Ising Spin Model

[Brian]

Thought some might find this article interesting:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/shocking-unification-reduces-lot-tough-physics-problems-just-one

[Zhongyongdaoist]

Thanks Brian, aside from being an interesting article I had to laugh out loud when I read about how the "the enigmatic Norwegian-American chemist Lars Onsager", was "famously incomprehensible".  It seems his science was clear enough, after all he won a Nobel prize, but apparently just couldn't talk to people, including students and college administrators resulting in the lose of two faculty positions.

 

 

[Brian]

Thanks Brian, aside from being an interesting article I had to laugh out loud when I read about how the "the enigmatic Norwegian-American chemist Lars Onsager", was "famously incomprehensible".  It seems his science was clear enough, after all he won a Nobel prize, but apparently just couldn't talk to people, including students and college administrators resulting in the lose of two faculty positions.

Yeah, I laughed, too! I was reminded of Feynman's lectures which were supposed to be aimed at freshmen but were mostly attended by faculty and grad students -- and Feynman prided himself on making topics understandable (still the finest set of works in the field, in my opinion). I had a brilliant first-year professor my senior year who couldn't teach and was outrageously rude & condescending to both students and fellow faculty. A newly minted PhD from Purdue, he didn't even complete his full first-year before they bought out his contract and asked him to leave. Hopefully, he found a research position somewhere.

[Michael Sternbach]

To me, this one is funny:

 

"I find it pretty shocking," says David Perez, a mathematician at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), who was not involved with the work. "What is surprising is not that there is a universal model, but that it is so simple."

 

Has Mr. Perez ever heard that universal truths are always simple? Einstein had an understanding of this, anyway.