Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World

Notes on Contributors

Before, behind and beyond the discovery of the Higgs boson

Notes on Contributors

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, by Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm and Michael D. Gordin. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2013. viii, 259 pp. $35.00 US (cloth), $21.00 US (paper). The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and Sciences of Human Nature, by Jamie Cohen-Cole. Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press, 2014. 397 pp. $45.00 US (cloth), $27.00 US (paper). The Cold War abounds with ironies of fighting in war room type, to paraphrase a gag from Kubrick's pitch-black nuclear satire, Dr. Strangelove. Perhaps most flagrant one is America's elaborate and expensive effort to rationally control a fundamentally irrational threat. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind quotes George Kennan, one of America's most prominent strategists of containment, who said that nuclear bomb was the most useless weapon ever invented. It can be employed to no rational purpose (83). These two books elucidate roles academics played in military-industrial complex and creation of Cold War's liberal consensus, and how this altered academy, especially social or human sciences. Both books are from University of Chicago Press, and complement each other nicely. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind unpacks ideas of an elite echelon of Cold War thinkers, action intellectuals working in hard and social sciences who circulated through universities, an alphabet soup of acronymic think tanks, government, and mainstream press. The Open Mind has much to say about these thinkers as well, but is more interested in way Cold War thought trickled down to general public, and was integrated into education and discourse. Cohen-Cole details promulgation of idea an open mind was best--and most American--intellectual disposition. Given that few North Americans, to this day, pride themselves on their closed-mindedness, popularization of open-mindedness is an example of an exceptionally efficacious Western propaganda campaign. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind originated at Max Planck Institute's 2010 workshop on Strangelovian Sciences. It is work of an interdisciplinary team of six scholars specializing in history of science, economics, and philosophy. As interdisciplinarity was one of hallmarks of Cold War rationality--a feature of era's ethos that Cohen-Cole treats at length--their approach is a neat match for topic. The authors begin by distinguishing reason from rationality. Reason and arguments about it have a long history in West, culminating in Enlightenment enthusiasm for rule-based thinking as a superior replacement for tradition or superstition. But authors insist that Leibniz's declaration, let us calculate, gained new meaning and urgency after World War II, with development of computing power and in face of staggering logistical challenges such as Berlin Airlift (63). The delightfully-named Operation Vittles, which conveyed supplies to Berlin, gave birth to Project scoop, an acronym for Scientific Computation of Optimum Programs. Even though ibm had yet to produce a computer that could satisfy military's voracious demand for information and calculations, programming and algorithms became important components of, and models for, Cold War rationality. Algorithms did not suffer from fear, or any other potentially distorting feeling. Computational rationality was but one model researchers deployed. Game theory was another, and authors focus on its strange career in chapter five, explaining development of The Prisoner's Dilemma, and eventual diminution of game theory's sway. In sixth and final chapter, authors contend that rise of cognitive science, especially heuristics-and-biases work of Kahneman and Tversky, hastened collapse of Cold War conceptions of rationality. …

Notes on Contributors

Reviews of Books

Notes on Contributors

Reviews of Books

Hugh De Santis. The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, 1933–1947. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1980. Pp. x, 270. $23.00 Get access Santis Hugh De. The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, 1933–1947. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1980. Pp. x, 270. $23.00. Robert D. Schulzinger Robert D. Schulzinger University of Colorado, Boulder Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 86, Issue 5, December 1981, Pages 1171–1172, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/86.5.1171-a Published: 01 December 1981

The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, 1933–1947. By Hugh De Santis. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Pp. x + 270. $23.00.) - Volume 76 Issue 1

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Charles Piot. Nostalgia for the Future: West Af rica after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 200 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibiography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. $20.00. Paper. Charles Piot's landmark 1999 ethnography, Remotely Global, showed that societies of the savanna region of northern Togo, far from being static, insular polities on the margins of the nation-state, lying history and isolated from global forces, have always been influenced and preoccupied by the outside world. In this new book, Piot argues that the ending of the Cold War brought about a decrease in the power of both the state and local chieftaincy in Togo, the emergence of a radically new political economy centered on NGOs and Pentecostal churches, and new, future-oriented social imaginaries, modes of subjectivity, sovereignty, and storytelling. Piot's tide indexes Togolese longing for a future that replaces untoward pasts, both political and cultural. Such longing is represented not only in Christian End Times narratives and die universal quest for exit visas but also in the embrace of a thousand development initiatives that hail youth and leave elders behind (20). Utopian yearnings find expression in a passion for playing the green card lottery, fantasies of fictitious marriages with foreigners, membership in churches that promise supernatural abundance, Internet searches for exit strategies, and a turn to the transient pleasures of sex, drugs, and music for an instantaneous sense of affective power and presence. This emphasis on inwardness and self-fulfillment stands in dramatic contrast to the prevailing ethos of a traditional culture, where duty, forebearance, and respect for elders imply a stoic acceptance of life as one finds it and the suppression of thoughts and feelings that challenge the status quo. Traditionally, lip service was paid to the idea that one must sacrifice personal gratification and spontaneous self-expression to make sociality viable (the implication being that what is good for the many will prove good for die individual). Collective rituals and everyday practices of commensality, neighborliness, and mutuality reinforced the common weal. Modernity reverses these assumptions. Personal development through education, travel, and purchasing power becomes the royal road to social development, a precondition for the wider social good. This revolutionary change in worldview does not occur adventitiously. It follows radical disruptions to the social fabric - civil war, famine, epidemic illness, mass migration or displacement, and urbanization. Piot paints a grim picture of the anomic background against which the new social imaginarles emerged in the 1990s. These changes burst onto this socio-cosmological stage like a comet from the sky. Disconcerted by the violence against Kabre in the cities of the south, puzzled by those strange new keywords democratie and droits de l'homme, attacked by the Pentecostal churches, stung by currency devaluation and state withdrawal, and increasingly neglected by cash-strapped diasporics, this authority system was shaken to its roots (99). …

The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, 1933–1947. By Hugh De Santis. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Pp. x + 270. $23.00.) - Volume 76 Issue 1

This article describes the electroweak interactions of the Standard Model (SM) with Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism, the appearance and properties of the Higgs boson. Braut-Engler-Higgs mechanism plays an important role in the Standard Model, which introduce a scalar Higgs field with a non-zero vacuum expectation results from spontaneous symmetry breaking. So, due to the interaction with this field, elementary particles become massive. Here arise electrically neutral quanta associated with the Higgs field, so called Higgs boson, in the same way that there is a quanta associated with the electromagnetic field, i.e. photons. The strong part of the Standard Model, Quantum Chromodynamics, quark mixing Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix, physics of the neutrino and many other issues were not mentioned in the article. Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism and associated Higgs boson are important parts of the Standard Model of elementary particles. In this paper we present the full Lagrangian of the Standard Model and a set of theoretical predictions about the Higgs boson before its detection, as well as the current state of the Higgs boson problem. Keywords: Standard Model, High Energy, Large Hadron Collider, Higgs boson, Higgs mechanism, Spontaneous symmetry breaking.

It is a long-standing intriguing problem to explore the synthesis of elements, and extensive studies are going on (See Clayton (Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1968, [1]), Rolfs and Rodney (Cauldrons in the Cosmos, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988, [2]), Thompson and Nunes (Nuclear Reactions for Astrophysics: Principles, Calculation and Applications of Low-Energy Reactions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, [3]), VHS Element Genesis—Solving the Mystery, 2001, [4]). Roughly speaking, the synthesis of elements can be divided into the primordial nucleosynthesis, which is also called the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and the stellar nucleosynthesis. The light elements such as deuterons , He and Li have been synthesized by nuclear reactions within 3–15 min after the Big Bang. This is the Big Bang nucleosynthesis. It terminates at the elements of mass number 7, since there is no stable nucleus of mass number 8. Stars started to be formed about one billion years later. Then, thermal nuclear reactions took place inside stars, and nuclei up to Fe, which has the largest binding energy per nucleon, have been successively synthesized depending on the mass of each star. (Precisely speaking, the nucleus which has the largest binding energy per nucleon is \({}^{62}_{28}\)Ni as remarked in Chap. 2.) Nuclei beyond Fe are synthesized either slowly by the neutron capture reactions called slow process (s-process) inside red giant stars, or synthesized by the explosive astrophysical phenomenon called rapid process (r-process). Nuclei with extremely large mass number such as U are thought to be synthesized at the supernovae explosion, which is one of the last stages of stars. In this chapter we learn some basics concerning the nuclear reactions related to nucleosynthesis (See Clayton (Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis, 1968, [1]), Rolfs and Rodney (Cauldrons in the Cosmos, 1988, [2]), Thompson and Nunes (Nuclear Reactions for Astrophysics: Principles, Calculation and Applications of Low-Energy Reactions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, [3]) for details).

A particle physicist cannot think about retirement before one big project is finished: the manual of our universe. It is supposed to contain all the building blocks of nature as well as a description of what they are doing. This manual is continuously being updated, still far away from being complete, but already very powerful. It is called the “Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics”. Technically, it is a renormalizable quantum field theory: the field quanta correspond to elementary particles. The fields and particles can be divided into two groups. Particles from the one group are the matter particles. As they all have a spin of 1/2, they belong to the group of “fermions”, particles with half-integer spin. The other group of particles is somehow different. It also contains particles, called bosons due to their spin of 1 (there is also a boson with spin 0, the Higgs boson, that plays a somewhat different role), but their purpose is different from the classical image of “sticking them together like LEGO bricks to get something big”. These bosons are also called “force carriers” as they are exchanged between the fermions and mediate interactions. Let us try to illustrated that image with an admittedly simplified example.