Symplectic, Simplectic takes a lot more work than its “simple” suggests

Frank Nielsen @FrnkNlsn  Nice thread
Jonathan Gorard @getjonwithit  In physics, one often thinks of space and time as being fundamental, pre-existing concepts, and proceeds to define everything else (energy, momentum, forces, etc.) in terms of them. But it doesn’t need to be so – symplectic geometry shows us how to go the other way. (1/16)

When I think of gluons in bulk quantities, there are only a few systems where they live naturally. Neutron stars, galactic black holes, magnetars, quark stars, stars where thing are still happening, and ones where one is not sure what will happen next. That does not have to be tagged with an absolute time and space coordinate. It is “out there, somewhere, some time, or “might not be exactly right but might be, so keep track”.

Much knowledge on the Internet is not easy to tag or tokenize or classify or index. But it goes into memory in a way it is not lost. There are many experiments and situations where the information about order, depth, place and timing are not clear, cannot be made clear, cannot be understood – yet. One of the first problems I worked on professionally was tracking all things in orbit. The forward problem was simple, but working back not so much.

My uncle, Royal Eugene Collins, felt that all physics could be derived from statistical foundations.  In his later years he wrote it out as best he could. One of the few times he liked what I was doing was when I was creating differential equations from arbitrary recursions. So I am fairly certain I know where you are coming from, I am not sure what problems you will run into in your remaining life.

I checked with Google ngram viewer to look at the plot for simplectic. I first saw it in the sharp growth period in the early 1970’s up to the early 1990’s. There was hope then of continuing growth. Look at the “resurgence”?, “renewed interest”? the last few years. I am fairly certain that is because one can run a computer for a few days or years and look at what it finds when it is done exploring on its own.

In my first university (1967, 1968), on the side, I would measure the electrical signals from hydra, then take the magnetic tapes across the street to a hospital where I would plot on one of the old Calcomp plotters. Sometimes it would take me all night or all weekend. But I liked watching the symbols and lines and patterns emerge. Many problems have those stages, but many natural things cannot be classified so easily. I study noise, and that has a large element of surprise and “keep looking for more examples”.

Not sure if any of this is useful to you. When I read “simplectic” in your note, I had that sad and sick feeling from when it crashed in the late 1990’s. Hopes and dreams were dashed because the simple easy things did not yield much, and the hard ones were still insurmountable with the methods of that time. Mostly because of people’s unwillingness to let the machine explore without pre-conceptions, biases, or too strict boundaries and pre-conceptions.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=simplectic&year_start=1900&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

Filed as (Simplectic takes a lot more work than its “simple” suggests)

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation