Textbook recommendations for self-studying intermediate to advanced physics.
The last conventional war the US fought was the opening round of Operation Iraqi Freedom (the “shock-and-awe” phase of the current Iraq war). But that almost doesn’t count, because it was the US fighting at the near peak of its power against an Iraqi army that had never fully recovered from the massive defeat inflicted upon it by the Gulf War.
The last war the US fought against a functional military was the Gulf War, in 1993. While today, we look upon the US victory in the Gulf War as an inevitability, we must remember that it was a huge surprise when Saddam’s army and air force crumpled after just over two weeks of sustained combat operations. Saddam’s military, at the time, was the fourth largest in the world, and was combat hardened after the almost decade-long Iran/Iraq war of the ’80s. It was also far better equipped, relative to the US, than the North Vietnamese military had been in the ’60s. As a result, there were many who feared that the US was getting into another quagmire by attempting to liberate Kuwait in 1993. Instead, the world was treated to the largest military surprise since the German invasion of France in 1941. Never before had a military that large been destroyed so thoroughly in so short a time.
However, 1993, at this point, is 15 years in the past. While the US military has been distracted by the twin insurgencies of Iraq and Afghanistan, other militaries (notably China and Russia) have been studying the conditions behind US military’s victory in the Gulf War and have been coming up with ways to counter the advantages that the US displayed in that conflict. A distributed system like passive radar is one such way. Other ways include the usage of so-called “hybrid war” tactics displayed by the Russian military in Crimea, Donbass, and, lately Syria. China has been developing a system of tactics and technologies that fall under the umbrella of “anti-access/area-denial” (A2AD), which focus on keeping the US Navy at a distance, in order to secure Chinese control over the South China Sea and potentially keep the US from coming to Taiwan’s aid if China should choose to invade Taiwan.
The US military, in my estimation, is much like the British army prior to World War 1. The British military, riding high after its victories in the Napoleonic wars and the Crimean War, was confident in its own abilities and sanguine about the perceived weakness of its adversaries (rising Germany and the fading empires of Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans). As a result, the British military focused on fighting “brushfire wars” against native rebellions in Africa, India and Afghanistan (lol). Because of this, the British army found itself ill-prepared and under-equipped to fight a “high-intensity conflict against near-peer adversaries” (to use the words of modern military analysts).
There is a school of thought that says that conventional war against near-peer adversaries is impossible, because any such war would inevitably escalate to nuclear weapons. I actually wish this argument was true. It would simplify our threat assessments greatly. However, whenever I hear this argument, I am reminded of all the arguments prior to World War 1 or World War 2 that suggested that a major war was impossible because of the unprecedented destructive capabilities of modern weapons.
Do I think a war is likely? At this moment, I do not. Can I tell when the next war is going to occur? If I could, I would be working for the CIA, NSA or DoD, with a top-secret clearance. What I do have is a vague sense of unease. This sense of unease comes from the fact that the world today is multi-polar and unstable. The US military no longer enjoys the unchallenged hyperpower hegemony that it had at the end of the cold war. Yet, it still acts and fights as if it does. I also remember that wars, when they do occur, can stem from causes that are extremely surprising at the time. Who would have thought that the assassination of the crown prince of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist would lead to a war that resulted in the deaths of millions?
… the next time the US has to fight a conventional war
Is that considered likely anytime soon? When was the last conventional war? What will the next one be?
I haven’t always agreed with Lanier, but he’s spot-on in pretty much everything he says in this piece.
Bret Victor here discusses his notion that the primary challenge in building modern ‘Maker’ projects usually has less to do with putting the thing together and more to do with understanding behavior. For example, a robot that avoids light might not be technically complex to build so much as technically complex to design and optimize its behavior. As such he recommends makerspaces move away from a ‘machine tool club’ model and more towards a workshop for providing tools to analyze and predict behavior in the physical world.
I don’t know how much I agree with him on that particular point, but I did find the design ideas interesting.
I found this document interesting for its captivating description of the mystic vein of Hinduism. More relevant perhaps to us, this take has a transcendent quality that borders on being kin to the implicit doctrines taught by singularitans:
“Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions–a powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and effect; a little moth placed under the wheel of causation which rolls on crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow’s tears or the orphan’s cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature. Is there no hope? Is there no escape?–was the cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings: “Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from death over again.” “Children of immortal bliss” –what a sweet, what a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name–heirs of immortal bliss–yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth–sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter. Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One “by whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth.””
I really wanted to like this. But unfortunately, it appears to be written in Elvish. Why does Gil-Galad need to know algebraic topology?
From that post:
Some Righties talk about the idea of a post-political world — the idea that a system with less citizen input, on the continuum from Singapore to monarchy or neocameralism — would be more stable. But in a world without elections, there would still be shifts in power. It’s just that the mechanisms by which power shifts wouldn’t have occasional moments of relative transparency.
So, reflecting on that, I agree with his premises – that mechanisms by which power shifts happen would have less transparency. But I disagree with his conclusion. It’s not clear to me that autocratic states are inherently less stable than democracies. Yes, autocratic states crumble (as we saw in the Arab Spring revolutions). But democracies crumble and collapse as well. Russia was fairly democratic in the ’90s before collapsing into Putinist autocracy. Thailand had a fairly robust democracy before it was locked down by a military junta. Turkey and Pakistan have flipped between military rule and democratic governance multiple times.
And on the flip side, dictatorial China, despite all its internal problems, actually appears to be a more responsive state to its citizens than democratic India. While Delhi still has the worst air pollution in the world, the Communist Party has quietly cleaned up Beijing, in response to citizen unrest.
I think, up until a certain point, competence matters more than representation. As it turns out, people don’t really care by what mechanism the government listens to their needs, as long as it implements policies that improve their daily lives. The hypothesis is that once an economy has fully industrialized, it’s impossible for government to be appropriately responsive to all the diverse interests of the country without democratizing. But the continued existence of autocratic China makes me doubt that theory more and more with each passing day.
So, the most relevant bit is this and I think it’s key that the average LWer comes to understand it:
“The first thing I noticed was that every once in a while the classifier would spit something out as ‘I don’t know what category this is’ and you’d look at it and it would be what we’re calling this fringe stuff. That quite surprised me. How can this classifier that was tuned to figure out category be seemingly detecting quality? “[Outliers] also show up in the stop word distribution, even if the stop words are just catching the style and not the content! They’re writing in a style which is deviating, in a way. […] “What it’s saying is that people who go through a certain training and who read these articles and who write these articles learn to write in a very specific language. This language, this mode of writing and the frequency with which they use terms and in conjunctions and all of the rest is very characteristic to people who have a certain training. The people from outside that community are just not emulating that. They don’t come from the same training and so this thing shows up in ways you wouldn’t necessarily guess. They’re combining two willy-nilly subjects from different fields and so that gets spit out.”
“During the winter of 1901, the brothers began to question the aerodynamic data on which they were basing their designs. They decided to start over and develop their own data base with which they would design their aircraft. They built a wind tunnel and began to test their own models. They developed an ingenious balance system to compare the performance of different models. They tested over two hundred different wings and airfoil sections in different combinations to improve the performance of their gliders The data they obtained more correctly described the flight characteristics which they observed with their gliders. By early 1902 the Wrights had developed the most accurate and complete set of aerodynamic data in the world. “
Oh, is that why high-level life players tend to keep diaries?
related
How much math background would you estimate is required for this?
Concrete example: I took the required college calculus courses (series, integrals… uh… I forget what else?) for my CS degree, plus “discrete math”, and of course there was trig and logic various other stuff in high school. For me to learn this physics, are we talking “brush up a bit” or are we talking “have to first cover the equivalent of n semesters of college math” (for whatever n)?
Required college calculus will get you pretty far. You need to be comfortable with derivatives and integrals to do mechanics. You need vector calculus to do EM, and you need linear algebra to do QM. Past there you need various random things from math that you’ll pick up as you go.
This article links a couple math books to learn as you learn the physics.
Ok, thanks!
(Filing this away mentally as “something I’d like to do someday, given a bunch of free time, but probably not anytime soon”.)
TBH I don’t think I would’ve been able to learn physics without taking classes.
Hm, yeah, come to think of it, I suspect that is likely true of me as well, because this is exactly how I feel about computer science (this despite CS being supposedly easy to learn on your own).
I really think there’s no substitute for live, real-time interaction with a) a good instructor, who can answer your specific questions, discuss the particular aspects of the topic that you’re having trouble with, etc., and b) other students who are studying the same thing at the same time.