please, just know that we are truly sorry and that we wish you all the greatest of happiness in the future."
... After reportedly taking a "long look in the mirror" last week, senior defense officials came to the conclusion that they had "wasted a decade of [their] lives" with Afghanistan ...
Saturday, May 08, 2021
Three Thousand Years and 115 Generations of 徐 (Hsu / Xu)
Cheng Ting Hsu was born December 1, 1923 in Wenling, Zhejiang province, China. His grandfather, Zan Yao Hsu was a poet and doctor of Chinese medicine. His father, Guang Qiu Hsu graduated from college in the 1920's and was an educator, lawyer and poet.
Cheng Ting was admitted at age 16 to the elite National Southwest Unified University (Lianda), which was created during WWII by merging Tsinghua, Beijing, and Nankai Universities. This university produced numerous famous scientists and scholars such as the physicists C.N. Yang and T.D. Lee.
Cheng Ting studied aerospace engineering (originally part of Tsinghua), graduating in 1944. He became a research assistant at China's Aerospace Research Institute and a lecturer at Sichuan University. He also taught aerodynamics for several years to advanced students at the air force engineering academy.
In 1946 he was awarded one of only two Ministry of Education fellowships in his field to pursue graduate work in the United States. In 1946-1947 he published a three-volume book, co-authored with Professor Li Shoutong, on the structures of thin-walled airplanes.
In January 1948, he left China by ocean liner, crossing the Pacific and arriving in San Francisco. ...My mother's father was a KMT general, and her family related to Chiang Kai Shek by marriage. Both my grandfather and Chiang attended the military academy Shinbu Gakko in Tokyo. When the KMT lost to the communists, her family fled China and arrived in Taiwan in 1949. My mother's family had been converted to Christianity in the 19th century and became Methodists, like Sun Yat Sen. (I attended Methodist Sunday school while growing up in Ames IA.) My grandfather was a partner of T.V. Soong in the distribution of bibles in China in the early 20th century.
Wikipedia: The State of Xu (Chinese: 徐) (also called Xu Rong (徐戎) or Xu Yi (徐夷)[a] by its enemies)[4][5] was an independent Huaiyi state of the Chinese Bronze Age[6] that was ruled by the Ying family (嬴) and controlled much of the Huai River valley for at least two centuries.[3][7] It was centered in northern Jiangsu and Anhui. ...
Generations 114 and 115:
Four volume history of the Hsu (Xu) family, beginning in the 10th century BC. The first 67 generations are covered rather briefly, only indicating prominent individuals in each generation of the family tree. The books are mostly devoted to generations 68-113 living in Zhejiang. (Earlier I wrote that it was two volumes, but it's actually four. The printing that I have is two thick books.)
Thursday, March 18, 2021
Council on Foreign Relations: The Rise and Fall of Great Powers? America, China, and the Global Order
Panelists discuss the rise and fall of great powers and the competing grand strategies of the United States and China.
Speakers
Ray Dalio Founder, Co-chairman, and Co-chief Investment Officer, Bridgewater Associates, LP; Author, The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail
CFR Member Elizabeth C. Economy Senior Fellow for China Studies, Council on Foreign Relations; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Author, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State; @LizEconomy
Paul M. Kennedy J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies, Yale University; Author, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
Friday, March 05, 2021
Genetic correlation of social outcomes between relatives (Fisher 1918) tested using lineage of 400k English individuals
For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 English Individuals 1750-2020 shows Genetics Determines most Social Outcomes
Gregory Clark, University of California, Davis and LSE (March 1, 2021)
Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology are dominated by the belief that social outcomes depend mainly on parental investment and community socialization. Using a lineage of 402,000 English people 1750-2020 we test whether such mechanisms better predict outcomes than a simple additive genetics model. The genetics model predicts better in all cases except for the transmission of wealth. The high persistence of status over multiple generations, however, would require in a genetic mechanism strong genetic assortative in mating. This has been until recently believed impossible. There is however, also strong evidence consistent with just such sorting, all the way from 1837 to 2020. Thus the outcomes here are actually the product of an interesting genetics-culture combination.
Fisher, R. A. 1918. “The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 52: 399-433
(p.26) a recent study from the UK Biobank, which has a collection of genotypes of individuals together with measures of their social characteristics, supports the idea that there is strong genetic assortment in mating. Robinson et al. (2017) look at the phenotype and genotype correlations for a variety of traits – height, BMI, blood pressure, years of education - using data from the biobank. For most traits they find as expected that the genotype correlation between the parties is less than the phenotype correlation. But there is one notable exception. For years of education, the phenotype correlation across spouses is 0.41 (0.011 SE). However, the correlation across the same couples for the genetic predictor of educational attainment is significantly higher at 0.654 (0.014 SE) (Robinson et al., 2017, 4). Thus couples in marriage in recent years in England were sorting on the genotype as opposed to the phenotype when it comes to educational status.
It is not mysterious how this happens. The phenotype measure here is just the number of years of education. But when couples interact they will have a much more refined sense of what the intellectual abilities of their partner are: what is their general knowledge, ability to reason about the world, and general intellectual ability. Somehow in the process of matching modern couples in England are combining based on the weighted sum of a set of variations at several hundred locations on the genome, to the point where their correlation on this measure is 0.65.
Thursday, February 18, 2021
David Reich: Prehistory of Europe and S. Asia from Ancient DNA
The new technology of ancient DNA has highlighted a remarkable parallel in the prehistory of Europe and South Asia. In both cases, the arrival of agriculture from southwest Asia after 9,000 years ago catalyzed profound population mixtures of groups related to Southwest Asian farmers and local hunter-gatherers. In both cases, the spread of ancestry ultimately deriving from Steppe pastoralists had a further major impact after 5,000 years ago and almost certainly brought Indo-European languages. Mixtures of these three source populations form the primary gradients of ancestry in both regions today.
In this lecture, Prof. Reich will discuss his new book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
See also Reich's 2018 NYTimes editorial.
Saturday, October 17, 2020
Down the Rabbit Hole: Mark Lane, the Zapruder film, and the JFK Conspiracy
At minimum the evidence is strong for a CIA JFK coverup -- see last video, for example. It doesn't mean they did it, ofc. Johnson pressured Warren to lead the commission with the argument that if the public became convinced the Soviets/Cubans were behind it WW3 would result. This could have affected CIA actions post-Dallas as well. But I suspect something more sinister on the part of certain elements of CIA, and there is tons of evidence to that effect leaking out over the years.
I enjoy listening to Mark Lane speak even if he turns out to be incorrect in some or many of his allegations. I think he destroys Buckley in their debate: Lane the Rationalist and Buckley a good example of motivated or biased reasoning.
I've followed Spygate for 4 years now, with the media covering it up and FBI/CIA refusing to produce documents, Barr probably acting to protect the institutions, FISA court obviously corrupt, etc. The JFK matter has a very familiar feel to it. [ Should add the Epstein matter, which unfolded in plain sight over 20y, as another example. ]
While serving as chief analyst of military records at the Assassination Records Review Board in 1997, Douglas Horne discovered that the Zapruder Film was examined by the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center two days after the assassination of President Kennedy.
In this film, Horne interviews legendary NPIC photo interpreter Dino Brugioni, who speaks for the first time about another NPIC examination of the film the day after the assassination. Brugioni didn't know about the second examination and believes the Zapruder Film in the archives today is not the film he saw the day after the assassination.
I suggest you invest an hour or two in
1. Brugioni interview: establishes that a conspiracy at the highest level of CIA to alter the film evidence was in place within ~24h of the shooting. Hard to explain unless there was very strong motivation already... bureaucracies usually can't react that fast when *surprised* by events.
2. Interview with Hunt's son, concerning his deathbed confession of being aware of (and playing a minor role in) the assassination conspiracy. Hunt is a well-known CIA figure who was involved in lots of covert ops including Watergate. You don't have to accept this as fully credible of course, but you can't say that conspiracy didn't happen because otherwise information would have leaked out. It may very well have leaked out! But few pay attention because of the groupthink against "conspiracy theory" (this term was literally invented and promulgated by CIA to discourage public attention to what it was doing during the Cold War).
I would say I am very confident of an active cover up post assasination, less confident of a CIA role in the killing.
Other facts that have leaked out (now confirmed by official documents and the official CIA historian) include the fact that CIA was very closely monitoring Oswald starting in 1959 and that his file was closely held by none other than CIA prince of darkness James Jesus Angleton. Now look into the unsolved killing of Angleton's friend Mary Meyer (who was having an affair with JFK when he was shot) in 1964 and you are off to the races... Their common friend Ben Bradlee (WaPo editor of Watergate fame) wrote in his memoirs of catching Angleton, having broken into Meyer's house, with her diary...
BTW, over the years it was wrongly reported that RFK did NOT believe in a conspiracy against his brother. The evidence is pretty convincing now that he always believed in a conspiracy but didn't admit it in public.
Saturday, September 12, 2020
Orwell: 1944, 1984, and Today
... Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, i.e. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving ...
... intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.
there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted
the exact sciences are endangered
two and two could become five
dictatorial methods ... systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.
Of course, there is nothing new under the sun. It takes only a generation for costly lessons to be entirely forgotten...
Wikipedia: Trofim Denisovich Lysenko ...Soviet agronomist and biologist. Lysenko was a strong proponent of soft inheritance and rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of pseudoscientific ideas termed Lysenkoism.[1][2] In 1940, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences, and he used his political influence and power to suppress dissenting opinions and discredit, marginalize, and imprison his critics, elevating his anti-Mendelian theories to state-sanctioned doctrine.
Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were imprisoned. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state, including the botanist Nikolai Vavilov. Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in the Soviet Union in 1948. As a result of Lysenkoism and forced collectivization, 15-30 million Soviet and Chinese citizens starved to death in the Holodomor and the Great Chinese Famine. ...
In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR: "He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists."
Saturday, September 05, 2020
Adam Tooze: American Power in the Long 20th Century
The history of American power, as it is commonly written, is a weighty subject, a matter of military and economic heft, of ‘throw-weight’, of resource mobilisation and material culture, of ‘boots on the ground’. In his lecture, Adam Tooze examines an alternative, counterintuitive vision of America, as a power defying gravity. This image gives us a less materialistic, more fantastical and more unstable vision of America’s role in the world.
1:10 - Tim Geithner; U.S. Treasury: America had been “defying gravity"
5:50 - U.S. was the “gravity” of world
11:07 - U.S. is now also subject to the “gravity” of world
13:28 - 100 years of 9 historic U.S. events; Overview
14:44 - Adam Tooze; Historian “Ordering rather than Order, and the Disordering effects of efforts at Ordering.”
16:28 - Start at the beginning of 1800’s
17:12 - 1898 U.S. Imperialist power
17:50 - 1916 U.S. Globalist power
18:47 - Woodrow Wilson; U.S. President
22:46 - 1920s Republican domestic priority of Financial Austerity and Tax cuts.
25:59 - Great American Financial shocks/panics; 1857, 1873, 1893, 1896, 1907, 1920, 1929 26:49 - 1920s Great Depression
27:18 - 1930s U.S. Hyper militaristic power
31:51 - World War 2; One World, One War (1942)
33:48 - Post World War 2, Bretton Woods economic conference.
36:24 - Marshall Plan not the same as Bretton Woods...
41:10 - Cold War: Asia
43:30 - U.S. President Nixon abandons the Gold peg in 1971. Which results in inflation in G7 countries and Switzerland.
44:10 - Keynesian era 50s to 60s. Start of Neoliberalism or the Paul Volcker shock 1979.
45:07 - Cold War: Europe 1980s, Reagan & Gorbachev
47:13 - Concluding phase of the talk
1:01:56 - Challenges in 2019 and going forward; China and Climate Change
1:03:20 - Q&AAlso recommended: Tooze on US-China geopolitical competition (August 6 2020 Sinica podcast). This discussion focuses more on the present and future than the past and may be of more interest to readers.
Thursday, May 14, 2020
James Oakes on What’s Wrong with The 1619 Project - Manifold Podcast #46
Steve and Corey talk to James Oakes, Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, about "The 1619 Project" developed by The New York Times Magazine. The project argues that slavery was the defining event of US history. Jim argues that slavery was actually the least exceptional feature of the US and that what makes the US exceptional is that it is where abolition first begins. Steve wonders about the views of Thomas Jefferson who wrote that “all men are created equal” but still held slaves. Jim maintains many founders were hypocrites, but Jefferson believed what he wrote.
Topics: Northern power, Industrialization, Capitalism, Lincoln, Inequality, Cotton, Labor, Civil War, Racism/Antiracism, Black Ownership.
Transcript
James Oakes (Bio)
Oakes and Colleagues Letter to the NYT and the Editor’s Response
The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts
The World Socialist Web Site interview with James Oakes
man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.
Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.
Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.
Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.
Friday, April 17, 2020
The von Neumann-Fuchs bomb, and the radiation compression mechanism of Ulam-Teller-Sakharov
Some useful references below on the Ulam-Teller mechanism, Sakharov's Third Idea, and the von Neumann-Fuchs thermonuclear design of 1946. They resolve a mystery discussed previously on this blog:
Sakharov's Third Idea: ... If Zeldovich was already familiar with radiation pressure as the tool for compression, via the Fuchs report of 1948, then perhaps one cannot really credit Teller so much for adding this ingredient to Ulam's idea of a staged device using a fission bomb to compress the thermonuclear fuel. Fuchs and von Neumann had already proposed (and patented!) radiation implosion years before. More here.It turns out that the compression mechanism used in the von Neumann-Fuchs design (vN is the first author on the patent application; the design was realized in the Operation Greenhouse George nuclear test of 1951) is not that of Ulam-Teller or Sakharov. In vN-F the D-T mixture reaches thermal equilibrium with ionized BeO gas, leading to a pressure increase of ~10x. This is not the "cold compression" via focused radiation pressure used in the U-T / Sakharov designs. That was, apparently, conceived independently by Ulam-Teller and Sakharov.
It is only recently that the vN-F design has become public -- first obtained by the Soviets via espionage (Fuchs), and finally declassified and published by the Russians! It seems that Zeldovich had access to this information, but not Sakharov.
American and Soviet H-bomb development programmes: historical background by G. Goncharov.
John von Neumann and Klaus Fuchs: an Unlikely Collaboration by Jeremy Bernstein. See also here for some clarifying commentary.
A great anecdote:
Jeremy Bernstein: When I was an undergraduate at Harvard he [vN] came to the university to give lectures on the computer and the brain. They were the best lectures I have ever heard on anything — like mental champagne. After one of them I found myself walking in Harvard Square and looked up to see von Neumann. Thinking, correctly as it happened, that it would be the only chance I would have to ask him a question, I asked, ‘‘Professor von Neumann, will the computer ever replace the human mathematician?’’ He studied me and then responded, ‘‘Sonny, don’t worry about it.’’
Note added from comments: I hope this clarifies things a bit.
The question of how the Soviets got to the U-T mechanism is especially mysterious. Sakharov himself (ostensibly the Soviet inventor) was puzzled until the end about what had really happened! He did not have access to the vN-F design that has been made public from the Russian side (~2000, after Sakharov's death in 1989; still classified in US). Zeldovich and only a few others had seen the Fuchs information, at a time when the main focus of the Russian program was not the H bomb. Sakharov could never be sure whether his suggestion for cold radiation compression sparked Zeldovich's interest because the latter *had seen the idea before* without fully comprehending it. Sakharov wondered about this until the end of his life (see below), but I think his surmise was not correct: we know now that vN-F did *not* come up with that idea in their 1946 design. I've been puzzled about this question myself for some time. IF the vN-F design had used radiation pressure for cold compression, why did Teller get so much credit for replacing neutrons with radiation pressure in Ulam's staged design (1951)? I stumbled across the (now public) vN-F design by accident just recently -- I was reading some biographical stuff about Zeldovich which touched upon these issues.Another useful resource: Gennady Gorelik (BU science historian): The Paternity of the H-Bombs: Soviet-American Perspectives
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/10/sakharovs-third-idea.html
Consider the following words in Sakharov’s memoirs, with a note he added toward the end of life:
Now I think that the main idea of the H-bomb design developed by the Zeldovich group was based on intelligence information. However, I can’t prove this conjecture. It occurred to me quite recently, but at the time I just gave it no thought. (Note added July 1987. David Holloway writes in “Soviet Thermonuclear Development,” International Security 4:3 (1979/80), p. 193: “The Soviet Union had been informed by Klaus Fuchs of the studies of thermonuclear weapons at Los Alamos up to 1946. … His information would have been misleading rather than helpful, because the early ideas were later shown not to work.” Therefore my conjecture is confirmed!)
Teller, 1952, August (re Bethe’s Memorandum): The main principle of radiation implosion was developed in connection with the thermonuclear program and was stated at a conference on the thermonuclear bomb, in the spring of 1946. Dr. Bethe did not attend this conference, but Dr. Fuchs did. [ Original development by vN? ]The last part ("cool as long as possible") refers to the fundamental difference between the vN-Fuchs design and the U-T mechanism of cold radiation compression. The former assumes thermal equilibrium between ionized gas and radiation, while latter deliberately avoids it as long as possible.
It is difficult to argue to what extent an invention is accidental: most difficult for someone who did not make the invention himself. It appears to me that the idea was a relatively slight modification of ideas generally known in 1946. Essentially only two elements had to be added: to implode a bigger volume, and, to achieve greater compression by keeping the imploded material cool as long as possible.
Official Soviet History: On the making of the Soviet hydrogen (thermonuclear) bomb, Yu B Khariton et al 1996 Phys.-Usp. 39 185. Some details on the origin of the compression idea, followed by the use of radiation pressure (Zeldovich and Sakharov).
Thursday, January 02, 2020
Andrew Hartman: The Culture Wars Then and Now (Manifold Podcast #27)
Note: We've moved to a weekly release schedule (previously one per two weeks).
Steve and Corey talk to Andrew about his new introduction to his book The War for the Soul of America. While the left largely won the culture wars, the three wonder whether the pendulum has swung so far left that many liberals are alienated by today’s cultural norms.
Other topics: Was the left’s victory in the debate over the college curriculum pyrrhic? Is identity politics a necessary step in liberation or a problematic slide toward greater division, or both? Are current students too sensitive, and easily triggered, to take the fight to the Billionaire class?
Transcript
Andrew Hartman (Faculty Profile)
A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars
man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.
Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.
Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.
Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this program are those of the guest(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of the hosts, the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation, or Michigan State University.
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