31 ideas
| 468 | Musical performance can reveal a range of virtues [Damon of Ath.] |
| Full Idea: In singing and playing the lyre, a boy will be likely to reveal not only courage and moderation, but also justice. | |
| From: Damon (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B4), quoted by (who?) - where? |
| 20086 | Nowadays sovereignty (once the basis of a state) has become relative [Reybrouck] |
| Full Idea: In the twenty-first century, sovereignty, once the basis of the nation state, has become a relative concept. ...Powerlessness is the key word of our time. | |
| From: David van Reybrouck (Against Elections [2013], 1 'Crisis') | |
| A reaction: The point is that nation states now have limited power, in the face of larger unions, multinational companies, and global problems. |
| 20090 | Today it seems almost impossible to learn the will of the people [Reybrouck] |
| Full Idea: Imagine having to develop a system today that would express the will of the people. | |
| From: David van Reybrouck (Against Elections [2013], 2 'electoral') | |
| A reaction: Our recent Brexit referendum didn't do the job, because it was confined to a single question. Van Reybrouck laughs at the idea of expressing it through a polling both. How about a council of 500, drawn by lots? Meet for three months. |
| 20087 | There are no united monolothic 'peoples', and no 'national gut feelings' [Reybrouck] |
| Full Idea: There is no such thing as one monolithic 'people' (every society has its diversity), nor is there anything that could be described as a 'national gut feeling'. | |
| From: David van Reybrouck (Against Elections [2013], 2 'populism') | |
| A reaction: Rousseau yearned for a republic no bigger than Geneva. I don't see why we should give up on the general will in huge modern societies. It is likely, though, to be an anodyne lowest common denominator. No bad thing, perhaps. |
| 20089 | Technocrats may be efficient, but they lose legitimacy as soon as they do unpopular things [Reybrouck] |
| Full Idea: Efficiency does not automatically generate legitimacy, and faith in the technocrat melts away as soon as spending cuts are implemented. | |
| From: David van Reybrouck (Against Elections [2013], 2 'democracy') | |
| A reaction: They can hang on to legitimacy if they can come up with some technical mumbo-jumbo like 'monetarism' which the people will swallow. |
| 20088 | Technocrats are expert managers, who replace politicians, and can be long-term and unpopular [Reybrouck] |
| Full Idea: Technocracy is a system where experts are charged with looking after the public interest. ...Technocrats are managers who replace politicians, so they can concentrate on long-term solutions and announce unpopular measures. | |
| From: David van Reybrouck (Against Elections [2013], 2 'technocracy') | |
| A reaction: I like technocrats. They just need to be accountable. In the UK we have far more respect for the governor of the Bank of England than for any politician. |
| 20085 | Democracy is the best compromise between legitimacy and efficiency [Reybrouck] |
| Full Idea: Democracy is the least bad form of all governments precisely because it attempts to find a healthy balance between legitimacy and efficiency. | |
| From: David van Reybrouck (Against Elections [2013], 1 'Crisis') | |
| A reaction: There seems to be a widespread feeling that democracy is declining in efficiency, and that may be because our remoteness from government decreases legitimacy, so we have less commitment to getting things done. |
| 20095 | A referendum result arises largely from ignorance [Reybrouck] |
| Full Idea: In a referendum you ask everyone to vote on a subject that usually only a few know anything about. | |
| From: David van Reybrouck (Against Elections [2013], 4 'remedies') | |
| A reaction: Tell me about it! I was forced to vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum, and felt thoroughly out of my depth on such a complex economic question. |
| 20094 | You don't really govern people if you don't involve them [Reybrouck] |
| Full Idea: Even with the best of intentions, those who govern the people without involving them, govern them only in a limited sense. | |
| From: David van Reybrouck (Against Elections [2013], 4 intro) | |
| A reaction: But if they are highly involved, who is governing who? Do we want the people to become happier about being governed, or do we want them more involved in doing the governing? |
| 20093 | In the 18th century democratic lots lost out to elections, that gave us a non-hereditary aristocracy [Reybrouck] |
| Full Idea: The drawing of lots, the most democratic of all political instruments, lost out in the eighteenth century to elections, a procedure that was not invented as a democratic instrument, but as a means of bringing a new non-hereditary aristocracy to power. | |
| From: David van Reybrouck (Against Elections [2013], 3 'democratisation') | |
| A reaction: This is the basic thesis of Van Reybrouck's book. He argues for the extensive use of lots ('sortition') for getting people involved in modern democracies. I love the idea that in a good democracy you get an occasional chance to rule. |
| 20091 | Representative elections were developed in order to avoid democracy [Reybrouck] |
| Full Idea: Bernard Manin (1995) revealed how, immediately after the American and French revolutions, the electoral-representative system was chosen with the intention of keeping at bay the tumult of democracy. | |
| From: David van Reybrouck (Against Elections [2013], 3 'procedure') | |
| A reaction: At the time America and France were two of the largest countries in the world, and communication and transport were slow. That has changed. |
| 21181 | Relativity and Quantum theory give very different accounts of forces [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: General Relativity and quantum mechanics are the two great theories in physics today but they give two very different ideas for how forces work. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 01) | |
| A reaction: Relativity says it is space curvature, and quantum theory says it is particle exchange? But is there a Relativity account of the strong nuclear force? |
| 21183 | Thermodynamics introduced work and entropy, to understand steam engine efficiency [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: The Laws of Thermodynamics introduced the concepts of entropy and work; put simply, how much useful energy you can really get out of a steam engine. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 03) | |
| A reaction: The point of science by this stage was to introduce measurable and quantifiable concepts |
| 21191 | Photons are B and W° bosons, linked by the Higgs mechanism [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: The photon is actually a mix of two deeper things, the B and the W°, tied together by the Higgs mechanism. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 06) | |
| A reaction: The B (for 'Boson') transmits a force associated with the 'winding symmetry'. (I record this without properly understanding it.) |
| 21199 | Spinning electric charge produces magnetism, so all fermions are magnets [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: The muon, like all fermions, spins - and because a spinning electric charge generates a magnetic field all fermions act like tiny bar magnets. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 11) |
| 21180 | Electrons are fundamental and are not made of anything; they are properties without size [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: As far as we can tell, electrons (and quarks) are fundamental. They are not small lumps of material, because we could always ask what the material is. The electron just ...is. They are collections of properties, with no apparent size. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 01) | |
| A reaction: This idea from physics HAS to be of interest to philosophers! The bundle theory is discredited for normal objects and for minds, and so is the substrate idea for supporting properties. But rigorous physics accepts a bundle theory. |
| 21189 | Electrons may have smaller components, bound by a new force [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: Quarks, leptons or bosons may actually be made up of something even smaller, bound together by a conjectural new force. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 05) | |
| A reaction: Electrons are a type of lepton. Compare Idea 21180, from the same book. If electrons are not fundamental, what matters is not some 'stuff' they are made of, but a different force that would bind the ingredients. |
| 21184 | Physics was rewritten to explain stable electron orbits [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: Explaining the stable electron orbits would require a complete rewriting of the physics of subatomic particles. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 03) | |
| A reaction: This really looks like a simple and major landmark moment. You can ignore a single anomaly, but not a central feature of your entire theory. |
| 21182 | Quantum mechanics is our only theory, and is very precise, and repeatedly confirmed [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: Quantum mechanics is the only working description of the universe that we have. It is amazingly precise, and so far every experimental test has verified its predictions. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 02) | |
| A reaction: I take it from this that quantum mechanics is simply TRUE. Get over it! It will never turn out to be wrong, but may be subsumed within some more fine-grained or extensive theory. |
| 21187 | Virtual particles can't be measured, and can ignore the laws of physics [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: We can never measure these virtual (transitory) particles directly, and it turns out that they don't even have to obey the laws of physics. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 05) | |
| A reaction: These seems to be the real significance of the Uncertainty Principle. Such particles 'borrow' huge amounts of energy for very short times. |
| 21185 | Colour charge is positive or negative, and also has red, green or blue direction [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: Colour charge is 'three-dimensional'. As well as the charge having a positive or negative sign, it can also have a direction, and for convenience these three different directions (pointing like a weather vane) are labelled 'red', 'green' and 'blue'. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 04) |
| 21197 | Standard Model forces are one- two- and three-dimensional [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: The forces in the Standard Model are built on gauge symmetries, with a one-dimensional charge (like electromagnetism), a two-dimensional charge (the weak force), and a three dimensional charge (the strong force). | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 10) | |
| A reaction: See also Idea 21185. |
| 21194 | The Standard Model omits gravity, because there are no particles involved [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: Gravity is not included in the Standard Model because we simply cannot study it using particles. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 09) | |
| A reaction: I'm guessing that Einstein describes how gravity behaves, but not what it is. |
| 21195 | In Supersymmetry the Standard Model simplifies at high energies [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: Supersymmetry suggest that the Standard Model becomes much simpler at high energies. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 10) |
| 21188 | Quarks and leptons have a weak charge, for the weak force [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: For the weak force there must be a corresponding 'weak charge', and all the fermions, all the quarks and leptons carry it. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 05) | |
| A reaction: So electrons carry a weak charge, as well as an electromagnetic charge. Like owning several passports. |
| 21186 | Quarks rush wildly around in protons, restrained by the gluons [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: Inside a proton the quarks are rushing around like caged animals, free to move until they push against the bars to try to escape, when the gluons pull them back in. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 04) |
| 21192 | Neutrinos only interact with the weak force, but decays produce them in huge numbers [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: Neutrinos only interact with the weak force, which means they barely interact at all, but because the weak force is crucial in the decays of so many other particles, neutrinos are still produced in huge numbers. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 08) | |
| A reaction: They only interact with the W and Z bosons. |
| 21196 | To combine the forces, they must all be the same strength at some point [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: If all the forces are to combine, at some point they must all be the same strength, and Supersymmetry (SuSy) makes this happen. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 10) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like an impressive reason for favouring supersymmetry - as long as you have an a priori preference for everything combining. |
| 21190 | 'Space' in physics just means location [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: 'Space' in physics really just means location. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 06) | |
| A reaction: Location can, of course, only be specified relative to something else. Space is really an abstraction, but at least it means there is some sort of background to locate all the fundamental fields. |
| 21193 | The universe is 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 5% regular matter [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: The most precise surveys of the stars and galaxies tell us that the universe is made up of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, and just 5% regular matter (the stuff of the Standard Model of particle physics). | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 09) | |
| A reaction: Regular matter - that's me, that is. |
| 21198 | If a cosmic theory relies a great deal on fine-tuning basic values, it is probably wrong [Hesketh] |
| Full Idea: If a theory has to rely on excessive 'fine-tuning', a series of extremely unlikely events in order to produce the universe we see around us, then it is extremely unlikely that this theory is correct. | |
| From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 10) | |
| A reaction: He says the Standard Model has 26 parameters which are only known by experiment, rather than by theory. So instead of saying '...so there is a God', we should say '...so our theory isn't very good'. |