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“Michael Green is the new Lucasian chair of Mathematics replacing the esteemed Stephen Hawking. Green helped sparked the great optimism in string theory by discovering with John Schwarz the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation mechanism.
Elsewhere, the Perimeter Institute has named ten new distinguished research chairs, among them a host of the quantum computing afflicted”
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“It can be difficult to balance a typical research university professor teaching load with a typical research university professor research activity level, not just in terms of the time required to do both when physically in one’s own department but also (and perhaps especially) when some travel is required. I have already been on two major trips this academic year, and have two more scheduled before the term ends. How is this possible for someone who also teaches?”
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“A clock is something that ticks. This is true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story; a clock is something more than that. You need a recording device, too. Time is the phase of an oscillation, and as that phase accumulates you need to keep track of it, which is why we have displays that get updated with each “tick,” or something equivalent to that. If you lose the phase information, or never had it, you don’t know what time it is. A pendulum clock without the hands, gearing, etc. is just a pendulum. “